I testified at the Senate yesterday on the "Combatting Hate" Bill, which impacts expressive rights. I also listened to every other panel discussion on this Bill, which was very illuminating and quite disturbing. Canada is on a precipice. We are a country of atomized groups simultaneously jockeying to be seen as the most oppressed, while also wielding considerable power as sacralized identities to push for restrictions on the expression of others — not just "hate", but also offence, dissent, and even opposing facts. Having listened to many of the other speeches before I prepared mine, I took the opportunity to speak against criminalizing "denialism". That would be a terrible path for Canada to take — even worse than the one we're already on. Criminal law cannot manufacture harmony (generously assuming that is what the activists want); only open debate and dialogue can.

I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this. The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home. There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered. What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business. Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not. This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy. That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids. What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes. Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming? No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

This is the point. Same will happen in all countries that will make social media age restrictions. “Won’t someone think of the children” is usually not about the children

I’ll be working on a post to unpack the key elements of Bill C-36, but the big story is the stripping of the Privacy Commissioner's powers over private-sector privacy law after 25 years. The Digital Safety Commission (now Digital Safety and Data Protection Commission of Canada) will now be responsible for both regulating online speech and content moderation across the country's largest platforms and overseeing how every organization in Canada collects, uses, and discloses personal information. There is no precedent in Canada for this kind of digital super-regulator.

Banning social media for teenagers only puts them in greater danger. Teens are forced to switch to VPNs — and unlock far worse illegal content. We’ve seen this before. When the Russian government banned Telegram, 95% of Russian teenagers kept using it. They just moved to VPNs.

Whatever is going on in the world, Thomas Sowell always got there first and summed it up perfectly.

The tech industry should have a solidarity regime in place for things like this. Pass some stupid, privacy-invasive law, they immediately all pull out.

John Stuart Mill nailed Canada’s problem. A free country cannot survive when one side controls the schools, media, bureaucracy, courts, and cultural institutions, then treats every serious objection as misinformation, hate, or extremism. If your argument cannot survive open debate, it is not wisdom. It is weakness wearing a government badge. Canada’s problem is not that Canadians disagree. Healthy countries disagree. The problem is that too many people in power no longer think they should have to answer the other side. They confuse slogans with thought and moral posing with truth. Mill understood what our political class has forgotten: you do not even understand your own position until you can state the opposing case honestly and refute it fairly. Canada needs more of that again. Less censorship. Less sneering. Less expert class arrogance. More courage. More debate. More freedom.

Capitalism is a system so good that even the communists can become millionaires

Il y a un truc qui me fascine. C'est qu'Elon soit aussi seul. Des milliers de milliardaires sur cette planète. Des gens qui ont assez d'argent pour ne plus jamais rien craindre de personne. Et un seul ouvre sa gueule. Il existe une expérience fascinante en éthologie : la boîte des rats de Didier Desor. On met six rats dans une cage. Pour manger, il faut plonger dans un tunnel immergé et rapporter les croquettes. Très vite, une structure émerge toute seule : deux exploiteurs qui ne plongent jamais et volent la nourriture des autres, deux exploités qui plongent et se font racketter, un souffre-douleur qui ramasse les miettes. Et un seul autonome. Le rat qui plonge lui-même, rapporte sa propre nourriture, la défend, et ne se soumet à personne. Le plus troublant : peu importe la composition du groupe. Tu remets six exploiteurs ensemble, la même structure se reforme. Tu remets six autonomes ensemble, pareil. Comme s'il existait une loi naturelle qui fixe la proportion de courage disponible dans une population. Une loi de la paire de couilles, distribuée par la nature avec une avarice remarquable. Dans la boîte des rats à milliardaires, Elon est le seul autonome. Les autres ont les mêmes moyens que lui. Souvent les mêmes opinions que lui. C'est ça le plus fascinant : en privé, la grande majorité des milliardaires sont d'accord avec Elon. Sur la liberté d'expression, sur la dérive idéologique des médias, sur le wokisme, sur tout. Ils le disent à voix basse dans les dîners, ils l'écrivent dans des messages privés, ils hochent la tête. Et puis ils retournent financer les ONG qui les protègent, sponsoriser les médias qui les épargnent, signer les tribunes qui les dédouanent. Ils plongent, rapportent les croquettes, et se laissent racketter par la meute. Avec des centaines de milliards sur le compte. L'argent ne donne pas le courage. Il révèle juste combien tu en avais au départ. Un seul rat a refusé le jeu. Il a dit "go fuck yourself" aux exploiteurs devant le monde entier, il a accepté de perdre des milliards, et trois ans plus tard il est le premier trillionnaire de l'histoire. La nature est bien faite : c'est toujours le rat autonome qui finit par posséder la boîte.

