The only online harm Trudeau wants to prevent is to Liberal ideology.

C-11, C-18 and now…..this.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently announced his Liberal government would be tabling legislation purportedly to protect Canadians against so-called "online harms" as soon as next week. But what those harms might be and by what means Mr. Trudeau's legislation will aim to stop them will be the real story once the bill is presented to Parliament.

If you are skeptical about what Mr. Trudeau might propose this week, you have good reason to be. When Mr. Trudeau's government introduced a proposal under the guise of "preventing online harm" in the lead-up to the 2019 general election, a wide array of civil society groups expressed significant concerns about the bill's potential not only to stifle free speech but to potentially criminalize whatever the government of the day deigned as wrong-thought.

Fast forward six years later to 2024, where Mr. Trudeau's controversial bills C-11 and C-18 have already led to potential government scrutiny of algorithms used to determine what Canadians see online and have led to bans on the presentation of news content on social media platforms. And while this newest bill has yet to be tabled, rumours in Ottawa this week suggest that it will include potentially controversial measures such as a redefined and broadened definition of hate speech, a new government department with mandates to oversee "digital safety," and new content restrictions for social media platforms to enforce on its users. Given the slippery slope that Mr. Trudeau's previous legislative forays into internet regulation have proven to be steep, any of these measures should be viewed with a lens of deep skepticism as to their true motives.

That’s because this new bill comes as Canada faces significant increases in crimes already covered by current laws. Many of the reasons fueling this trend have their roots in Mr. Trudeau's government's inability to enforce the law or in legislation that they introduced, which made it easier for those charged with crimes to be released on bail back into the community to re-offend. Stark and recent examples happened as alleged perpetrators of a Montreal-based car theft ring were released due to delays in the justice system and when a Calgary woman was stabbed by an ex-partner who was free in the community despite repeatedly violating the terms of a no-contact order. Current provisions around stalking are routinely not enforced.

Parliament should ask why Mr. Trudeau's government isn't first seeking to remedy these problems - and many others - by first taking care of issues like tightening bail conditions, filling judicial vacancies, and ensuring that law enforcement has the resources they need to bring perpetrators to justice as this new bill is tabled.

Before this week, one could have been forgiven for arguing the reason for the sudden introduction of legislation that has been panned in the past lay in the circumstances of Mr. Trudeau's freshly minted Justice Minister, Arif Virani. Long relegated to lesser ranks of Mr. Trudeau's caucus, Mr. Virani enters his post after the high profile ousters of his predecessors Jody Wilson Reybould and David Lametti, and at a time when the Liberal government looks severely long in the tooth. To date, Mr. Virani's most notable achievements in his time in office have been to serve as a regular defender of Mr. Trudeau's scandals on television talk panels. Mr. Virani has something to prove, and could see this legislation as an opportunity for a political legacy. But as his cabinet colleague Sean Fraser found out the hard way, when an inexperienced Minister takes the advice of bureaucrats and political staffers to push previously failed policy instead of first cleaning up the present dumpster fire they find themselves in, things often get worse, not better. (Of interest, a weird Order in Council posted today slightly punts Pascale St. Onge, Minister of Heritage, to the side in favour of Mr. Virani just as this bill is about to be tabled.)

But the real motivation for the sudden tabling of this legislation - long delayed - was likely expressed by Mr. Trudeau on Alberta radio talk show host Ryan Jespersen's show this week. In a weird, rambling interview, Mr. Trudeau related the need for the soon-to-be-tabled bill to the loss of legacy media's monopoly on distribution of news, which in turn has led to the loss of the public "actually agreeing on a common set of facts" as presented by these outlets. In positioning the legislation this way, Mr. Trudeau likely said the silent part out loud. For the Liberals, this legislation is likely to be less about preventing harm to the public and more about ensuring that the government regulates public discourse down to a "common set of facts" that doesn't question the hegemony of the Laurentien consensus. 

Now, there are legitimate gaps in current legislation regarding the dissemination of information that new technological advances have presented. For example, I've spoken extensively about updating Canada's intimate image distribution laws to account for deepfake technology. And there are still too many tragic incidents that involve minors being lured by online sexual predators. But given Mr. Trudeau's past overreaches into the governance of speech and failure to slow a plethora of other crimes across the country, the odds of his motives in this new legislation being pure or the legislation being focused, functional, and non-controversial are low.

Mr. Trudeau's track record of infantilizing the public and assuming that our ability to critically evaluate a host of information whose sources extend far beyond the reach of traditional outlets like the CBC is wrong. The same could be said of his unwavering faith in the ability of a government that can't keep track of how much it costs to build a simple app to police the speech of Canadians without gross intrusions into civil liberties.

So, as Mr. Trudeau's foray into speech governance is unveiled next week, we should all be asking ourselves whether the online harm Trudeau most wants to prevent is to his career and to Liberal party ideology.