Canada's awful new proposals on “harmful” content | Hacker News Reader

Canada's awful new proposals on “harmful” content

pluralistic.net

I expect Canada to become a police state (its already on the way) and the brain drain to accelerate.

Bill C-10 and C-36 are horrific China emulating policies, loose definition of "hate speech", bypassing courts in favour of human rights tribunals with 100% conviction rates and no requirement of evidence, preventative enforcement by police.

With C-36, even saying something truthful, if causes perceived harm is a punishable offence.

People with money and skills will continue to move south.

Am Canadian. No offense to my southern neighbours, but if it ever comes time to move because of this, my direction won't be south.

I'll probably play twister and hope the direction it lands is a good one.

North American trends have not been great lately in general.

Maybe I'll finally get that European passport I've been putting off.

Same. Am Canadian, already south. This is not the place.

I'm looking at Northern Europe (good privacy laws) or Singapore (the rules are draconian, but very clear).

Netherlands, although not perfect still has some classical liberal ideals. Singapore is a "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", who in their right mind would go there.

And the death penalty is applicable to a tiny proportion of the population (disproportionately drug smugglers). It might not be your ideal, but please refrain from implying someone else is crazy for living there.

I lived in Eindhoven for three years. I found it very uncomfortable.

In what ways if I may ask?

Singapore would be a toss up in terms of privacy, but it is excellent and friendly for work-focused, law-abiding, norm-conforming kind of people. I don't mean it in a bad way.

Canada is 'becoming a police state' somehow, and the answer is to move to a bastion of freedom like Singapore. Just... I... ugh.

Yeah, I found that pretty questionable of a move as well.

On the opposite side of the political isle, you could observe the same thing, with a bunch of republicans loudly proclaiming on the internet their "plans" to move to Canada whenever Obama implemented Obamacare or tried to raise taxes on anything. Given that Canada has socialized healthcare and higher taxes, they looked just as ridiculous as people in this thread "planning" a move to Singapore due to Canada pushing anti-privacy laws. That's the taste of self-hating north americans for you.

A good quote in relation to this comes to mind: "There is no geographical solution to personal problems." Note: it doesn't mean that moving to another country due to your current one becoming unlivable is bad idea. But it seems weird to want to leave your country due to poor internet laws for a country with even worse internet laws and privacy. Which is what you can see with those mentions of Singapore, they didn't quite think it through at all. That's the taste of a group of self-hating north americans for you.

Yup I'm applying for an EU country passport myself (via family ties). Canada is a terrible place if you want to start a business, now house prices are getting insane and the recent encroachment on freedoms as well as lack of pushback from the population is pretty much the last straw for me. You can make more money and pay less taxes while having more affordable housing and better healthcare and education in a number of countries.

I wouldn't agree it's as bad as you make it sound.

However, I'm also not sure which other first world country has lower taxes, more "freedoms", higher salaries and cheap housing though.

The US is a very obvious example.

Take a look at housing affordability indexes, Canada is behind the EU average and certainly behind the top EU destinations. Also behind Australia, the UK, the US. Toronto and Vancouver are literally 2 of the most unaffordable places on the planet.

Also the US, UK and half the EU have lower taxes. The only places with comparable taxes have better healthcare and cheaper or free education.

Honestly, go to the US, UK, Australia, nearly any EU country and you'll find housing prices more in line with local salaries, better infrastructure, better services, more bang for your tax dollar, etc...

In what country can you give away 40% of your paycheck making less than 6 figures to then pay for dental work, prescriptions and education out of pocket while needing to make 3x the average salary to afford an average house?

> In what country can you give away 40% of your paycheck making less than 6 figures to then pay for dental work, prescriptions and education out of pocket while needing to make 3x the average salary to afford an average house?

Yeah, I dunno... Maybe there's a little bit of the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" effect going on here, but as an American, if I hadn't read the rest of your post, I would have sworn you were giving a brutally accurate description of the US in that last sentence.

I think a big difference between the US and Canada is that living in Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, etc... is way more desirable than living in Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa or Winnipeg...

In Canada, Toronto and Vancouver are the only real 'destinations' and they're SF and NYC expensive but with jobs that pay less than half...

A quick verification reveal that at 100k you pay 33% income tax in Quebec, and this is before any deductions. Education is very affordable at about 3k/year for university.

House are out hand tho, but this is more related to older generation greed than gouvernement..

The point is that EU countries with comparable taxes (or even slightly lower) that offer free dental, drugs and university.

And the house prices absolutely can be pinned on governments, we're one of the few countries globally that allows non residents to buy property.

