Back to 1977: Carney Turning Back the Clock on Free Expression

June 30 marked a watershed moment. When Prime Minister Mark Carney reversed course on Canada’s Digital Services Tax (DST) under direct pressure from the Trump White House, the collapse was not merely a trade retreat—it was a symbolic exposure of a deeper problem: the growing instinct in Ottawa to control speech, culture, and the digital commons through regulatory force.

The DST’s defeat didn't just preserve economic openness. It inadvertently protected Canadian journalism from a plan to bind it more tightly to state-sanctioned subsidies. What fell apart was not only a tax, but a federal scheme of influence godfathered by Liberal governments. And what is rising alongside it is far more dangerous: a resurrection of the failed and discredited logic of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Initially passed in 1977, Section 13 prohibited hate speech communicated via telephone lines, deeming it a “discriminatory practice” if it was likely to expose individuals to hatred or contempt. That threshold—“likely to expose”—was intentionally vague. But the law remained narrowly applied until 2001, when the internet was folded into its reach. What had once been about isolated, recorded hate calls became something else entirely: a sweeping tool to regulate the digital public square.

Section 13 was civil, not criminal, which made it seem harmless to its defenders. But that very feature made it more dangerous. The law bypassed the rigour of the Criminal Code’s hate speech provisions—Sections 318 to 320—which require intent and are subject to full Charter protections. Instead, Section 13 complaints were adjudicated by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT), using a mere balance-of-probabilities standard. There was no presumption of innocence, no right to a complete defence based on truth or public interest, and no need to prove intent to harm. The tribunal could impose fines, gag orders, and takedown directives based purely on the probability that someone's feelings might be hurt.

Did it make any difference? Did it protect Canadians against hate?

What followed was not protection, but mischievous persecution. In the early 2000s, lawyer Richard Warman became a prolific complainant, using Section 13 to pursue dozens of Canadians for online posts, often succeeding in securing fines or speech restrictions. In 2008, Maclean’s magazine and columnist Mark Steyn were brought before multiple human rights commissions for publishing excerpts from Steyn’s book America Alone, which warned of Western demographic decline. The complaints were dismissed, but only after years of costly, public proceedings. That same year, Ezra Levant was summoned before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for reprinting the Danish Muhammad cartoons in the Western Standard. He was eventually cleared, but not before enduring interrogations about his editorial motives.

Section 13 didn’t stop hate. It punished dissent. It didn't deter racists. It chilled debate. And by the time the Conservative government repealed it in 2013—following a private member’s bill by MP Brian Storseth—it had become clear that the law's core assumptions were incompatible with a liberal democracy. Courts were already straining to justify it. The Supreme Court’s 4–3 ruling in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990), upholding Section 13, was widely regarded as tentative. Later cases like Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott (2013) clarified that only extreme vilification, not mere offence or criticism, could be curtailed without violating the Charter.

But what was buried in principle has been exhumed in practice.

In 2021, then–Justice Minister David Lametti introduced Bill C-36, a piece of legislation designed to re-establish Section 13’s powers under the guise of civil enforcement against online hate. Lametti, who would later resign in disgrace following a court’s rebuke of his government’s 2023 illegitimate handling of the Emergencies Act, championed the bill as a progressive necessity. The bill died with the election. [Note: The PMO and David Lametti announced that, effective July 14 (Bastille Day), Lametti is appointed Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Mark Carney].

Lametti’s successor, Arif Virani, took up the same mantle in 2024 with Bill C-63—the so-called Online Harms Act. The bill would have established a Digital Safety Commission to monitor online platforms, allowed human rights tribunals to resume fining individuals for “harmful” expression, and compelled takedown compliance across digital networks. It was, in all but name, Section 13 reincarnated. The bill collapsed when Trudeau questionably prorogued Parliament in January 2025 to avoid greater discoveries of the corruption surrounding the Green Slush Fund.

But the ambition behind the desire to regulate speech did not die. Mark Carney has taken it further. During a spring 2025 campaign rally in Hamilton, Ontario, Carney declared:

We announced a series of measures with respect to online harm… a sea of misogyny, anti-Semitism, hatred, conspiracy theories—the sort of pollution that’s online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States. My government, if we are elected, will be taking action on those American giants who come across [our] border.

The speech was a signal. It reframed online speech regulation not as civil protection, but as patriotic duty. The villain was not abusive content, but the United States. The logic is as straightforward as it is cynical: use anti-American rhetoric to justify the revival of laws that target the fundamental rights of Canadians. By casting American tech firms as the boogeyman, Carney dressed censorship in the garb of nationalism.

Carney’s record shows a consistent preference for authoritarian coercion. In a 2023 Globe and Mail column, he publicly advocated for freezing the bank accounts of Canadians involved in the Freedom Convoy—an action later found unconstitutional by the Federal Court. The state Carney imagines is not one of neutral referees, but of regulators and financial enforcers. The media he envisions is not independent, but subsidized, first with domesticating grants, then, under the DST, with funds extracted from foreign tech giants under threat of legislative penalty.

That plan, too, has now failed. Carney’s Digital Services Tax, announced in early 2025, would have levied a 3% fee on revenues earned by American platforms in Canada, retroactive to 2022. The revenue was intended, in part, to prop up a fragile mainstream Canadian media ecosystem increasingly reliant on government cash. This was not about fairness. It was about media subjugation: extracting money from American firms to impose a domestic press regime already bound too tightly to Ottawa’s funding levers.

Then came Trump. On June 27, 2025, the U.S. president abruptly suspended all trade negotiations with Canada, calling the DST a “blatant attack.” The tough-talking Carney folded within 48 hours. He rescinded the tax. Trade talks resumed. But something else happened, too: in defending American firms, Trump inadvertently defended Canadian journalism from greater dependence on state-facilitated funding. One of Carney’s favourite refrains—that protecting the press is protecting democracy—was rendered hollow by the very structure of his proposal. It was Trump, not Ottawa, who preserved some of Canadian press autonomy from a deeper entanglement with the state.

There is another warning here. The White House should now be paying close attention to what Carney’s government is attempting through its proposed online harms regime. If passed, the Online Harms Act would impose quasi-judicial penalties on global platforms, regulate content generated by U.S. citizens, and enforce takedown orders under standards far beneath U.S. constitutional norms. It would effectively export Canadian censorship into American cyberspace. And given Carney’s repeated attempts to frame U.S. companies as polluters of Canadian minds, the White House would be justified in interpreting the legislation as an unjustified regulatory assault on American expression.

Trump could intervene again. As with the DST, he could collapse the Online Harms Act through economic and diplomatic pressure. In doing so, he would again be defending American interests and would be advancing the Charter rights of Canadians.

I do not favour foreign interference, but let’s remember for a moment that under the current Liberal government, hostile foreign interests from Beijing to Teheran have operated with relative impunity on Canadian territory, crushing or abbreviating the rights of targeted individual Canadians, while the PMO looked the other way because the interfering power created an advantage to the ruling party.

Trump’s protection of the rights of Americans is not interference or hostile asymmetrical warfare like Beijing’s. It is deterrence against Canadian cross-border regulatory overreach masquerading as civil protection.

The false narrative of contrived nationalism or the language of progressivism should not fool Canadians. The modern Liberal Party, in its eagerness to control the digital world, is dragging the country back to 1977 —back to tribunals, back to vague definitions, and back to coercion without courts. The “progressives” want to regress—reinstating laws struck down by courts, repealed by Parliament, and rejected by the public. Their future, it turns out, is a perfect mirror of the past.

And in that mirror, the face staring back is not liberty but power.