Bill #C34 would appoint “digital safety commission” with powers to order Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat & other social media platforms to remove “categories of harmful content”, including posts deemed “violent extremism.” Bill defines violent extremism as “an act that causes property damage that is committed for a political, religious or ideological purpose” such as “undermining, weakening or destroying fundamental institutions or political, economic or social stability…”

These are the exact same people who made “countering hate” their entire identity. They were the first to plant “Hate Has No Place Here” signs on their lawns. They insist “hate speech isn’t free speech.” They proudly fund groups like Hope Not Hate and Stop AAPI Hate They still chant “Love Trumps Hate” like it’s scripture. Yet here they are, in the pages of The Globe and Mail, publishing a guide on “how to properly hate” Elon Musk for the crime of building SpaceX into a company that could make him the world’s first trillionaire. Proof positive that their “anti-hate” crusade was never about hate. They are, in reality, full of hate. It was always about who they’re allowed to hate

Correction: Most Authoritarian. • C-8: Without a court order, govt can cut you off from the internet • C-9: Criminalizes speech online • C-22: Keep a year of metadata of everything you do online • C-34: Requires ID checks to use social media

For instance, @MarcMillerVM’s own fake-news posts about “unmarked graves,” which resulted in the arson of dozens of places of worship across Canada? It seems that this falls into the category of undermining “social stability,” right Marc?

"The classical liberals were right. Nothing good has come of pressuring institutions to discriminate based on race, even if they thought it was for social justice. It just took a few years for the new policy of explicit institutional racism to be noticed and internalised, in combination with a concurrent dizzying increase in immigration, and for the other shoe to drop." Yes, it was obvious (or should have been) at least a decade ago that reactionary tribalism would be the result. Still, we were marched down the "equity" path like lemmings to the cliff.

Feds introduce legislation to restrict social media for minors and create new digital safety commission nationalpost.com/news/canada…

DEI is a toxic mix of white saviour complex, white guilt and cultural Marxism. DEI negates centuries of progress by denying the individual *and* their agency. DEI forcibly ascribes traits to people that they do not possess and crimes that they did not commit. DEI is a cancer.

Do you have questions on the kids' social media ban? I've got answers: Why is it bad policy? Does the ban actually work? Doesn’t polling show public support for a ban? Why is mandated age verification a privacy risk? Is the ban really “temporary"? michaelgeist.ca/2026/06/ever…

I love how libs are like, "don't you want society to be inclusive," and it's like, yeah, that's what individualism and capitalism are, you can be a weirdo and so long as you contribute to society, this is literally the only system in the world where nobody cares, or at least a lot fewer care than you'd find anywhere else. And you're trying to destroy that, you idiots. And why do they do it? Why? Because they don't like the "so long as you contribute to society" part. They want for there to be no conditions to belonging to civilized society. But ah, there are conditions for them: to believe what they believe. And to believe it strongly. Because it goes so powerfully against the grain of a functioning Western society that you have to believe it strongly to ignore the catastrophic damage it does. And soon, there are conditions for belonging to their little civilized society, namely, to believe all the same things they do, to behave the same way they do, to belong to their exclusive little circles through absolute ideological orthodoxy or by keeping any disagreements to yourself or get destroyed. And suddenly they've made the most intolerant little enclaves where nothing is tolerated except ideological fervor for the tribe, and nothing is inclusive at all, all in the name of inclusion. And then because status depends on group signaling rather than merit -- you know, the whole "so long as you contribute to society" part -- the economy dies. Progress dies. Innovation dies. Replaced by tribal signaling and zero-sum mentality and pillaging. And then the West dies. It does not progress to become some greater version of itself. It regresses into barbarism, into what most other civilizations apart from the West have always been for eternity. And I just say fuck that.

Reports are circulating that the Canadian government plans to introduce regulations banning social media for minors. We believe there is a better way. Regulating legal online content risks excessive state control, not just for children, but for all Canadians. Age-verification systems would force adults to hand over ID to access websites, creating a vehicle for broader censorship. These rules would also limit young people’s freedom of expression, the very generation we’re counting on to carry the free speech torch forward. At the same time, we treasure our youth and recognize the need to protect them from genuine harm. There are better solutions than a blanket government ban. Here are a few: - Educating parents and youth on responsible social media use and built-in controls; - Providing practical, device-level tools for parents; - Limiting device access in controlled environments like schools; - Requiring platforms to adopt age-appropriate design standards by default (e.g., limiting addictive features); - Disabling algorithmic feeds for under-16s, defaulting to chronological only. There are many creative and effective alternatives to heavy-handed digital ID requirements, if that is indeed the government’s plan. What do you think? Should the government ban social media for minors, or is there a better, freer path forward?

Seconded!