As a European who immigrated to Canada I will respectfully disagree. Yes house prices are insane but this is true of much of the world now. However, Canada has a friendly society that is open to newcomers. The Europeans especially in the northern and western parts fancy themselves as tolerant peoples but this is just skin deep fakery. Don't fall for it. Even coming from a western country you will never be truly embraced as one of them. What sets Canada apart and the US to a lesser degree is that here if you make an effort you can actually integrate into the society and be considered a real Canadian even if you grew up elsewhere. By that I mean you will be invited to the Sunday game and your kids will be welcome to the sports team and treated as any other no matter skin color, accent or religion.

Also in Canada there is a certain level of maturity and compassion that most other societies do not have. This is well illustrated by the COVID vaccination figures and the whole response to this crisis as well as the previous ones.

No country is perfect but one would need to search long and hard to beat Canada.

Europe is a big place with a lot of cultural differences. You can get away with painting Canada (35mm people) with a broad brush, but you probably shouldn’t do broad comparisons to Europe as a whole (750mm people).

Yes, I will make a bit of an exception to the rule and say that Southern Europeans are maybe a bit warmer than the rest.

Eastern Europe though is just the meaner, cruder version of Western Europe with the xenophobia dialed up from 8 to 11.

I mean, there is no Canadian identity so in that sense we're welcoming. I grew up with family that spoke Ukrainian every day on one side and French on the other (and I have never lived in Quebec either). I have no idea what Canadian identity is despite having been born here. To me Canada is prairies, mountains, and small Ukrainian, French, Nordic and German enclaves/towns dotting the countryside. I can't relate to a 10th generation Canadian from Ontario.

Economically though things were way better 20 years ago. We're losing ground on every single economic metric. Almost all of my family has already left for the US or back to Europe. All of my classmates I kind of kept up with have left the country. A bunch of the immigrants I used to know left.

If you have a good job and a house I'm sure things are fine. You can live a good life here if you do have a good income stream and already own a home. You can live well anywhere. I'm currently in the rocky mountains and it is nice.

But just looking at things critically (since my partner and I are looking to settle down and have kids, she has an EU country passport, I have a Canadian one, we both have family everywhere, she just bought an investment property in Europe), our taxes are too high for the services we receive, wages are too low for the cost of living, and things are objectively worse than they were before.

I don’t have this frame of reference since taxes haven’t changed much since I arrived. And yes I have a tract house with a two car garage and hardwood floors. Nothing exuberant but I’m content. This is more than I could buy in the countries I used to live in. Yes, the European cities are awesome by comparison but unfortunately they are inhabited by snobby cliquey Europeans. I’d know because I used to be one of them.

Gotcha. Anyhow I did update my post a little as I thought about it. And for the record Canada isn't awful. Just kind of sad seeing it become a lot less affordable just in my lifetime (and I'm only a millennial!).

As a Canadian who has lived in Europe as well as America, I experienced more sameness than difference. As Saskia Sassen writes, global metropoles of elites all have the same culture really. You can get a craft beer everywhere now. As I write from St. Petersburg, I can say that it too fits this, but, there is a sense of alienation - in a good way - wherein people ..don't even imagine what you are thinking or judge what you are up to .. it's hard to describe - like they do in the West. For example, there are signs everywhere for masks but few wear them, and I do sometimes and sometimes I do not. No one really notices. Vs in the West there is a mask fetish as it stands for one's inner moral position or something. That space - the space we all inhabit most of the time of our own fantasies and stuff we say to ourselves - remains inviolate here. I am not saying anything else about the problems in this country which are legion and I don't want to wade into that here - but on a subjectival level, in the context of 2021, I feel calm here.

And when it gets worse there too, what then?

There seems to be a lot more pushback against government overreach in most EU countries as well as the US.

In Canada, most people applaud more government overreach. Just like everyone was more than happy to snitch on their neighbours during the pandemic.

>Just like everyone was more than happy to snitch on their neighbours during the pandemic.

This is what set me off the most in the start. Canada has an history of encouraging snitching (software piracy, zoning requirements, work permits, social gatherings). Hoe they think this is good for social cohesion is beyond me. I've only seen it fuel hatred between neighbors.

An elephant in the room is worth noting: democracies were built to avoid dystopias, yet there are growing trends of "it is better to leave" in long established democracies - "Contact your representative then" increasingly seems to no longer be an established, working idea.

Several factors may accompany this phenomenon: polarization; perceived failures in education¹; sometimes anti-centrism in the government; political (the purpose of the party) and societal (the affiliation of the citizen with peers) crisis of identity...

¹and Canada is the Country which promotes the relevant OECD studies

The path of least resistance in 2021 is different from that of 1951.

