Ditch the censorship proposal. Seek truth from your leader instead.

The Liberal convention should demand more from their leader rather than seeking to impose further restrictions on the dissemination of information.

This morning, as rank-and-file Liberal members gather in Ottawa for their political party’s policy convention, Canadian columnist Paul Wells wrote a scathing missive about a proposal that will be discussed at the convention over the weekend.

The policy reads as follows:

“BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Liberal Party of Canada….Request the Government explore options to hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.”

Gulp.

Well’s column does a great job of laying out the chilling nature of this proposal. I encourage you to read it. The upshot is that the Liberal membership seems to be proposing some government oversight mechanism that could require any content posted online to go through some kind of third-party certification process, with no details on what would be deemed acceptable content or who would be responsible for making that decision.

And on the heels of the Liberal’s highly contentious bills C11 and C18, which will have big impacts on what Canadians can see and watch online, the implications of this new proposal are already raising red flags for Canadian experts in the field. The new proposal, layered on top of these bills and the Liberal’s history of government-overseen media bailout programs are proving a pattern of obsession of controlling what Canadians can see, and say.

What hasn’t been written yet about this new proposal is the absurdity of the Liberals proposing it while their government is in the middle of a scandal wherein they are accused of sitting on information regarding threats to a sitting Canadian Member of Parliament. After the week the Liberals just had, it’s hard to fathom the Liberal government being given further say over what information can be published online. 

But it’s not just that issue that should give Liberals pause for thought before attempting to give Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government more powers as arbiters of truth. The Trudeau Liberal government has overseen a steep decline in the ability to access government records through Access to Information requests. It’s no exaggeration to say the Liberal government has earned a reputation for being opaque in its messaging and eroding trust in the information coming out of public institutions. (In February, I wrote a whole piece about the litany of ways the Trudeau Liberals have fallen away from this promise, you can read it here.)

But there could be a fix to these problems - a disgruntled Liberal party membership raising their voices and demanding that Trudeau make good on his 2015 promises for open and transparent government. Strong demands from the rank-and-file membership, tied to Trudeau’s ability to run as party leader in the next election, could be enough to end Trudeau’s tendency to hide information and deflect from addressing issues.

Seeing a Prime Minister who was open and truthful about current situations, even in tough situations, would go a lot further to aid Canadians in defending against the barrage of misinformation circulating online. It’s hard for conspiracy theories to take root when people with the most power in the country are honest and forthcoming with information and aren’t proven to be misleading time and time again. 

As artificial intelligence and deepfake technology further mess with the public’s ability to make informed decisions about the information they’re presented with, political parties should be finding ways to help Canadians educate themselves on how to evaluate information. They should also be setting an example from the top - which is why Liberal members should abandon their ill-thought-out proposal and instead hold their leader to account for his failures on this front.

At the very least, Liberal members attending their convention should acknowledge that when it comes to misinformation, the call is coming from inside the house.