Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Wokeism VS. classical liberal truth-based order at the root of Online Harms bill debate
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge
You can be made a criminal as a result of someone’s emotional response to what you say or write online. A successful complainant can receive up to $20,000 for that anonymous complaint from the person complained about.
Wokeism versus the classical liberal truth-based order is what the discussion on the Online Harms Bill, C-63, is really about. Although some see it as a plot to undermine free speech, it may actually represent the legitimate view of progressives—wokeism—to promote social justice, as they see it. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers—the first woke government in the history of Canada—sincerely believe in what they are doing. C-63 is wokeism at work.
I’m not talking about the sections designed to protect children from online harm. Everyone wants that. Whether or not the various digital safety commissars are necessary is questionable, but the politicians can sort that out. I’m referring specifically to the sections allowing anyone to anonymously make a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) that someone has written or said something that is “hateful.” This is defined as causing someone to feel “detested” or “vilified.” You can be made a criminal as a result of someone’s emotional response to what you say or write online. A successful complainant can receive up to $20,000 for that anonymous complaint from the person complained about. And that person, who is now $20,000 poorer, can be ordered to pay a further $50,000 to the government after CHRC bureaucrats—appointed by the government—decide that he has hurt the feelings of the anonymous complainant.
We don’t have to imagine how this will work, because we have already seen it in action with Section 13, the previous incarnation of C-63. In one famous case, Ezra Levant, now of Rebel News, was the person complained about. He had dared to republish the infamous Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Someone complained, and Levant basically had years of his life, and most of his money, consumed with trying to defend himself.
The other famous Section 13 case related to the Islamist issue involved author and media personality Mark Steyn. His case was just as gruelling, time consuming, and expensive. Steyn eventually won, but at great cost in time and money.
Largely as a result of these cases, Section 13 was repealed by the Harper government. What had happened is that a commission with a particular view about Islamic issues had relentlessly prosecuted two men who legitimately held different views about the subject.
And that is exactly what we can expect with this resurrected version of Section 13.
It could be on Islamic issues where people have different views. Or it could be on a thousand other issues where people have different views.
The trans issue is one. The prime minister famously tweeted “Trans women are women.” That is a view held by many people. It is one of the fundamental tenets of progressivism—wokeism. However, many do not accept that view. How many? According to Professor Eric Kaufman, one-third of Canadians accept woke views, while two-thirds reject wokeism. This same two-thirds to one-third ratio also applies in Britain and United States. The one-third fervently believe that they must remake the world according to the way they know it must be, and that the two-thirds who don’t see it yet must be brought along.
So, with this proposed legislation, we see the problem immediately. Complaints will be made to the CMHR about a trans issue, for example, against someone within the two-thirds majority of the population who do not accept that “trans women are women” and that complaint will be adjudicated by mainly Liberal appointees—appointed in large part exactly because of their progressive views—who believe that “trans women are women.” The people complained about can expect to be treated the same way Levant and Steyn were treated: namely, being forced through lengthy and expensive hearings, simply for holding the same views that two-thirds of Canadians hold.
This is an absurd result. And the trans example is just one of many that can be expected to generate complainants. What about the belief that all indigenous complaints must be believed? This is the woke view, namely that the truthfulness of stories told within indigenous communities cannot be questioned in the usual way. The most dramatic example of this odd belief is the claim that 215 indigenous children were secretly buried at the former Kamloops Residential School, in some cases with the forced help of children as young as six. We were asked to believe this highly improbable claim simply because of stories that circulated within indigenous communities.
The Trudeau Liberals immediately accepted this baseless claim. A cabinet minister, Marc Miller, even publicly called a distinguished professor of history, Jacques Rouillard a “ghoul” for simply suggesting that it is in the interest of all Canadians that excavations should be undertaken at Kamloops to determine the truth. If a cabinet minister says such things, it can safely assumed that many other people are quite willing to lodge anonymous complaints against truth seekers, like this professor.
The prime minister actually gave an explanation of how he views free speech in a candid discussion with a journalist during the truckers’ convoy protest. He said that some Canadians—those opposing vaccine mandates and other forms of excessive government control—had “unacceptable views.” They must be stopped. Only “acceptable views”—his—would be allowed.
The problem with this simplistic view is that there are a myriad of subjects upon which people hold different views. Trudeau sincerely believed that these protesters were wrong, while the protestors just as sincerely believed that he was wrong. Imposing the Emergencies Act over a difference of opinion was an extreme move. We now know that what he did was unconstitutional. Bill C-63 is very similar to the use of the Emergencies Act. Both only make sense to the woke.
The classical liberal truth-based order, so painstakingly constructed, was built on free and raucous discussion. And that is the only way it can be maintained. That free discussion of ideas—no matter how offensive, “hateful,” or irksome they might be to people with different views—is vital to our democratic governance.
The woke view, on the other hand, insists that there are certain fixed ideas, such as systemic racism, trans women are women, etc., that must be accepted by everyone, at any cost.
