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MP Michelle Rempel Garner said the goal is to ‘protect the most vulnerable Canadians without creating a government-managed surveillance state or restricting Charter-protected speech.’
(LifeSiteNews) — Canada’s Conservative Party promised to introduce a new online harms bill that will counter legislation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals that aims to further clamp down on online speech.
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, speaking to reporters on September 12, said the new Conservative bill will “protect Canadians online” and preserve “civil liberties.”
“After nine years of Justin Trudeau, the NDP-Liberal coalition has failed to put forward any legislation that will protect Canadians online without infringing upon their civil liberties,” she said, adding that “Canadians are paying the price for this failure.”
Rempel Garner added that online criminal behaviour is “still rampant” in Canada, “yet the Liberals’ only response has been to table two censorship bills, forcing Canadians to choose between their safety and free expression.”
In a blog post about the forthcoming legislation, Rempel Garner observed that “for nearly a decade, the Liberals have presented Canadians with a false dichotomy; that they should have to water down their civil liberties to be protected online.”
She made a direct reference to the Liberal’s Bill C-63, or the “An Act to enact the Online Harms Act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act and An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts.”
Bill C-63 was introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome. Put forth under the guise of protecting children from exploitation online, the bill also seeks to expand the scope of “hate speech” prosecutions, and even desires to target such speech retroactively.
Trudeau’s law, which is in the second reading, also calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content.
Rempel Garner promised the Conservative’s online harms bill will “introduce protections in three areas of focus,” and will “protect the most vulnerable Canadians without creating a government-managed surveillance state or restricting Charter-protected speech.”
“To be clear, this update won’t criminalize something like two people disagreeing about policy online, or other types of expression of opinion that is protected under the Charter, which Liberal Bill C-63 will undermine,” Rempel Garner noted.