It is much cheaper now to move to another country and you can stay in frequent online contact with your kin. Back then, only serious oppression or poverty would force people to emigrate. If the problems were more tractable, people stayed and attempted to solve them in situ

Yes, but unfortunately, this "impotence option" means the relevant problems will get increasingly radicated.

Some of us are "on the run" in the hope for a better society like nomads looking for natural resources, while civilization was meant to be engineering a solution space in a collective plan, building, not staying someplace until it is spoilt.

It is a huge failure if the terms and conditions of the social contract have come to include «[practically] intractable problems».

You are probably right.

For example, within the EU, there is free movement of people and workforce, which sucks out the best and the most talented people from the peripheries like Andalusia or Bulgaria and lands them in the very prosperous regions of the north-west where they can find good and well-paying jobs.

This is a major problem that cannot be solved by spending extra money on building infrastructure in the peripheries. Infrastructure is fine, but a new highway won't heal anyone's cancer. Lack of doctors and engineers cannot be easily countered with development projects that tend to be mired in corruption.

Not even immigration can help that, because highly qualified immigrants won't stay in the periphery, and unqualified immigrants cannot provide the necessary work.

Could also be the absolute futility that "contact your representative" represents now? I think more and more people are realizing that change can't happen that way anymore, particularly as you can't even organize grass roots movements without media and social-media approval these days. The only things that can get critical mass now to enact change from a citizen perspective are popular causes that are essentially "approved". Good to guard against bad movements like say commies or nazis, but absolutely horrible for popular but "not in the right direction" movements.

> Bill C-10 and C-36 are horrific China emulating policies, loose definition of "hate speech", bypassing courts in favour of human rights tribunals with 100% conviction rates and no requirement of evidence, preventative enforcement by police.

Didn't the current premier's father do pretty much the same thing (suspend constitutional rights) in the 70's for... dubious reasons to say the least? He was also the man who paved the way to normalize relations with China and Cuba, two nations known for their respect of human rights.

> and the brain drain to accelerate.

On the hiring side I can tell it's happening.

> Didn't the current premier's father do pretty much the same thing (suspend constitutional rights) in the 70's

Yes, it was called the October Crisis.[1]

I don't think we should be judging Justin Trudeau for his father's actions, but we should judge him because when he was asked to apologize (on behalf of the government) for the October Crisis, he refused.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis

I think you both need to read a bit more, and also, listen to released (more than 50 years, such recordings must be released) recordings of private meetings at the time.

While no PM is perfect, when the Premier of Quebec phones the PM, and says (paraphrasing here) that "the separatists are everywhere, I don't know who to trust in the police, my own staff, they're all around me", while little girls are being killed by bombs, diplomats are being kidnapped and slaughtered, maybe declaring martial law isn't a completely bad response.

And when you see this at the start of the article:

The Premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, and the Mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, supported Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act

Well, come on....

I personally find the current laws being passed to be highly dangerous, and very disturbing, but trying to compare it acts taken against domestic terrorists, and lunatics, is a little wonky.

To give a bit more clarity....

Canada is not a police heavy state. And you get a premier, and mayor, saying the police cannot be trusted.

You cannot deploy troops domestically for police action in Canada, without the war measures act.

What would you do?

I find it best to ask such a question. What would you do?

You weren't there. You aren't even fully aware of the complete history, nor what the RCMP domestic terrorism unit said to the PM.

what do you do?

Not that, you may say. Well, arm chair quarterbacking seems all too easy, to me, and is often wrong.

Suspension of civil liberties in response to political unrest is not an uncommon response. We've seen it in the US. That doesn't make it right.

I'm not Canadian, so perhaps I shouldn't arm chair quarterback Canadian history, but you asked what I would do.

I'll respond to a similar scenario that hits a lot closer to home for me: would I have supported the detention of hundreds of Muslims after 9/11, without any evidence they'd committed a crime?

Absolutely not.

And on that basis I feel perfectly comfortable saying that the detention of 500 people in Quebec, without any evidence they'd committed a crime, was wrong.

---

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so I'll respond briefly here to the posts below:

> so democratic that we have allowed votes on separation over the years

Canada hadn't allowed such votes before the October Crisis. The first referendum on Quebec sovereignty was in 1980.

Holding a referendum in 1970 would have been preferable to the violence and the suspension of civil liberties, but only the [mostly anglophone] government could have called such a vote, and it wasn't done. Not then, and up to that time, not ever.

So when you say that the Quebecois were trying to separate "by force, without vote", remember that such a vote was not an option available to them.

