Terence Corcoran: Steven Guilbeault’s platform should be taken down

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The Trudeau Liberal government is obsessed with the two greatest industrial complexes of our time, Big Oil and Big Tech. Both must be brought down to ground level, an aggressive federal policy agenda personified by Steven Guilbeault, officially federal minister of Canadian heritage but unofficially a leading intellectual warrior in the battle against the two giant industrial sectors.

As one of Quebec’s leading environmental activists, the founder of Équiterre and a Greenpeace operative, Guilbeault is an influential proponent of Ottawa’s net-zero campaign to end Canada’s fossil fuel industry. You can read all about his environmental exploits in a glowing Wikipedia bio that appears to have been written by an underling.

But it is as heritage minister that Guilbeault is now establishing a record as the Trudeau government’s commander-in-chief in a campaign to rein in Big Tech.

Until now, not enough attention has been paid to the Liberal’s escalating moves to shake down the technology companies and impose draconian state regulation on the transmission of news and information, entertainment and all manner of electronic communication. Call it net zero for the internet.

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After months of official obscurantism, misrepresentations and dodgy statements, the reality of Guilbeault’s scheme to expand federal control over the internet came into sharp focus late last Friday — official bury-the-news time in Ottawa — when Liberal MPs rubber-stamped an amendment to Bill C-10, the government’s proposed update of the Broadcasting Act. The amendment would effectively give Ottawa, through the CRTC or via other routes, the power to regulate such internet services such as Netflix, YouTube, iTunes and others. In effect, government would have the potential authority to regulate all personal and commercial content that moves over the internet.

Most readers would be unaware of Bill C-10, in part because too few in the media have been tracking it since it was introduced last November. When tabled, it was seen as part of a plan to require online companies to pay $800 million a year for Canadian content. In December, one columnist laced into the proposed legislation, calling it “one of the most radical expansions of state regulation in Canadian history.”

Few heeded the warning, with a couple of notable exceptions. The University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist has been condemning Bill C-10 as a multi-faceted travesty that favours the usual beneficiaries of Canadian cultural content policies but threatens media freedom. In one of his early Bill C-10 “Broadcasting Act Blunders” blog posts, Geist wrote: “The potential scope of news sites regulation is vast, covering everything from the Rebel (which sells video subscriptions) to podcast networks like Canadaland.” Even the New York Times and Amazon Prime could be regulated when they supply video news content.

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It is Geist who drew attention last Friday to the government’s latest fiddle with Bill C-10. In “Freedom of Expression Under Attack,” Geist crisply described the impact of the new amendment. “Bill C-10 adopts the position that a regulator sets the rules for free speech online.” The bill, he added, represented “an unconscionable attack on the free expression rights of Canadians. It must be defeated.”

Unfortunately, Bill C-10 isn’t the only element in the Trudeau-Guilbeault campaign to bring the internet under greater government control. Guilbeault is the lead minister on the government’s plan to extort cash out of Big Tech. He has also been touring around delivering speeches in which he promises to bring in some form of censorship. Sharing newslinks on Facebook, he has said, is immoral.

A story from Blacklock’s Reporter last week quoted Guilbeault from a speech to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in which he promised legislation that would promote “content moderation.” The legislation, coming within weeks, he said, would give the government wide powers. “Once a publication is flagged, it will have to be taken down within 24 hours of having it being flagged. There are not a lot of countries that are doing that right now,” he added. In Guilbeault’s world, flagging and taking down — Chinese Communist style — would apparently be a sign of integrity.

Guilbeault apparently made similar comments a week earlier. “Could we envision having blocking orders? Maybe,” he said in a presentation to a meeting of Canada 2020, especially if such posts might “undermine Canada’s social cohesion.”

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The idea that Guilbeault is out of control has been circulating with greater frequency in recent weeks. Former CRTC commissioner Timothy Denton wrote in the Financial Post last month that the new Broadcasting Act is “clearly intended to allow speech control at the government’s discretion.“

Guilbeault’s grand ambitions to seize control of Big Tech and expand government involvement in content was telegraphed last February in an interview with Martin Patriquin at The Logic. The promised intrusions on top of Bill C-10 are now being brought forward by the minister. Guilbeault has promised a new regulator to oversee the actions of online platforms, with the ability to audit what platforms are doing, as well as enforce what he called a “Canadian code of conduct.” It would be able to levy “very, very important fines” against companies that don’t comply with it.

Guilbeault has described Big Tech companies as “behemoths” that are a threat to Canada, its culture and its freedoms. The real behemoth is government, and it’s time to review the minister’s platform and take it down.

Financial Post

• Email: tcorcoran@postmedia.com | Twitter: terencecorcoran