That’s the fight that is underway now with the Online Harms Bill. One side—the one-third—say that they know the way, and everyone must follow. The other side—the two-thirds—say that no one “knows” the way, but only by free discussion can we find it. That free discussion of ideas is messy. People will have their feelings hurt by discussions that will not always be polite. But that’s exactly what has built our advanced civilization.
Wokeism versus classical liberal truth-based order. That’s what C-63 is about.
Children must be protected. Genocide is bad. No one argues with those things. But free speech must be protected. The one-third of the population who hold “woke” views are absolutely entitled to hold and express those views. But they cannot be allowed to prevent the two-thirds who view the world differently from expressing theirs.
Canadians are a trusting people, as Kaufman points out in the above article. And while the roughly two-thirds of the population that does not accept wokeism is identical to the two-thirds in Britain and United States, Canada is different from them in that our Conservative Party has been very reluctant to push back against wokeism, as the Conservatives do in Britain and the Republicans so vigorously do in America. The odd result is that the two-thirds non-woke Canadians tend to trust the one-third woke who have captured the media and our other major institutions. We saw that at work in the government control wielded during the COVID years. Bill C-63 can only make that tendency towards submission worse, by allowing only woke views—acceptable views—to be discussed publicly.
There will be some brave free-speech martyrs, like Levant and Steyn, who will be prepared to soldier on regardless of what legislation the current ideological government passes. But most people who would be inclined to push back against woke mantras—such as “a trans woman is a woman” or “all indigenous claims must be believed”—won’t, even if they know that the claims aren’t true. Canada will become the worse for it.
Wokeism is authoritarian, and will not tolerate free speech.
As drafted, Bill C-63 definitely contravenes Article 2 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to their “political or other opinion.”
C-63, as drafted, is bad law. It must not be passed.
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Scott McGregor warns BC Ferries’ contract with a Chinese state-owned shipbuilder reveals Canada’s failure to align procurement with national security. It is trading short-term savings for long-term sovereignty and strategic vulnerability.
BC Ferries’ recent decision to award the construction of four new vessels to China Merchants Industry (Weihai), a state-owned shipyard under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is a cautionary tale of strategic policy failure. While framed as a cost-effective solution to replace aging vessels, the agreement reveals a more critical issue: Canada’s persistent failure to align vital infrastructure procurement with national security and economic resilience.
The situation goes beyond transportation. It is a governance failure at the intersection of trade, security, and sovereignty.
Outsourcing Sovereignty
China Merchants Industry is part of a sprawling state-owned conglomerate, closely connected to the CCP. It is not merely a commercial player; it is a geopolitical actor. In China, these organizations thrive on a unique blend of state subsidies, long-term strategic direction, and complex corporate structures that often operate in the shadows. This combination grants them a significant competitive edge, allowing them to navigate the business landscape with an advantage that many try to replicate but few can match.
The same firms supplying ferries to BC are also building warships for the People’s Liberation Army Navy. That alone should give pause.
Yet BC Ferries, under provincial oversight, proceeded without meaningful scrutiny of these risks. No Canadian shipyards submitted bids due to capacity constraints and a lack of strategic investment. But choosing a Chinese state-owned enterprise by default is not a neutral act. It is the consequence of neglecting industrial policy.
Hybrid Risk, Not Just Hybrid Propulsion
China’s dominance in shipbuilding, now over 60% of global orders, has not occurred by chance. It is the result of state-driven market distortion, designed to entrench foreign dependence on Chinese industrial capacity.
Once that dependency forms, Beijing holds leverage. It can slow parts shipments, withhold technical updates, or retaliate economically in response to diplomatic friction. This is not speculative; it has already happened in sectors such as canola, critical minerals, and telecommunications.
Ordering a ferry, on its face, might seem apolitical. But if the shipbuilder is state-owned, its obligations to the CCP outweigh any commercial contract. That is the nature of hybrid threats to security: they appear benign until they are not.
Hybrid warfare combines conventional military force with non-military tactics (such as cyber attacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and the use of state-owned enterprises) to undermine a target country’s stability, influence decisions, or gain strategic control without resorting to open conflict. It exploits legal grey zones and democratic weaknesses, making threats appear benign until they’ve done lasting damage.
A Policy Void, Not Just a Procurement Gap
Ottawa designed its National Shipbuilding Strategy to rebuild Canadian capability, but it has failed to scale quickly enough. The provinces, including British Columbia, have been left to procure vessels without the tools or frameworks to evaluate foreign strategic risk. Provincial procurement rules treat a state-owned bidder the same as a private one. That is no longer defensible.
Canada must close this gap through deliberate, security-informed policy. Three steps are essential for the task:
Ottawa should mandate National Security reviews for critical infrastructure contracts. Any procurement involving foreign state-owned enterprises must trigger a formal security and economic resilience assessment. This should apply at the federal and provincial levels.
