In Trudeau’s Canada, You Can Be Imprisoned Just for Thinking

When we look around at places like New Zealand and Scotland, there seems to be a bizarre competition to see which country can pass the most fascist laws and imitate George Orwell’s dystopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four in the least amount of time.

Scotland has imposed so-called hate crime laws that subject you to imprisonment for exercising free speech if it happens to offend a long list of protected parties. No actual violence or physical act is needed. If you simply say the wrong thing, you can be arrested, fined and imprisoned for “inciting hate.”

A similar law has just passed in Ireland. The Polish government wants to pass a law that makes it a crime to “defame” members of the LBGT community. Of course, the term “defame” is ill-defined and is in the eye of the beholder. Any choice of words, even if derogatory or hurtful by some standard, should be protected by free speech provisions. But in Poland, it may soon land you in jail.

I’ve never understood hate crime laws anyway (and I’m a lawyer). If you murder someone, it’s murder. If you assault someone, it’s assault. Subject to due process of law, you should go to jail if convicted or perhaps face capital punishment. Prosecutors have to show intent, but what does “hate” have to do with it?

The perpetrator may, in fact, hate the victim, but that’s not the crime. The crime is assault or murder. Those crimes have been considered crimes for millennia. Adding hate to the definition just blurs the line between thought and action in ways that make it easier for fascist governments to target political enemies with flimsy allegations of “hate” when no actions were involved.

The most egregious example of this trend toward thought crimes is Canada. The chief neo-fascist there is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He has proposed a law called the Online Harms Bill that expands the definition of “discrimination” to include online speech “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group.”

OK. What exactly does this law mean by “foment?” Who defines “vilification” or “detestation?” What’s the definition of “group?” All of these questions will be answered by a new Digital Safety Commission, which will not be bound by “any technical or legal rules of evidence.”

If accused, you can be ordered to pay $20,000 to any “victim” and $50,000 to the state with no limit on how many victims might crawl out of the woodwork. This is practically an invitation for grifters and activists to attack political enemies with fake claims of having been subject to “detestation.”

It gets worse.

If a court believes you are likely to commit a “hate crime” under this law, you can be placed under house arrest and held in isolation. Just thinking the wrong thing, as imagined by an unaccountable magistrate, is enough to put you under house arrest. This is actually worse than what the Thought Police did in Orwell’s novel.

My advice is to stay out of Canada. If you have to go there, be careful not to think.

Corporate leaders and institutional fiduciaries looking to incorporate state of the art predictive analytics to their risk mitigation and strategic analysis should click the link to learn more about Raven Predictive Analytics®.