Censorship Industrial Complex
Bill C-9 and the Tyranny of Feeling Heading Straight for Canadians
When governments turn offence into law, liberty collapses into sentiment. Canada risks importing Britain’s mistakes, just as J.D. Vance warned Europe in Munich.
On February 14th of this year (coincidentally, the anniversary of Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act against protestors), in the grand hall of the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance startled Europe’s elites by saying what few of them expected to hear. The greatest threat to their democracy, he argued, was not Moscow. It was their own governments that turned on their citizens in the name of fighting misinformation and hate. Vance catalogued the evidence with blunt precision: British citizens arrested for jokes on Twitter, preachers detained for quoting scripture, elections tampered with under the smiling banner of progress. The room bristled with discomfort, yet the truth could not be mistaken. Western democracies are abandoning the free expression that once sustained them, and they are doing so under the new morality of emotion.
Canada now finds itself in that same trajectory with Bill C-9, Ottawa’s latest legislative foray into the culture war. It is being sold as the Combatting Hate Act, a law meant to protect vulnerable minorities and to defend sacred spaces from intimidation.
Peel back the packaging and its essence appears at once: the codification of subjective feelings into the Criminal Code. What the United Kingdom has lived through for the last decade, police investigating citizens for limericks and memes, Canada now risks importing as law.
The mechanics of the bill are deceptively technical. Until now, prosecutions for so-called hate propaganda required the Attorney General’s approval. That safeguard was in place to ensure that prosecutions were filtered through political accountability and not simply triggered by an activist’s complaint. Bill C-9 abolishes that filter, placing the discretion squarely with police officers who will be pressed to act on every allegation. Remember how the cops acted during COVID.
The bill then goes further by creating new offences for the “willful promotion of hatred” through words, symbols, or representations, a category so broad it could ensnare a placard at a school board protest or a verse from scripture. It also introduces a stand-alone “hate crime” category in which the motive itself becomes the crime. In short, it criminalizes thought. Finally, it expands criminal liability to anyone who obstructs or intimidates access to religious or cultural sites. In the last five years, the law in Canada has not been exceptionally diligent in prosecuting church arson and gunfire attacks on synagogues, despite existing laws. The C-9 wording is so loose that a prayer vigil outside an abortion clinic or a parents’ protest at a school could easily fall within its net.
Why does this matter? Because it moves the law away from objective acts of violence or harassment and into the murky realm of motive. It is one thing to punish a man for assault; it is quite another to punish him more severely because a cop or judge claims to know the intention behind his act. It is one thing to outlaw threats; it is quite another to treat blunt disagreement as hate. The result is predictable. Citizens will censor themselves on questions of immigration, gender ideology, or religious teaching because the cost of speaking plainly will be too high. The process itself, arrest, seizure of devices, and the humiliating headline will become the punishment.
The British experience shows us the road ahead. Harry Miller, a former policeman, was investigated in 2019 for retweeting a limerick that mocked gender identity theory. Police recorded a “non-crime hate incident” in his file and told him they needed to “check his thinking.” Paul Chambers, in 2010, made a sarcastic joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport after his flight was cancelled. He was arrested, fined, and lost his job, but was acquitted only years later, by which time the damage had already been done.
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In 2020, Kate Scottow was detained and held for questioning because she “misgendered” someone online; her children were left alone as police seized her devices. British street preachers have been hauled away for reading biblical verses aloud. Even football fans have been arrested for chants and tweets. In a single year, British police recorded 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” and arrested roughly 3,000 people for “grossly offensive” posts.
The phrase in Britain is “grossly offensive.” The phrase in Canada will be “wilfully promoting hatred.” Both are so elastic that they depend solely on the complainant’s feelings. In effect, the state outsources its standards to the most sensitive or malevolent among us, empowering activists to wield the criminal law as a bludgeon against their opponents.
Here, J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich is especially relevant. He noted that Western elites have become adept at justifying repression under the guise of safety. They claim to fight disinformation, but in practice, they suppress opposition. They claim to defend minorities, but in practice, they silence majorities. They claim to defend democracy, yet in Europe, they annul elections. In Canada, there is now a push to criminalize dissent.
What emerges is a selective enforcement regime in which elites are exempt and ordinary citizens are vulnerable. A tweet from a farmer in Red Deer will be treated as criminal, while a prime minister declaring that parents who question gender ideology are extremists goes unpunished.
Beneath all of this lies a deeper cultural drift. Bill C-9 is not merely bad law. It is bad philosophy. Modern governments have learned to glorify emotivism, to elevate feelings over objective reason because emotions win elections. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor clearly saw this trend in his Massey lectures, later published as The Malaise of Modernity. Allan Bloom did the same in his Closing of the American Mind.
