Oh, Canada, what on earth are you doing?!

I ask because our neighbor to the north has been a favorite destination of mine for years. It is a splendid outdoor playground, has wonderful museums and great restaurants—and, for the most part, it’s almost as free as America. But the Great White North is turning darker by the day.

When freedom in the True North of Canada goes south, a pandemic ensues. 

When the body politic loses its freedom, free-thinkers are the next victims. 

Such is the nature of an illiberal pandemic born in Canada and soon to be borne by all Canadians who support free speech due to Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada.
If the Online Harms Act becomes law, a pandemic is inevitable.
Even if the Act fails, a pandemic is still possible; an outbreak is not improbable because the ideology responsible for the act is in the air.

The act has breached the House of Commons and escaped the walls of this laboratory of democracy. The act is set to hit us in The United States, too—the die is cast as they say.
 
Here is what you need to know: The act would create a “Digital Safety Commission” to police speech, creating a Ministry of Hate with the power to censor, fine, and prosecute anyone who says hateful things—whatever that definition turns out to be.

The guilty would have 24 hours to change their ways and erase their words or be punished to the full extent of the law for thought crimes—that’s right, thought crimes.
 
It is less important that every Canadian is guilty of impolite speech than that some Canadians are more guilty because of their politics. Conservatives and members of the Conservative Party, classical liberals and civil libertarians, critics and citizens, all are suspects, criminal suspects in the eyes of this Orwellian safety commission.

Of course, it goes without saying, but I will anyway: Anyone who opposes this commission is a threat to public safety.

Don’t think this doesn’t concern us. Anyone who doesn’t think that the loss of liberty on one side of the northern border does not lead to losses on our side is simply naïve.

Anyone who says the commission is not a form of illegal immigration or that a bad idea in one land does not lead to the enactment of a bad law in our land is just wrong.

Safety is the watchword of the enemies of liberty and the pretext for restrictions on civil liberties for the benefit of the state. Not your benefit, nor mine, but the collective power of government.

Safety is Canada’s newest and most dangerous export.
Safety without liberty secures nothing but the state’s monopoly on power, control, and, eventually, violence.

No doubt the irony is lost on Trudeau, as the act is incompatible with Canada’s other main export: comedy.

Leave it to a humorless politician or political hack to support a bill that would outlaw humor or at least increase the number of Canadian comics seeking asylum in the U.S.

Add this group to the roll call of names whose ranks include:
Jim Carrey, John Candy, Martin Short, Rick Moranis, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Dave Thomas, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Norm Macdonald.

Silence!

Censors cancel comedians because comedians mock censors.

Do we believe comedy is so sacred an art or that art is so sacred as to be free of censorship or political interference?
Do we believe censors are sensitive about how they wield power and so sensitive as to be sensible about how they exercise power?

Do we believe our beliefs are immune from censorship, that a commission in need of enemies has an endless supply of them in us?

Canada is the test market for political programming in the U.S.

Let me tell you this and make it clear: For every citizen who abhors censorship, there is a politician who endorses it.
For every citizen who values liberty, there is a politician who promises to defend it.

Are these promise-keepers true to their word?
Have they repealed the Patriot Act or acted like patriots?
Have they done anything to stop harming us, or are they instead harmful to the promulgation of online conversation?

Is the Online Harms Act not harmful to speech? Is the act not a sneak preview of our political future in which the unelected have the power to delete our words before the state deletes our existence?
 
This is the deep state defined and revealed!

Show me a commission whose great virtue is restraint, whose mission is its own obsolescence.

Show me an example that goes against Ronald Reagan’s dictum that government programs, once launched, never disappear.

A government agency is, as Reagan says, the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth.

The government is loath to relinquish power, and people in government are loath to surrender power.

This rule applies to all governments, whether democracies or dictatorships because the people who come together to form a government are all human. No one is without sin.

Agencies that sin against us are most sinful, however.
 
Any agency that corrupts and perverts language so as to prohibit speech sins against us.

In my estimation, any agency that “protects” us from using the English language—from using any language, for that matter—commits a grievous sin.
Is the Bible not a threat to tyranny?

Is the Declaration of Independence not a threat to homegrown tyrants?

Is the First Amendment not a threat to all tyrants?

Are we so indifferent as to outsource our liberty to those who are anything but indifferent about the words we use?
The censors among us look to see if they can import Canada’s newest brand of censorship. If a commission governs our words and says words are weapons of mass destruction, we will have to devise new words.

We must encrypt our words and have a cipher to unlock them.

We will have to speak like prisoners, as that is how we will sound.

We will have to act like prisoners, for that is how we will look.

We will have to live like prisoners, for that is what we will be.
 
Freedom may not survive in Canada; it may already be dead in the north, but it must never die in America.

Do not let safety destroy liberty, leaving us with nothing.
Never let the unjust have the last word.

Speak up and be heard!