With Justin Trudeau’s announcement that he will step down as prime minister, Canada is now looking for a new leader after a decade under his policies. The question is whether anyone will look for the remnants of Canadian free speech in the wreckage of the Trudeau government.
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about the collapse of free speech in Canada under Trudeau.
Canada has long been a country caught between two influences: the United Kingdom and the United States.
It has shared DNA with both nations. Unfortunately, it has largely followed the British approach in treating free speech more like a privilege than a right.
That dubious tradition was magnified over the last decade by a wholesale attack on free speech deemed hostile, insulting or triggering for different groups.
In many ways, Canada has been a cautionary tale for many in the U.S., as the same voices of censorship and criminalization grow on our campuses and in Congress.
Indeed, BlueSky, a social media site that offers a safe space for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views, has apparently embraced Canadian-style standards for censorship as part of its pitch for those with viewpoint intolerance.
For over a decade, Trudeau has been the cheerful face of modern censorship. While exuding tolerance and inclusivity, he hammered critics with draconian measures and perfectly Orwellian soundbites. In the name of tolerance, he proudly proclaimed intolerance for opposing views.
Trudeau shows how speech codes and virtue signaling are now chic on the left.
In a town hall event, Trudeau chastised a woman for asking a question that used the term “mankind” and instructed her, “We like to say ‘peoplekind’ … because it’s more inclusive.”
(He later claimed he was joking. If so, many of his policies have the same punchline and are no joking matter.)
In many ways, Trudeau’s true colors emerged in his crackdown on the trucker protests opposing COVID-19 mandates in 2022, a campaign widely supported by an enabling media. Trudeau invoked the 1988 Emergencies Act for the first time to freeze bank accounts of truckers and contributions by other Canadian citizens, powers long condemned by civil liberties groups in Canada.
The anti-free speech apple did not fall far from the tree. It was Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who as prime minister used the predecessor to the act for the first time in peacetime to suspend civil liberties.
Trudeau was widely criticized for his anti-free speech policies, including his move to amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act to criminalize any “communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
It was used to prevent “social media platforms [from being] used to threaten, intimidate, bully and harass people, or used to promote racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic and homophobic views that target communities, put people’s safety at risk and undermine Canada’s social cohesion or democracy.”
Under Trudeau, human rights commissions became virtual speech commissars in Canada. A conservative webmaster was prosecuted for allowing third parties to leave insulting comments about gay people and minorities on the site. Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley insisted that “the minimal harm caused … to freedom of expression is far outweighed by the benefit it provides to vulnerable groups and to the promotion of equality.” Even a comedian was prosecuted for insulting jokes involving lesbians.
Recently, a Canadian mayor and a town were prosecuted for not hoisting an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag” in celebration of Pride Month — even though they did not have a flag pole.
Despite crushing the trucker protests, the Canadian parliament extended Trudeau’s emergency powers to allow him to continue to harass and threaten those on the right. Despite broad opposition, the Liberal Party, the NDP and other allies were able to muster 181 votes to keep authoritarian powers alive in Canada. (The Canadian courts later, belatedly, declared the Trudeau powers unconstitutional).
Many of the same legislators would later push to increase the penalties for certain speech crimes to life imprisonment.
One of the most tragically ironic moments for Canada came last year, when Trudeau’s government blocked the citizenship of Russian dissident Maria Kartasheva because she has a conviction in Russia. She had been tried in absentia by a judge sanctioned by Canada for her exercise of free speech in Russia in condemning the Ukrainian war. The Canadian government informed Kartasheva that her conviction in Russia aligns with a Criminal Code offense relating to false information in Canada.
Think about that. Canada was concerned because she violated anti-free speech laws that are similar to its own. The Russians convicted her of disseminating “deliberately false information,” and Canada convicts people under laws like Section 372(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada for efforts “to convey, cause, or procure to be conveyed false information with the intent to alarm or injure anyone.”
That is why some of us spit out our soup in 2022 when Trudeau’s government condemned Cuba for its own crackdown on protesters, claiming that “Canada strongly advocates for freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly free from intimidation.” Trudeau also condemned China for cracking down on protests over COVID-19, the very subject of his own crackdown on the truckers.
Yet Trudeau has been a darling of the Canadian and American press despite a disapproval rate of around 68 percent among Canadian citizens. The media clearly approves of his position that “freedom of expression is not without limits” when others seek “to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”
So the question is: Now that Trudeau is heading out, where do Canadians go to get their free speech back?
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Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”