Secondly, when necessary, Canada should enhance its domestic industrial capabilities through strategic investments. Canada cannot claim to be powerless when there are no local bids available. Federal and provincial governments could collaborate to invest in scalable civilian shipbuilding, in addition to military contracts. Otherwise, we risk becoming repeatedly dependent on external sources.
Canada should enhance Crown oversight by implementing intelligence-led risk frameworks. This means that agencies, such as BC Ferries, must develop procurement protocols that are informed by threat intelligence rather than just cost analysis. It also involves incorporating security and foreign interference risk indicators into their Requests for Proposals (RFPs).
The Cost of Strategic Amnesia
The central point here is not only about China; it is primarily about Canada. The country needs more strategic foresight. If we cannot align our economic decisions with our fundamental security posture, we will likely continue to cede control of our critical systems, whether in transportation, healthcare, mining, or telecommunications, to adversarial regimes. That is a textbook vulnerability in the era of hybrid warfare.
BC Ferries may have saved money today. But without urgent policy reform, the long-term cost will be paid in diminished sovereignty, reduced resilience, and an emboldened adversary with one more lever inside our critical infrastructure.
Scott McGregor is a senior security advisor to the Council on Countering Hybrid Warfare and Managing Partner at Close Hold Intelligence Consulting Ltd.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Madrid knew solar and wind power were unreliable but pressed ahead anyway
When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.
As I wrote in these pages in January, the data have long shown that environmentalists’ vision of cheap, reliable solar and wind energy was a mirage. The International Energy Agency’s latest cost data continue to underscore this: Consumers and businesses in countries with almost no solar and wind on average paid 11 U.S. cents for a kilowatt hour of electricity in 2023, but costs rise by more than 4 cents for every 10% increase in the portion of a nation’s power generation that’s covered by solar and wind. Green countries such as Germany pay 34 cents, more than 2.5 times the average U.S. rate and nearly four times China’s.
Prices are high in no small part because solar and wind require a duplicate backup energy system, often fossil-fuel driven, for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. The Iberian blackout shows that the reliability issues and costs of solar and wind are worse than even this sort of data indicates.
Grids need to stay on a very stable frequency—generally 50 Hertz in Europe—or else you get blackouts. Fossil-fuel, hydro and nuclear generation all solve this problem naturally because they generate energy by powering massive spinning turbines. The inertia of these heavy rotating masses resists changes in speed and hence frequency, so that when sudden demand swings would otherwise drop or hike grid frequency, the turbines work as immense buffers. But wind and solar don’t power such heavy turbines to generate energy. It’s possible to make up for this with cutting-edge technology such as advanced inverters or synthetic inertia. But many solar and wind farms haven’t undergone these expensive upgrades. If a grid dominated by those two power sources gets off frequency, a blackout is more likely than in a system that relies on other energy sources.
Spain has been forcing its grid to rely more on unstable renewables. The country has pursued an aggressive green policy, including a commitment it adopted in 2021 to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050. The share of solar and wind as a source of Spain’s electricity production went from less than 23% in 2015 to more than 43% last year. The government wants its total share of renewables to hit 81% in the next five years—even as it’s phasing out nuclear generation.
Just a week prior to the blackout, Spain bragged that for the first time, renewables delivered 100% of its electricity, though only for a period of minutes around 11:15 a.m. When it collapsed, the Iberian grid was powered by 74% renewable energy, with 55% coming from solar. It went down under the bright noon sun. When the Iberian grid frequency started faltering on April 28, the grid’s high proportion of solar and wind generation couldn’t stabilize it. This isn’t speculation; it’s physics. As the electricity supply across Spain collapsed, Portugal was pulled along, because the two countries are tightly interconnected through the Iberian electricity network.
Madrid had been warned. The parent company of Spain’s grid operator admitted in February: “The high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capabilities in place to keep them operating properly in the event of a disturbance . . . can cause power generation outages, which could be severe.”
Yet the Spanish government is still in denial. Even while admitting that he didn’t know the April blackout’s cause, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez insisted that there was “no empirical evidence” that renewables were to blame and that Spain is “not going to deviate a single millimeter” from its green energy ambitions.
Unless the country—and its neighbors—are comfortable with an increased risk of blackouts, this will require expensive upgrades. A new Reuters report written with an eye to the Iberian blackout finds that for Europe as a whole this would cost trillions of dollars in infrastructure updates. It’s possible that European politicians can talk voters into eating that cost. It’ll be impossible for India or nations in Africa to follow suit.
That may be unwelcome news to Mr. Sánchez, but even a prime minister can’t overcome physics. Spain’s commitment to solar and wind is forcing the country onto an unreliable, costly, more black-out-prone system. A common-sense approach would hold off on a sprint for carbon reductions and instead put money toward research into actually reliable, affordable green energy.
Unfortunately for Spain and those countries unlucky enough to be nearby, the Spanish energy system—as one Spanish politician put it—“is being managed with an enormous ideological bias.”
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “Best Things First.”
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