Taylor warned that when cultures replace shared standards of truth with the subjectivity of self-expression, they hollow out the ground beneath their toes. Bill C-9 is the juridical form of that malaise, the victory of the subjective over the rational, the enthronement of offence as a legal standard. When reason is abandoned, politics slides into tyranny, for then only force remains to adjudicate among clashing feelings.
The antidote against those who want to curtail your speech is not silence but more speech. Resistance begins with refusing to be cowed. State the obvious, again and again: men are not women, women are not men, for example. The categories of nature are not dissolved by individual whim.
Hannah Arendt, who more than anyone decoded the mechanisms of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, insisted that the greatest threat to power was not always open rebellion but ridicule. Mock the absurdities of their ideology, not in cruelty but in charity. Expose them as unserious, as unscientific, as laughable. Power that relies on emotion and feeling cannot withstand laughter. The rule of sentiment is brittle, which is why it demands coercion to sustain itself.
John Stuart Mill remains the strongest guide here. In On Liberty, he reminded us that the suppression of any opinion, however offensive, robs society of the chance to test truth. If an opinion is wrong, it sharpens truth by contest; if it is right, then silencing it robs us of truth itself. Mill’s harm principle is stark in its relevance. The state may act only to prevent real harm, not to shield citizens from chafed feelings. Hurt feelings are the price of liberty, and liberty is the most valuable condition for reason to flourish. When governments claim the right to protect citizens from offence, they do not protect minorities; they infantilize everyone.
So who loses under Bill C-9? Faith communities, whose doctrine can be branded hateful. Parents who risk charges for questioning curricula. Feminists who fight to preserve sex-based protections. Protesters, from truckers to farmers to pro-life advocates. And ordinary Canadians online, whose memes and jokes can be turned into evidence of “hate propaganda.”
Bill C-9 is not a shield for the vulnerable. It is a sword for the boundlessly powerful. It is the law’s surrender to the tyranny of feeling, the enthronement of emotion as authority. Vance’s warning in Munich was not only for Europe. It was for Canadians too. If disagreement is hate, liberty itself is outlawed. Canada now faces a choice: do we defend and protect our freedom, or do we accept a government that punishes thought?
The antidote remains the same: resist, speak, mock, and laugh. Proclaim the truth plainly but respectfully. Refuse to bow to the cult of feeling. The rule of reason is fragile but essential. It must be preserved. Without it, Canada will follow Britain into the swamp of self-censorship and state-enforced sentiment. With it, liberty might yet endure.
I wrote this post based on a few notes that I made for this conversation in Leaders on the Frontier.
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Censorship Industrial Complex
School Cannot Force Students To Use Preferred Pronouns, US Federal Court Rules
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
“Our system forbids public schools from becoming ‘enclaves of totalitarianism.’”
A federal appeals court in Ohio ruled Thursday that students cannot be forced to use preferred pronouns in school.
Defending Education (DE) filed the suit against Olentangy Local School District (OLSD) in 2023, arguing the district’s anti-harassment policy that requires students to use the “preferred pronouns” of others violates students’ First Amendment rights by “compelling students to affirm beliefs about sex and gender that are contrary to their own deeply held beliefs.” Although a lower court attempted to shoot down the challenge, the appeals court ruled in a 10-7 decision that the school cannot “wield their authority to compel speech or demand silence from citizens who disagree with the regulators’ politically controversial preferred new form of grammar.”
Because the school considers transgender students to be a protected class, students who violated the anti-harassment policy by referring to such students by their biological sex risked punishments such as suspension and expulsion, according to DE.
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“American history and tradition uphold the majority’s decision to strike down the school’s pronoun policy,” the court wrote in its opinion. “Over hundreds of years, grammar has developed in America without governmental interference. Consistent with our historical tradition and our cherished First Amendment, the pronoun debate must be won through individual persuasion, not government coercion. Our system forbids public schools from becoming ‘enclaves of totalitarianism.’”
OLSD did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
“We are deeply gratified by the Sixth Circuit’s intensive analysis not only of our case but the state of student First Amendment rights in the modern era,” Nicole Neily, founder and president of DE, said in a statement. “The court’s decision – and its many concurrences – articulate the importance of free speech, the limits and perils of public schools claiming to act in loco parentis, and the critical role of persuasion – rather than coercion – in America’s public square.”
“Despite its ham-fisted attempt to moot the case, Olentangy School District was sternly reminded by the 6th circuit en banc court that it cannot force students to express a viewpoint on gender identity with which they disagree, nor extend its reach beyond the schoolhouse threshold into matters better suited to an exercise of parental authority,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at DE, said in a statement. “A resounding victory for student speech and parental rights was long overdue for families in the school district and we are thrilled the court’s ruling will benefit others seeking to vindicate their rights in the classroom and beyond.”
