Below is my column in the Hill on the resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his anti-free speech legacy. The collapse of free speech in Canada is a cautionary tale for Americans. It shows how Trudeau and the Liberal Party used faux rhetoric of tolerance and inclusion to justify intolerance and exclusion.
Here is the column:
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?
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.”
Maybe one of our morally superior and erudite s@@tlib friends can explain why censorship or suppression of speech is bad when done by totalitarian regimes such as National Socialist Germany and the USSR but necessary and commendable when done in the West.
I don’t expect an answer but surprise me.
antonio
You’re surprised?
Do your own research.
You silly commenter.
No, you didn’t.
Not an answer. Why is suppression of speech/censorship good when done in the West?
Perhaps because leftists such as Trudeau are trying to build a better world? Help me anonymous.
antonio
You’re beyond help if you can’t find your own answer, you simpleton.
Please!!! I have a degree from a tier 1 lawschool and am admitted to the bar in several jurisdictions with 20 something years of experience as an attorney.
I would respect you more if you just admited you support censorship and speech laws provided they pertain to the ‘right’ people.
And before you call me a slur remember I’m Hispanic, what are you, some kind of bigot?
antonio
WTF are you writing about? Law degree, hispanic, attorney… oh my!
Seriously, you are the dumbest person I’ve ever enecountered here.
Let’s start from the beginning. I simply asked why is censorship/speech suppression in Nazi Germany and USSR considered bad and that in Western countries ok?
And I also challenged you to admit or deny that you support censorship.
Maybe admitting support for censorship is a bridge too far?
Fair questions and asking either does not make me a simpleton or dumb.
antonio
A good starting point to why censorship might be good in some cases and not in others….
authenticity and civility of the speaker. If the speaker is deliberately using deception, why shouldn’t that use of speech be singled out? If the deception is manipulative, toward what purpose?….toward self-empowerment and subjugation of other?…..nobody in their right mind would accord that speaker the same right to be heard as one who is authentic and candid as to purpose.
The distinction can be boiled down to one word — trustworthiness.
Humans have the freedom to ignore the unscrupulous and untrustworthy. When we ignore, we censor, in the sense that we refuse to give air to that which we distrust. Every person does this hundreds of times every day. You can call it censorship. I call it filtering.
The threat of censorship in a free society is when listeners have become closed-minded, not even willing to listen to ideas that are given with authenticity, civility and goodwill. This limits a people’s options and maneuvering room. It’s what the Founders were thinking in giving us the 1st Amendment.
I can almost guarantee you that they were not thinking about the freedom to:
• imposter while speaking in order to discredit an opponent
• fabricate information in order to manipulate the gullible
• sow chaos and mutual hatred based on wild exaggeration
• intimidate opponents into silence by making threats to personal safety
• foreign enemies to divide and conquer America through infowarfare
• predators to groom children for sexual slavery
• mind-control the public through clever deceptions that are hard to refute
• foment lawbreaking on the part of others
We’re in a tough spot where we have bookend threats coming from two perversions of free speech:
• censorship of unliked ideas put forth with authenticity, civility and goodwill
• the public square commandeered by deceitful infowarriors with hidden agendas
We could lose our freedom by not finding and clinging to the sweet spot between these two dangers. Opposing censorship as a 1-sided battle could naively hand over the infospace to untrustworthy, manipulative actors. They will always argue that “free speech” allows them the right to manipulate via inauthenticity and conniving false-narratives.
Tier one law school you say? Yeah right pal.
Perhaps he is simply an American.
By the way, where is Hispanica, whatever, and does the land you left also dole out “free stuff” and “free status” or was that the attraction? It would appear not, eh?
Dear Mr. Turley, it seemed to me when Mr. Trudeau became the Prime Minister, he only got in because of name recognition. I remember his parents and how their personal problems were a huge embarrassment to Canadian people. I am glad his government will be in the rearview mirror for Canada.
Turley, as someone who was regularly censored on your blog here for at least a couple years just for being who i am, I laugh just as hard now as I ever did at the sheer hypocrisy on your end to consider yourself a spokes person for ‘free speech’….
All while you’ve ignored book banning in school libraries. And avoiding the fact the presidential candidate, and now elect, has-been overtly threatening journalists with jail time.
Trudeau isn’t an enemy of free speech, you are. Granted I know you’re working hard for the Russian disinformation dollar, Comrade Turley.
Are you ashamed of your posting…? Own it…or be quiet..!
For those who are pleased with Trudeau’s resignation, I would suggest subdued care…..His former Deputy PM Freeland is comparable (by analogy) to Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden…trading one in for another doesn’t always cut the cake….
Lin, I commented on Freeland in an earlier posting and I wish everyone would come to understand who and what she is. She is just a masculine Trudeau with a much worse attitude.
