Canada's Globe and Mail claims consequence of 'excessive free speech' is more Trump-like candidates

In the morning after the defeat of a Conservative Party non-confidence vote to defeat the Trudeau government over its hated carbon tax, a Globe and Mail opinion piece sounding the alarm about “excessive free speech” seems even more outrageously egregious in its attack on essential liberties in Canada.

Lawrence Martin’s “Excessive free speech is breeding ground for more Trumps” is not just emblematic of the mainstream media’s fear of free speech in Canada, it might well be read in the affirmative — that Canadians could enjoy all the excessive free speech that their Charter of Rights is supposed to enshrine and that Canada could become a “breeding ground for more Trumps” or anyone who believes free speech is not a gift from the Trudeau government that can be taken away.

That was certainly not the author’s intention, because Martin finds Trump as toxic and nauseous as all this excessive free speech that is contaminating the media discourse.

To read Martin’s diatribe against free speech is to read the lament of a legacy media that has been disempowered from its once lofty position of creating and sustaining public opinion. Columnists like Martin and even newspapers like The Globe and Mail don’t matter anymore, or at least matter as much as they once did when a handful of columnists told Canadians what they should espouse as good stewards of the Liberal state.

We can hear the resentment and anger in Martin’s piece as he eviscerates populism and deplores the fact that the elites have lost control of managing what the public thinks.

“When other communications revolutions like the printing press, radio and television came along, they were still largely controlled by the elites. But when the internet came along regulatory bodies like Canada CRTC backed off. It was open season for anything that anyone wanted to put out. No license needed, no identity verification. What a far cry from the days when the masses had no outlet save things like man on the street interviews or letters to the editor, or protest placards. We moved from one extreme to the other," Martin writes.

“The masses were finally weaponized, not with arms, but with a communications instrument that empowered them against the establishment forces. Like they had never been empowered before. The change represented one of the history's significant power shifts with the multitudes given a megaphone. What a wonderful democratic advance it was, but it came with a rather massive irony. Free speech became as much a slayer of democracy as an enabler.”

God help us now that these deplorable masses have been weaponized by the internet.

This is precisely why journalists like Martin are not opposing the Online Harms Act; responding to his critics on X, Martin suggests “majorities of Canadians and Americans want more regulation of the internet.”

So instead of joining in the fight to stop Trudeau’s online censorship and the truly odious Online Harms Act, the media elite are fretting about something called “excessive free speech” without even bothering to define when free speech becomes excessive or even to contemplate the utter stupidity of such a statement.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was concerned about excessive free speech in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 because all that diversity of opinion undermined the Fuhrer’s desire to unite the German community into one cohesive block that could recite the talking points. There was no excessive free speech in the Soviet Union either, because that would have interfered with the communist program or perhaps even revealed that dictator Joseph Stalin was murdering millions of Russians and Ukrainians as part of that program.

The media elite hate former President Donald Trump because he doesn’t just deride the fake news of the mainstream media, he laughs at it, he ridicules it. He tells Americans that they don’t have to be captive to the Democratic narrative insidiously peddled by MSNBC and The New York Times; he tells the masses that their opinions matter.

Martin’s mania about the imagined dangers of Trump is reminiscent of how Trudeau’s former attorney general and justice minister, David Lametti, responded to the Freedom Convoy in February 2022. This elite law professor actually said the trucker protesters were domestic terrorists. Not only that, he said they and anyone who supported their cause should not question why their bank accounts should be frozen.

“If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried,” Lametti told CTV.

So why is The Globe and Mail obsessing about excessive free speech and not about the Online Harms Act? If you want to talk about excessive, this legislation is excessive: it could mean a life sentence for violating something called a “hate crime offense” or house arrest for thought crimes. We are literally walking into the serfdom imagined by George Orwell in 1984 and the acolytes of the Liberal Party are talking about how this bill is about “more regulation of the internet” or protecting children.

So let us hope that Canada continues to enjoy a measure of excessive free speech, although that is becoming increasingly evanescent as Trudeau continues to erode that basic liberty. If we can breed some more Trumps in this country, it might mean fewer politicians like Trudeau and less intrusion from supercilious, know-it-all columnists who want to strangle the free speech that should be the foundation of their livelihood.