From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

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.’

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.

“Specifically, the provision in our new Conservative legislation will be based on the existing definition of criminal harassment, applying specifically to those who repeatedly send unwanted, harassing content that causes someone to reasonably fear for their safety or well-being.”

Conservative bill will not mandate Digital IDs for internet use

Rempel Garner observed that the new bill will have provisions to protect minors and will criminalize the sharing of “intimate” photos without a person’s consent, as well as “deep nudes” (AI images that look real), as well as the sharing of pictures or video of sexual assault.

“The legislation will outline in detail how operators must comply with and operate under this duty of care, including reporting requirements, marketing prohibitions, and other items. Operators who don’t comply with these provisions will face steep fines and a private right of action,” she said.

Rempel Garner said the Conservative’s new bill will look to implement privacy-preserving and “trustworthy age verification methods (for example, computer algorithms that ensure reliable age verification) to detect when a user is a minor,” to be able to restrict access to any “content that is inappropriate for minors to such users while expressly prohibiting the use of a Digital ID for these purposes.”

In June, Rempel Garner said Trudeau’s Bill C-63 is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced or come to light before the next election.

C-63’s “hate speech” section is accompanied by broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics, including levying preemptive judgments against people if they are feared to be likely to commit an act of “hate” in the future.

Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.

Jordan Peterson, one of Canada’s most prominent psychologists, accused Trudeau’s Bill C-63 of trying to create a pathway to allow for “Orwellian Thought Crime” to become the norm in the nation

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Senior research psychologist and Google critic Dr. Robert Epstein told popular podcast host Joe Rogan on Wednesday that a “free and fair election” is an “illusion” now, warning about the rise of the “technological elite.”

In June 2019, Epstein addressed Congress over his concerns that Google not only poses a “serious threat to democracy and human autonomy,” but also advising how the lawmakers could “end Google’s worldwide monopoly on search.” Appearing on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Epstein explained his belief that there hasn’t been a “free and fair election” nationally since 2012, because tech has been used to manipulate public opinion.

“We are finding overwhelming evidence that they are very deliberately and systematically messing with us and our elections, especially. I personally believe that as of 2012 the free and fair election, at least at the national level, has not existed,” Epstein said. “It’s just been manipulated since 2012. I say this in part because I met one of the people on Google’s tech team — on Obama’s Tech Team, I should say — which was being run by Eric Schmidt, head of Google at the time.”

“I talked to him at great length about what the tech team was doing. They had full access to all of Google’s shenanigans, all those manipulations and one member of that team, asked by a reporter, how many of the four points by which Obama won, how many of those points did he get from the tech team? And the guy said … two of the points came from us. Now Obama won by 5 million votes, roughly, and two out of four points came from the tech team — that’s two and a half million votes,” Epstein said.

Epstein, along with several others at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), released a study that claimed tech companies have the ability to influence decisions of undecided voters through search suggestions on search engines. The Google whistleblower told the Daily Caller News Foundation that search engine operators controlling search suggestions could have “the power to shift a large number of votes without people’s awareness.”

Epstein continued to call out the 2016 election between former President Donald Trump and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, stating that if Google’s interference had been taken out, the popular vote “would have been tied.”

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“By 2016 I had calculated that Google could shift — and it would be toward Hillary Clinton of course, whom I supported at the time — that Google could shift between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton in that election with no one knowing. She won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes,” Epstein said. “If you take Google out of that election the popular vote would have been tied. Couple days after that election everyone — all the leaders in Google get up on stage … and they’re talking to all of Google’s 100,000 employees and one by one they’re going up to the mic and saying, ‘We are never going to let that happen again.’”

The Google whistleblower added that between President Joe Biden and Trump, if Google had been taken “out of the equation,” Trump would have won “11 out of 13 swing states instead of five.”

“So going forward from roughly 2012 I think the free and fair election has been an illusion, an illusion. And this is something — it’s very weird and kind of ironic, but this is something that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in that last speech of his farewell speech he warned about the rise of the military-industrial complex, everyone’s heard about that,” Epstein continued.

“But he also warned about the rise of a technological elite that could someday control public policy without anyone knowing. And the technological elite are now in control. That’s what we have. That’s where I get back to my ranting and my pain because I realize no one is paying attention! Eisenhower said we have to be alert or this will happen,” Epstein said.