Censorship Industrial Complex
How the UK and Canada Are Leading the West’s Descent into Digital Authoritarianism
“Big Brother is watching you.” These chilling words from George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, 1984, no longer read as fiction but are becoming a bleak reality in the UK and Canada—where digital dystopian measures are unravelling the fabric of freedom in two of the West’s oldest democracies.
Under the guise of safety and innovation, the UK and Canada are deploying invasive tools that undermine privacy, stifle free expression, and foster a culture of self-censorship. Both nations are exporting their digital control frameworks through the Five Eyes alliance, a covert intelligence-sharing network uniting the UK, Canada, US, Australia, and New Zealand, established during the Cold War. Simultaneously, their alignment with the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, particularly Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9—which mandates universal legal identity by 2030—supports a global policy for digital IDs, such as the UK’s proposed Brit Card and Canada’s Digital Identity Program, which funnel personal data into centralized systems under the pretext of “efficiency and inclusion.” By championing expansive digital regulations, such as the UK’s Online Safety Act and Canada’s pending Bill C-8, which prioritize state-defined “safety” over individual liberties, both nations are not just embracing digital authoritarianism—they’re accelerating the West’s descent into it.
The UK’s digital dragnet
The United Kingdom has long positioned itself as a global leader in surveillance. The British spy agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), runs the formerly-secret mass surveillance programme, code-named Tempora, operational since 2011, which intercepts and stores vast amounts of global internet and phone traffic by tapping into transatlantic fibre-optic cables. Knowledge of its existence only came about in 2013, thanks to the bombshell documents leaked by the former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower, Edward Snowden. “It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian in a June 2013 report. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”
Following that, is the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016, also dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter,” which mandates that internet service providers store users’ browsing histories, emails, texts, and phone calls for up to a year. Government agencies, including police and intelligence services (like MI5, MI6, and GCHQ) can access this data without a warrant in many cases, enabling bulk collection of communications metadata. This has been criticized for enabling mass surveillance on a scale that invades everyday privacy.
Recent expansions under the Online Safety Act (OSA) further empower authorities to demand backdoors in encrypted apps like WhatsApp, potentially scanning private messages for vaguely defined “harmful” content—a move critics like Big Brother Watch, a privacy advocacy group, decry as a gateway to mass surveillance. The OSA, which received Royal Assent on October 26, 2023, represents a sprawling piece of legislation by the UK government to regulate online content and “protect” users, particularly children, from “illegal and harmful material.” Implemented in phases by Ofcom, the UK’s communications watchdog, it imposes duties on a vast array of internet services, including social media, search engines, messaging apps, gaming platforms, and sites with user-generated content forcing compliance through risk assessments and hefty fines. By July 2025, the OSA was considered “fully in force” for most major provisions. This sweeping regime, aligned with global surveillance trends via Agenda 2030’s push for digital control, threatens to entrench a state-sanctioned digital dragnet, prioritizing “safety” over fundamental freedoms.
Elon Musk’s platform X has warned that the act risks “seriously infringing” on free speech, with the threat of fines up to £18 million or 10% of global annual turnover for non-compliance, encouraging platforms to censor legitimate content to avoid punishment. Musk took to X to express his personal view on the act’s true purpose: “suppression of the people.”
In late September, Imgur (an image-hosting platform popular for memes and shared media) made the decision to block UK users rather than comply with the OSA’s stringent regulations. This underscores the chilling effect such laws can have on digital freedom.
The act’s stated purpose is to make the UK “the safest place in the world to be online.” However, critics argue it’s a brazen power grab by the UK government to increase censorship and surveillance, all the while masquerading as a noble crusade to “protect” users.
Another pivotal development is the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (DUAA), which received Royal Assent in June. This wide-ranging legislation streamlines data protection rules to boost economic growth and public services but at the cost of privacy safeguards. It allows broader data sharing among government agencies and private entities, including for AI-driven analytics. For instance, it enables “smart data schemes” where personal information from banking, energy, and telecom sectors can be accessed more easily, seemingly for consumer benefits like personalized services—but raising fears of unchecked profiling.
Cybersecurity enhancements further expand the UK’s pervasive surveillance measures. The forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, announced in the July 2024 King’s Speech and slated for introduction by year’s end, expands the Network and Information Systems (NIS) Regulations to critical infrastructure, mandating real-time threat reporting and government access to systems. This builds on existing tools like facial recognition technology, deployed extensively in public spaces. In 2025, trials in cities like London have integrated AI cameras that scan crowds in real-time, linking to national databases for instant identification—evoking a biometric police state.
Source: BBC News
The New York Times reported: “British authorities have also recently expanded oversight of online speech, tried weakening encryption and experimented with artificial intelligence to review asylum claims. The actions, which have accelerated under Prime Minister Keir Starmer with the goal of addressing societal problems, add up to one of the most sweeping embraces of digital surveillance and internet regulation by a Western democracy.”