She is far worse than Trudeau. She didn’t succeed in politics due to being the offspring of a revered political family, whether Kennedy or Trudeau. She got there by being an effective political activist for multiple causes and an accomplished journalist.
If Trudeau wasn’t the celebrated son of the celebrated Trudeau The First, that Canada’s remaining blue rinse grannies Liberal grandparents still speak about in revered tones, no matter how good his looks, the world would have no idea who he is.
The only thing he has going for him other than the name and good looks, is that he was raised in the Prime Minister’s official residence at his father’s side, watching Trudeau The Elder perform his Machiavellian machinations with provincial premiers, trade unionists, etc. He grew up watching how a prime minister exercises influence and power. And that’s about it.
Just a month short of 40 years later, like his father before him, Prime Minister Racist Black Face has now come to the point of unpopularity that he too had to make that long walk in the snow and decide to resign.
Old Airborne Dog
@Lin: Freeland in many ways is far more dangerous than VP DEI Hire.
For one, she is actually pretty smart as far as intelligence goes. Being a Rhodes Scholar doesn’t actually mean much, but she is one and did very well in the private sector before timing her moment to enter politics. She was an activist for political causes from her high school years onward, and was pretty effective at getting progress towards her goals. She entered journalism, writing for some pretty high end publications on specific topics and was successful there, as well as being a successful author.
So she’s smart and she’s had several decades of figuring out journalism and communicating a message you want to have positively received.
Most Canadians we know here in Montana a few miles south of the border, where they’re as common as MAGA hats, will tell anyone asking them that she’s just as dirtied by her close association and support of Trudeau and his policies that they believe her ceremonial resignation from his cabinet will not make her palatable enough to Canadians in the next election. Just as Harris was dirtied by her association with Biden.
Whether the Lenin Liberals will feel she’s not too dirty to condemn them in the federal election sometime this year remains to be seen. If they do decide to gamble on her, she is not going to make the bonehead errors that VP DEI Hire made. Freeland got where she is by her abilities, both in journalism and in politics.
Old Airborne Dog
Illiberal progressives the media has too long adored are in sharp and steady decline. It’s a good thing that has taken time like all good things do.
Attacks on freedom of speech are always cloaked in virtue: protecting feelings, preventing discrimination, protecting children, protecting the truth. There will always be the weak of mind who believe in the virtuous goals but always, without fail, underneath it all, is the goal of establishing the means to stifle dissent and protect power. Always. The founders were pretty danged smart guys.
Justin Trudeau saw ‘The Light’, now lets hope the rest of Canada does the same.
Maybe Gavin Newsom will take a que from this, but I doubt it.
The only way this happens is of Trudeau’s coalition is completely obliterated in the parliamentary elections.
“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” (John Adams)
For their sake, let’s hope he got this one wrong
It will be a lesson to America to watch this and to learn just how difficult it could be to retrieve all of our lost rights after the obama/biden/democrat assault on our constitution. And I do hope that a question will finally be brought before SCOTUS as to the constitutionality of all hate speech legislation and other infringements on our right to speak.
Trudeau is the classic case of a tinpot dictator rising to the level of his incompetence. He is the true to life figure depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”.
A Pathetic Little man, hidden behind blackface.
GEB, usually you usually have insighful comments, but this one is not up to paar. Do better.
Anonymous 9:32 Reveal your name and come into the light and then I will respond. Anyway, I would change nothing. Look for insight all you want.
Or should we just call you Jack Paar.
Come into light? Why? You’re anonymous.
Don’t go juvenile on people GEB, you posted something stupid, hurt your ego, no need to threaten.
GEB,
Well said and spot on. We can only stand back and wait and see how the Canadian people and their government react. It finally seems many people are coming around to the fact that woke progressiveness is dead. Thankfully!!
Well said GEB. Well said. And Kamala Harris would have been America’s little Tin Pot Dictator rising to her level of incompetence had she won……
Skyraider
She had already risen far, far beyond her abilities hence the big fizzle in spite of spending somewhere between 1 and 2 billion dollars on her campaign. That’s a major shitload of dolllars!!!
Like father like son…
Exactly: grew up in the Prime Minister’s mansion, watching firsthand the Machiavellian machinations of his father Trudeau the Elder and the collusion with future Lenin Liberal prime ministers like Chretien and Martin. Never mastered that as his father did.
Old Airborne Dog
Watch out for Trudeaus” ex finance minister, Freeland, as I believe she was in charge of the attack on trucker’s bank accounts. Also, I believe she was the politician walking down the street when a reporter was trying to ask her a question and her goon stepped right into the reporter and then charged the reporter with assault. It was the most fascisty thing I have seen in awhile.
