The Canadian Press article A lot of Canadians have been calling for more online freedom.
The Internet is a public space that’s not open to all of us, said former Supreme Court justice Anne Mearns in a 2014 Supreme Court of Canada decision.
That’s why Canadians love to complain about their government.
But freedom of speech isn’t just a right to talk, write and publish online.
It’s also a right that we take for granted in our daily lives, said University of Waterloo law professor Stephen Gough in a blog post.
And it’s what makes free speech such an important part of our daily life, he said.
“If we don’t have a free and open Internet, we can’t have our lives as we know them,” he said, adding that freedom of expression is an essential part of democracy.
I think it’s an important issue to be talking about, Gough said.
It is a real issue in terms of what we’re learning about the value of free speech.
A couple of years ago, Canadian blogger Jameson Loewentz published a column that challenged the legitimacy of the Conservatives’ government’s $8 billion plan to privatize Canadian Hydro.
He wrote that if the Liberals were serious about protecting the free flow of information, they would privatize the utility, which would mean the government would give away some of its assets.
Loewentts column attracted national attention and he was eventually fired from his job at CBC News.
He later apologized to the company and offered to take back the column if the company would allow him to apologize and publish it on his website.
In his 2015 book, the Conservative Party Platform, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that “free speech is the bedrock of our democratic society.”
He said that the Conservative government would protect free speech because “if the government doesn’t, then we’re not going to be a democratic society.
If we don, then free speech becomes an excuse to silence dissent.”
But it’s been three years since Loewents column and Canada is nowhere near as free as it was before the Conservative Platform.
It is now easier to post or tweet hateful content online than it was a few years ago.
One of the things that keeps Canadians up at night is the increasing number of hate crimes and the spread of misinformation online, said Michael Gove, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
This is happening even before we even have a federal election.
We are seeing that hate is being used as a weapon of political repression.””
We’re seeing this rise in hate crimes being reported, being committed and happening online.
We are seeing that hate is being used as a weapon of political repression.”
I think the more hate we see, the more it is a weapon against us, he added.
Gough believes the government’s strategy is to try to limit the online free flow.
It does not work.
He also said the government should stop targeting social media platforms and instead focus on more traditional media, such as newspapers and radio stations.
At the same time, Gove is worried that some hate speech is being reported on these platforms and that this could be used to justify the government to prosecute journalists for spreading inaccurate information online.
The problem is that hate speech has become so normalized, it has become almost a normal part of society.
This is not something that happens only in certain parts of the world, said Gough.
He believes the Harper government is trying to do more to curtail the expression of hateful speech online, but it is doing so by criminalizing it and trying to silence it.
The Government of Canada is not alone in its efforts to limit free speech and to limit speech online.
In fact, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled in 2015 that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was responsible for publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that was considered defamatory.
The ruling led to a public apology from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
The Federal Court’s ruling made it clear that the CBC and other news organizations must not be used as tools to suppress dissent.
But it did not mean that they have to stop reporting news and opinion that they believe is inaccurate, Gouts opined.