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Comment by StanislavPetrov | Hacker News Reader

If you asked me 25 years ago which country would slide down the toilet to becoming authoritarian fastest, I never would have guessed it would have been Canada.

>The bill, introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani, would also raise penalties for hate-propaganda offences from five years to life imprisonment for advocating genocide.

One need only look at the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine to see how ridiculous this new law is. Supporters of both sides accuse the other of "advocating genocide" by offering any sort of rhetorical support at all. You should have absolutely no doubt that opposing whatever war or military conflict Canada or NATO is involved with at the moment will be interpreted by the authoritarian Canadian regime as, "advocating genocide", no matter what actual verbiage is used. Nobody who believes in the semblance of a free society can support such a draconian law.

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This take is wild to me. The USA is currently in the midst of discourse about:

Banning abortion, making it criminal/murder to drop IVF eggs, burning/banning books in election ads, making it an offense to even mention your sexuality or home life in some situations, coddling Russia as if they're the good guys, electing a guy who clearly tried to engineer a coup, making it impossible to even identify as a trans person because of the social stigma (again).

But generally the people for all of the above (or parts of it) are crying murder when Canada tries to say maybe it's an offense to advocate for genocide and other such things online. The cases that happen with these laws won't be Trudeau's cronies coming up and taking you away in a van, they will go before perfectly reasonable judges who will rule if you were doing enough harm to warrant jail time. If the courts were stacked in the way the USA's have been I might be worried, luckily we have a better system up here for such things.

Sounds like you're believing far too much of what you read on social media, to be honest.

You’re grossly misinformed. Advocating genocide is already a crime in Canada. This just makes it more explicit in an online context since the laws around this were created pre-internet.

And given that this is a law that has existed for literally decades, can you cite a single example of where it has been misused to stifle free-speech?

Name one.

(That’s not to say we shouldn’t be keeping a close eye on these things of course, but you’re yelling fire in a theatre where there isn’t even smoke. Give me a break)

Certainly the Trudeau regime has never abused its power to deprive Canadian citizens of their rights and freedoms, and would never use this new, draconian law to do it again.

https://torontosun.com/news/national/ottawa-appeals-court-de...

Exercising “rights and freedoms” isn’t what the people in that protest were doing. Breaking that up was the right thing to do.

Federal court disagrees with you. You just happen to not like what they were protesting.

I lived in Ottawa at the time these protests were going on. These people weren’t there to protest. They were there to antagonize.

Nice pivot attempt.

I asked for an example of existing laws against inciting genocide being used to stifle free speech. Because you made the claim it was inevitable... I pointed out that it's never happened even though those laws have existed for decades.

So, do you have something to back up your claim or not? Or are you just regurgitating right-wing fear-mongering nonsense without any independent thought?

As for the Ottawa protest; It's curious you invoked that protest and not any one of dozens of First Nations protests occupying various spaces over the past two decades. All of those people were also forcefully removed at gunpoint (See also: dozens of similar situations in the USA like Standing Rock).

It's different when it's white people whose views align with your own I guess, eh?

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