When Meta first said it would no longer post Canadian news stories on its Facebook and Instagram platforms, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the social media giants were treating Canada like it was a “small country.”
But Meta has not defined Canada as a small country. Trudeau has, by passing a censorship bill called the Online News Act that effectively tried to extort money from social media in order to provide more hush money to a Canadian media that’s already been bought off by massive subsidies.
It’s worth revisiting all of what Trudeau said as he whined about a big tech that has usually provided him with favorable coverage over the years, just as it has President Joe Biden and the Democrats.
“Facebook decided that Canada was a small country, small enough that they could reject our asks,” Trudeau declared. "They made the wrong choice by deciding to attack Canada. We want to defend democracy. This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War. This is what we’re doing every single day in the United Nations.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Trudeau somehow managed to justify both his censorship program and his Ukrainian war policy while suggesting that this was all about defending Canada and the world against the Nazis and Imperial Japan. He didn’t get “diversity is our strength” into his rant as he twisted himself into a pretzel.
On Tuesday, Meta calmly declared that it would be "permanently" ending Canadians' ability to view news on Instagram and Facebook after Trudeau demanded payments to Canadian media.
Trudeau is either being wilfully ignorant or is just plain unaware of how Canadian media have already been benefiting by having their material on social media, which drives the online circulation numbers. Social media clicks means money for Canadian publishers and reporters who are often paid according to how many people view their story.
If Trudeau is seemingly unable to provide a coherent or realistic response to what is happening to Canadian news, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre did provide a lucid and accurate assessment of where Canada is headed.
“It's like 1984. you have a prime minister passing a law to make news articles disappear from the internet … Who would ever have imagined that in Canada the federal government would pass laws banning people from effectively seeing the news.”
It has become a cliche to describe the age in which we live as “Orwellian,” but that is increasingly what Canada is becoming. Trudeau attempts to extort money from big tech in order to keep Canada’s legacy media intact. The federal government actually runs a euthanasia program but insists it’s the compassionate outreach of “Medical Assistance in Dying.” We don’t even mention suicide – just dying, as if that is a sound and sensible objective of doctors everywhere. Trudeau is even talking about abolishing the internal combustion engine by 2035, the same year that the country is supposed to achieve its “net zero” emissions goal. So if this all unfolds without some sane intervention, Canadians will be living in the cold and dark, unable to drive cars because they won’t be able to afford the electric ones whose batteries are consuming vital raw materials at a rate that outstrips the supply.
And Trudeau’s censorship program continues to churn forward while its apologists maintain it is going to enhance freedom of the press.
At the last Liberal policy convention, party hacks passed a resolution that would force media outlets with stories based on anonymous sources or whistleblowers to out these people. The Online News Act actually suggests that’s exactly what can happen now under the government’s legislation as Globe and Mail publisher Phillip Crawley told Sen. Pamela Wallin (CPC-SK) about how the government can now be “snooping” in the newsroom.
Trudeau isn’t finished yet either. This is all part of a three-part “digital agenda” that will make it even easier to banish what Trudeau and other governments do not like. It is a three-fold attack on free speech and freedom of the press that began with the Online Streaming Act, which insists upon Canadian content from all internet providers, and will culminate in the Online Safety Bill that is expected to be introduced in the fall.
This last bill is the most dangerous of all and will attempt to eradicate “disinformation” from Canada’s internet – the legislation fails to define that term on the basis that doing so might make it more difficult to prosecute alleged offenders.
But that will be the very point of legislation that is designed to be a gun in the head of not only media outlets but individual posters who could contravene the federal government’s whimsical notion of disinformation at any time for opposing any policy in any way.
That kind of information will not only be refused by Meta based on its Canadian content but banned in Canada as well for its subversive intent.
It is an Orwellian future indeed.