I don’t have the video, but hopefully someone will post it for me. I think Turley had a column on this incident when it happened.
What happens in Canada makes has zero impact to American readers of this blog. As for and Canadian readers, they already know their politicians. Anyway, Canadian voters do not decide the next PM, parliament does.
So why did you read the column and comment on it?
To make a point, because the bigmoths here think they’re intellectuals.
Please, you’re no intellectual hullb.
@Anonymous Democrat Marxist Useful Idiot To make a point, because the bigmoths here think they’re intellectuals.
Dear Democrat self-identifying intellectual: give us a link to the CBC or another Canadian national news media headline that says something like: “Canadian Parliament Votes To Elect Trudeau Prime Minister”.
The only point you have is the one at the top of your head. Why would you preen, pose and flex about being knowledgeable about any of this, when you can’t even figure out how to put a unique username with all of your posts?
Old Airborne Dog
@Anonymous Democrat Marxist Useful Idiot Anyway, Canadian voters do not decide the next PM, parliament does.
Give us a link to the CBC or another Canadian national news media headline that says something like: “Canadian Parliament Votes To Elect Trudeau Prime Minister”.
Canadian political parties vote for who the party leader will be in the election. If they win that election, that leader becomes the next prime minister – they DO NOT hold a vote in Parliament to ask parliament if there is majority agreement on that person.
Canadians don’t see those party names on their ballots. But they sure as hell know who the party leaders are of the MP’s on those ballots, and who will be prime minister if that MP’s party wins the election.
Why would you preen, pose and flex about being knowledgeable about any of this, when you can’t even figure out how to put a unique username with all of your posts?
Old Airborne Dog
Trump will make Canada great again
.
Trufaux is not gone yet. Even his resignation is a lie. He’s stalling for time, and everyone knows it.
It’s just one more tactic from a pol that inherited narcissism from his shameless mother. This guy will always surprise to the downside.
Everyone knows it? Howe come I’m just learning it now.
Sir, madame, or reassigned, one could fill a warehouse with what you don’t know.
Diogenes huh? You pretentious fool.
Trudeau or Obama?
Birds of a Feather
@Traveller: Trudeau or Obama?
You could argue that Prime Minister Racist Black Face was that son Obama spoke of never having.
You could also argue that Obama watched how Trudeau The Elder went from openly communist in his early adult years to joining the Liberal party for access to power, and then once in power divided Canadians against each other to fundamentally change the nature of Canada. Both had political superstar power that allowed them to survive actions that much of both countries hated.
Perhaps Obama was the fourth and unknown son that Trudeau The Elder never had.
Old Airborne Dog
Replacements for Trudeau in the ‘Liberal’ party are uniformly as bad as he. So, unless the conservatives can form a durable government without aid from any of the fools on the left, Canada is likely to end up with another go around.
Well, that why politics has (useful) fools, to use ands abuse the system for political means.
But who really cares about Canada? What does Canada have that one can’t enjoy elsewhere.
With the courts and legislature supporting him this entire time, why would his leaving solve anything? As with the USA, the ignorance runs very deep.
Vaild point. Nuke em!
Pierre Poilievre.
Is that the guy who owns the Subaru dealership in Toronto?
No clue, but he’s the guy who absolutely destroyed a reported while eating an apple. Video is online.
Can it be the two or three you know, are the ones to know what all Canadians want. Careful with such nonsensical statements, they make no sense.
Canadians need to clean house of the Left Wing Globalist crowd and all their policies. I know many Canadians, and nobody liked Trudeau and his polices. Need a clean Sweep.
Can it be the two or three you know, are the ones to know what all Canadians want. Careful with such nonsensical statements, they make no sense.
“Can it be the two or three you know . . .”
At the end of 2024, Trudeau’s approval rating was in the low *20’s*. Over half of Canadians polled believe he should quit.
That’s a bit more than “two or three.”
I beleive what the commenter you are attacking is directly referring to what the previous anon stated, all Canadians hate Trudeau. That is not factual.
so one extreme justifies another?
So is modus operandi too anon. Better luck nerxt time.
“Nobody liked…” Are you oblivious to the fact that he was PM for 10 years?
He was the Obamao of Canada. And yes it doesn’t mean people liked him. For Pete’s sake we had Obamao for 8.
Make that 12, really.
Re: “No one liked Trudeau yet….” Curiouser, and curiouser, Isn’t it? The electorate sets loose a runaway train and there’s no way to stop it until it runs out if fuel? Bullox! You get what you vote for.
Same as all the dumb*sses in NY and CA, enough woke deadheads and parasites keep these vipers in power (that is until they run out of other people’s money)
Boom!
Tora Tora Tora