Steven Guilbeault is Canada’s recently appointed Minister of the Environment and Climate Change. It is an odd designation given that the notion of man made global warming is a Theory and not a proven fact. But that’s beside the point. As Guilbeault has been an environmental activist since the 90s, his appointment by Trudeau clearly signals the present Liberal government has no intention of dealing with our energy sector with anything approaching a sane, pragmatic perspective. Alberta’s economy will languish and Canada, like the U.S., will be forced to depend more and more on nations with no environmental conscience whatsoever. Brilliant!
Guilbeault is a perfect example of the fanaticism that pervades Canada’s political Left. In his Greenpeace days he showed he was more than willing to break the law in defense of his environmental ideals. As Trudeau’s Heritage Minister from 2019 to 2021, he frequently expressed his disgust with online comments critical of politicians and public servants. In Feb., 2021, he informed a Commons committee he was looking to establish a regulatory body capable of sanctioning internet postings that might “undermine Canada’s social cohesion.” In consultations with the public from July to Sept. of this year, he listed 5 categories of “harmful content” he felt should come under government scrutiny, among them, of course, the ever-present “hate speech.” While Guilbeault has switched portfolios, our beloved P.M. continues to herald the need to censor the internet.
But, a host of critics have said, incitements to violence and libelous untruths are already illegal in this country, online or elsewhere. And would not any comment by one group critical of the ideas or behavior of another by definition imperil our “social cohesion”? Ought critical commentary of any kind therefore to be banished? Ottawa lawyer Phillip Palmer of the Internet Society Canada Chapter declared the language of the Liberals’ various categories perilously “loose” and “unclear.” But it is this lack of clarity, this disdain for objective legal standards, that the totalitarian Left takes such delight in exploiting. What better illustrates its eagerness to conflate any opinion not of its liking with “hate speech,” than the cancellation last year of all sorts of people from their online platforms simply for suggesting that Covid 19 may very well have originated in a Chinese Lab, an opinion, by the way, that even many on the Left were mouthing as the year wore on.
Suggest that Canada’s Residential School System was not genocidal in intent, and you are a Hater. Suggest that a country has every right to defend the integrity of its borders, and you are a Hater. Suggest that voters in any democratic nation need to show a valid piece of I.D., and you are a Hater. Yes indeed, if the Left could somehow have Hate Speech installed as a Legal Principle, we surely would be living in Orwell’s 1984!