ARTICLE: Trudeau Thinks Fight With Google and Facebook Like the Second World War
Social Media is Laughing at Canada's Liberal Government
The Trudeau government is attempting the impossible: introducing a law that will restrict free speech and blaming social media for what it is doing.
But leave it to this ethically and integrity challenged government.
The Liberals recently passed Bill C-18, which they innocuously labeled the Online News Act. This is a censorship bill pure and simple; it is designed to force social media – or more precisely, Meta and Google for the moment – to pay Canadian news outlets for the supposed privilege of promoting and distributing their material.
If there was a shred of honesty and integrity remaining in this Liberal government, they would have called this the Online Extortion Act because that is what it is about. The government won’t even attempt to define how much that extortion is going to cost because the bill was so crudely written and so brusquely pushed through the legislative process that no one ever got down to actual numbers and suggested how much it’s going to cost.
Kind of reminds you of how the Mafia does business.
Well, Meta and Google have decided that they are not going to play this game and have merely announced that they will no longer publish Canadian news. They know full well that Canadian news outlets are already profiting from having their stories distributed to millions of people who would otherwise never see them.
In the federal government’s opinion, that makes social media the villain and the enemy of free speech.
The more we understand this legislation [Bill C-18 and the Online Streaming Act], the less we like it. At least if what you like is free speech and an unfettered media.
In my opinion – and I daresay in the opinion of most Canadians – this makes the Liberal government one of the greatest sources of mendacity on the planet.
Just listen to the government’s argument.
WATCH Trudeau’s Bill C-18 “War” with Facebook & Google
“Facebook decided that Canada was a small country, small enough that they could reject our asks,” Trudeau declared. They made the wrong choice by deciding to attack Canada. We want to defend democracy. This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War. This is what we’re doing every single day in the United Nations.”
Even for this prime minister, that is a whopper of an exaggeration.
It is worth noting that Trudeau’s father, the late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, refused to fight in the Second World War, choosing instead to sit out the war in Montreal, where he drove his motorcycle through the city, playing the kind of urban rebel that Marlon Brando and James Dean would epitomize in the next decade.
So if Justin Trudeau is so passionate about the sacrifices that Canada endured in the Second World War, it is not from any personal connection.
His father did not fight the Nazis but was a huge fan of other totalitarian governments like the one in China headed by Mao Zedong and he eulogized Mao when the twisted dictator and mass murderer finally died and met his maker in 1976. Trudeau Sr. even went so far as “riding around the Laurentians on a motorcycle wearing a pointed Prussian army helmet. Today, it seems indefensible, even immoral. Even if everyone he knew in Quebec was against the war, Mr. Trudeau was not just anyone; he was a proud non-conformist, widely read and well educated, who had visited Europe in the 1930s, but was blind to the evil of Nazism,” according to the Globe and Mail review of a Trudeau biography published in 2006.
I remember there being a popular pamphlet published by the National Citizens Coalition, a right-wing think tank that fights for less government which former Prime Minister Stephen Harper used to lead, where they had THAT picture of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, on the motorbike wearing THAT German helmet. It was widely distributed in my youth. Thanks to current levels of internet censorship THAT picture has been all but scrubbed from the internet, which I am sure makes Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister and his families Trudeau Foundation, very, very happy.
Just like Stalin or even Castro airbrushing out the uncomfortable parts of history they do not like. This and that, DELETE. And as everyone is well aware, these dictators regularly even disappeared and airbrushed people out of history they did like or want to remember.
From the biography and the Globe and Mail review above I can prove the photo did actually exist — at this point in time — and you too can find the Globe review if you search the duckduckgo (not Google or Bing) search engine long enough.
The Online News Act will open the doors of the newsroom to the government investigator/censor.
Through Trudeau’s three-part trifecta called the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-18 is merely part 2 of his “digital agenda” which will make it even easier to disappear what he and other governments do not like. It is a three-fold attack on free speech and freedom of the press that began with Bill C-11, which insists upon Canadian content from all internet providers, and will culminate in the Online Safety Bill that is expected to be introduced in the fall. This particular piece of odious legislation will target “disinformation” even though it fails to define exactly what that is.
The Liberals and Trudeau can try to distract our attention from their love of censorship and enthusiasm for snuffing out free speech and a free press in Canada with their blatant propaganda claiming they are defending “democracy,” while using the very social media that he claims to fear to send an imploring tweet to entertainer Taylor Swift that she include Canada in her current concert tour, is not just an exercise in bad judgment, but a pathetic admission that social media is not about your free speech but about his desire to distract.
This is all about a teetering federal government attempting some basic damage control to contain the catastrophic effects of the Bill C-18, Online News Act that was pushed across the legislative goal line just before the House of Commons recessed for the summer, which many in the legacy media are starting to turn against. Tough questions started this week from the mainstream media on how Bill C-18 that was sold as the way to “save the Canadian media” may actually destroy it now that Google is not listing their stories and Facebook will not let them share the news links.
But, as bad as C-18 is, we didn’t understand how corrosive its effects would be because few in the Canadian media really bothered to read the fine print. And that fine print is frightening.
The Online News Act will open the doors of the newsroom to the government investigator/censor. As the clause 53 stipulates, “An operator or news business must, at the request of the Commission and within the time and in the manner that it specifies, provide the Commission with any information that it requires for the purpose of exercising its powers or performing its duties and functions under this Act.”
Even the legacy media in Canada that originally supported the bill – thinking they would squeeze enough funding from Facebook et al to stay in business – is worried about this dictate. They are beginning to see that this political dance by the feds, not only agonizingly embarrassing, but could be an insidious attempt by the government to police the media.
“Allowing the CRTC [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission] to go fishing for confidential information from news organizations, particularly information related to editorial departments, would be an overreach that's best avoided.”
“But I'm more concerned about the threat to the independence of media rather than the loss of a few million dollars,” Globe and Mail publisher Phillip Crawley told a Canadian Senate committee investigating the new legislation.
Second thoughts, anyone? The more we understand this legislation, the less we like it. At least if what you like is free speech and an unfettered media.
But that’s clearly not what the Trudeau government has in mind.
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sorry you are very wrong about the purpose of Bill C 18. The bill is to provide funding to the government propaganda channels other wise known as the dead stream media - the organisation that could benefit from it are the what was called the mainstream media such as CTV, Global etc the new media such as those that publish via substack were never intended to receive funds to support. Frankly if the deadstream media is censored out of existence who cares.
While the Trudeau government is seen as the ones implementing. One can be certain that even if Poilievre blathers about how he would have done the bill better on the campaign trail it will one of those promises that somehow gets forgotten to be implemented. The bill is all about funding the deadstream media, the evil ones in the deepstate need to keep their propaganda arm spreading their propaganda