The difference is, a province in a democratic nation, so democratic that we have allowed votes on separation over the years, yet we had terrorists deciding they're going to split a province, without vote, without democracy, by violence. That they intend to seize power by force.

It was a very, very tumultuous time. It was the civil war that almost was.

And with many civil wars, 99.99% of the population did not want violence, but would have been caught bleeding, dead on the street.

Was it right? I don't know. But I know enough to restate this ... how can I judge?

I'll add a little more here; context.

Were the muslims trying to break 1/5th of the landmass of the US, and 40% of the population, by for force, without vote?

Was there evidence those muslims were part of the group which caused 9/11? And that group held political prisoners, were blowing up random things, and threatening even more violence and death?

It is hard to find parallels here.

EDIT

Heh, I hit that filter just now...

Anyhow...

The votes for separation were not federal, but provincial. Quebec chose when to hold such votes, not Ottawa.

The premier at the time was french.

Also note that more than half our Prime Ministers have been french.

FLQ predates seperation votes. For all we know, without the October crisis, our democratic society might have gone the Spain/Catalonia way.

What predates what, does not imply causation though.

Without the FLQ, and moderate Quebeckers seeing lunatics and murderers, trying to usurpe democratic process, with extreme acts of violence, maybe things may have indeed been different.

But when moderates recall the acts of violent radicals, maybe they think "I'm not sure I want to vote for anything associated...", or "If they thought violence was OK then, what laws may they pass when in power?"

The stigma of the FLQ rubbed off on peaceful separatists for a long time...

There's a lot oF China comparison in that article too, but if you compare China to India, isn't it accurate to say that China's policies in this domain have actually prevented brain-drain and created a significant domestic industry, the exact opposite of what the author and your take suggests?

looking at the globe I don't really see a strong correlation between the success of technology, even directly in social media and freedom of expression.

Nowhere on the globe do 'digital sovereignty' style politics seem to benefit American companies. Just seems like an ideological take. I think it's pretty likely that a Canadian or European firewall would actually just promote Canadian or European operated business, because natives tend to have an edge when local values are baked into the system.

Maybe I’m not understanding your comment — are you saying that China’s censorship programs are helping to drive the local tech industry? That doesn’t sound right to me.

Yes that's what I'm saying. Specific example: Project Dragonfly effectively forced Google to leave the Chinese market out of domestic pressure. Chinese companies are significantly more apt at navigating Chinese regulatory environment than foreign companies, whose models are hardly compatible with it. It's incentivized Chinese firms to built an entirely parallel ecosystem.

  I expect Canada to become a police state (its already on the way)

The government added transgendered people as a protected class... it's the October Crisis all over again /s

It bears emphasizing that Hacker News will likely be forced to geoblock Canadian users if this legislative draft becomes law. It applies extraterritorially and the absurdly large administrative burden and financial penalties for noncompliance will make serving Canadian users untenable.

There is also enough ambiguity in the proposal to worry about the continuing availability of commercial unfiltered VPNs in Canada, at least in the longer term.

All my adult life I've seen the government make decisions I find not only suboptimal, but detrimental. More and more it feels like individuals have less say in what goes on, and that seems to show in vote participation and in how the government acts (like how they refuse consultation about a new controversial policy [1]).

1. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/rights-group-denounces-lack-of-c...

Well yeah, without free speech what you say is literally limited.

> This discrimination is sticky, because SESTA caused the shuttering of forums where sex workers advocated for their rights. The more marginalised the speaker, the worst it is – which is why the most heavily impacted group is trans women of colour.

This can't be understated. Who are these bills benefiting at the end of the day? Because the most marginalized people in my life — and those who are most often the targets of hate speech — are being pushed even further to the margins by legislation like this.

"Who are these bills benefiting at the end of the day?"

Politically active people who want to feel good about themselves?

"Who are these bills benefiting at the end of the day?"

Everyone’s future overlords.

The current situation with American megacorporations deciding unilaterally what is acceptable speech is also untenable.

Interesting that this is happening at the same moment Glenn Greenwald is promoting (Canada based) Rumble as a free-speech alternative to Youtube.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/strengthening-substack-jour...

I’d you are Canadian, please visit the link to find the feedback submission form and write your objections

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful...

This is China tightening the noose on another country.

Could you elaborate?

"Canada is considered harmful", "Australia is considered harmful", "UK is considered harmful" etc

Never thought I’d say this, but this makes me want actual Republicans now in Canada to fight such complete ordure.

You are on to something. Republicanism, as a political concept -- which is quite removed from today's Republican Party -- is the social equivalent of distributed computing. It will always be better than corrupted, centralized systems (misled democracies, theocracies, all forms of collectivism which have been tried, etc.)

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