Compounding this, UK police arrest over 30 people a day for “offensive” tweets and online messages, per The Times, often under vague laws, fuelling justifiable fears of Orwell’s thought police.
Yet, of all the UK’s digital dystopian measures, none has ignited greater fury than Prime Minister Starmer’s mandatory “Brit Card” digital ID—a smartphone-based system effectively turning every citizen into a tracked entity.
First announced on September 4, as a tool to “tackle illegal immigration and strengthen border security,” but rapidly the Brit Card’s scope ballooned through function-creep to envelop everyday essentials like welfare, banking and public access. These IDs, stored on smartphones containing sensitive data like photos, names, dates of birth, nationalities, and residency status, are sold “as the front door to all kinds of everyday tasks,” a vision championed by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change— and echoed by Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall MP in her October 13 parliamentary speech.
Source: TheBritishIntel
This digital shackles system has sparked fierce resistance across the UK. A scathing letter, led by independent MP Rupert Lowe and endorsed by nearly 40 MPs from diverse parties, denounces the government’s proposed mandatory “Brit Card” digital ID as “dangerous, intrusive, and profoundly un-British.” Conservative MP David Davis issued a stark warning, declaring that such systems “are profoundly dangerous to the privacy and fundamental freedoms of the British people.” On X, Davis amplified his critique, citing a £14m fine imposed on Capita after hackers breached pension savers’ personal data, writing: “This is another perfect example of why the government’s digital ID cards are a terrible idea.” By early October, a petition opposing the proposal had garnered over 2.8 million signatures, reflecting widespread public outcry. The government, however, dismissed these objections, stating, “We will introduce a digital ID within this Parliament to address illegal migration, streamline access to government services, and improve efficiency. We will consult on details soon.”
Canada’s surveillance surge
Across the Atlantic, Canada’s surveillance surge under Prime Minister Mark Carney—former Bank of England head and World Economic Forum board member—mirrors the UK’s dystopian trajectory. Carney, with his globalist agenda, has overseen a slew of bills that prioritize “security” over sovereignty. Take Bill C-2, An Act to amend the Customs Act, introduced June 17, 2025, which enables warrantless data access at borders and sharing with U.S. authorities via CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) pacts—essentially handing Canadian citizens’ digital lives to foreign powers. Despite public backlash prompting proposed amendments in October, its core—enhanced monitoring of transactions and exports—remains ripe for abuse.
Complementing this, Bill C-8, first introduced June 18, 2025, amends the Telecommunications Act to impose cybersecurity mandates on critical sectors like telecoms and finance. It empowers the government to issue secret orders compelling companies to install backdoors or weaken encryption, potentially compromising user security. These orders can mandate the cutoff of internet and telephone services to specified individuals without the need for a warrant or judicial oversight, under the vague premise of securing the system against “any threat.”
Opposition to this bill has been fierce. In a parliamentary speech Canada’s Conservative MP Matt Strauss, decried the bill’s sections 15.1 and 15.2 as granting “unprecedented, incredible power” to the government. He warned of a future where individuals could be digitally exiled—cut off from email, banking, and work—without explanation or recourse, likening it to a “digital gulag.”
Source: Video shared by Andrew Bridgen
The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) and privacy advocates have echoed these concerns, arguing that the bill’s ambiguous language and lack of due process violate fundamental Charter rights, including freedom of expression, liberty, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Bill C-8 complements the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63), first introduced in February 2024, which demanded platforms purge content like child exploitation and hate speech within 24 hours, risking censorship with vague “harmful” definitions. Inspired by the UK’s OSA and EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), C-63 collapsed amid fierce backlash for its potential to enable censorship, infringe on free speech, and lack of due process. The CCF and Pierre Poilievre, calling it “woke authoritarianism,” led a 2024 petition with 100,000 signatures. It died during Parliament’s January 2025 prorogation after Justin Trudeau’s resignation.
These bills build on an alarming precedent: during the COVID era, Canada’s Public Health Agency admitted to tracking 33 million devices during lockdown—nearly the entire population—under the pretext of public health, a blatant violation exposed only through persistent scrutiny. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), empowered by the longstanding Bill C-59, continues bulk metadata collection, often without adequate oversight. These measures are not isolated; they stem from a deeper rot, where pandemic-era controls have been normalized into everyday policy.
Canada’s Digital Identity Program, touted as a “convenient” tool for seamless access to government services, emulates the UK’s Brit Card and aligns with UN Agenda 2030’s SDG 16.9. It remains in active development and piloting phases, with full national rollout projected for 2027–2028.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Orwell’s 1984 warns we must urgently resist this descent into digital authoritarianism—through petitions, protests, and demands for transparency—before a Western Great Firewall is erected, replicating China’s stranglehold that polices every keystroke and thought.
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