Margaret Atwood, Elon Musk call out Trudeau’s ‘Orwellian’ legislation

Article content

Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who has been called the “prophet of dystopia,” is among the prominent voices, including Elon Musk, criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “Orwellian” online harms bill.

The Online Harms Act, known as Bill C-63, was tabled at the end of February to provide more protections for children and to stamp out online bullying and revenge porn. It also includes controversial new laws around hate speech, including up to life imprisonment for hate-crime offences.

Article content

Article content

Atwood took issue with the portion of the bill that says if a person “fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit” a hate crime, a judge can order their imprisonment, subject them to house arrest or insist they wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Reasonable grounds is a lower level of proof for a court to consider than the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt and in the court could punish someone even if they have yet to commit the allegedly hateful offence.

“The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” wrote Atwood on X last Friday.

The bill has come under intense criticism from civil liberties advocates and right-wing social media personalities.

Russell Brand, the British comedian who’s facing multiple allegations of sexual assault, and who styles himself as a YouTube culture warrior, asked in an X post: “Is Trudeau’s C-63 bill about protecting children or about labelling any speech he personally dislikes as hateful?”

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, formerly Twitter, called the potential life sentences for hate propaganda “insane” in a post to the social media site on Tuesday.

Article content

Atwood compared the bill to the letters that French monarch Louis XIV used to arbitrarily imprison people in the 18th century.

“If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” she wrote.

Article content

Article content

The lettres de cachet were orders signed by the king for a variety of purposes. Their most infamous usage, however, was to imprison suspects without a trial, have them shunted off to a convent or hospital or banish them to the colonies. The Marquis de Sade, the sadistic French activist and writer, was imprisoned repeatedly via lettres de cachet.

In her X post, Atwood shared a link to an article headlined “Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill” that was published in the conservative British magazine The Spectator.

“The legislation authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime,” the article states.

Justice Minister Arif Virani took issue with The Spectator’s characterization of the bill in a response posted to X, though he did not specify what he thought the article got wrong.

“Grateful for your interest in the Online Harms Act — which would keep kids safe, apply existing laws to the online world and address the rise in hate — but the article you’ve shared mischaracterizes the bill. Happy to discuss,” he wrote, along with a link to a story by The Canadian Press for “more context.”

Article content

In the article, Virani compares the new measure to existing peace bonds that can be sought in domestic violence cases and to prevent harm to children, terrorism or organized crime offences.

Virani said “safeguards,” including the need for evidence and the approval of a provincial attorney general, should address concerns and prevent the law from being abused.

Atwood compared the Trudeau government’s new law to the “thoughtcrimes” described in George Orwell’s 1984.

Article content

The English author coined the term “thoughtcrime” to describe the illegality of any thoughts that differ from the dominant ideology of Ingsoc, Orwell’s totalitarian political party. These thoughts don’t need to be written down or uttered to be considered criminal.

Thoughtcrime is an idea brought up regularly in discussions of censorship, but in the case of the online harms bill, a more apt literary comparison may be to Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report, in which an entire police bureaucracy — called “Precrime” — exists to arrest suspects before they get around to committing crimes, with the help of “precogs,” human mutants who can see into the future.

“In our society we have no major crimes,” says John Anderton, the captain of the Precrime department in The Minority Report, “but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.”

Some scholars argue efforts at a form of “pre-crime” policing have become less of a dystopian sci-fi future and more of a reality, particularly in the post-9/11 era.

“Anticipating crime and pre-empting would-be criminals are no longer confined to fantasy — it is now the rationale for profound and very real changes in contemporary approaches to security, crime and justice,” says the introduction to a 2015 scholarly study published in Routledge Frontiers of Criminal Justice. “Once pre-crime is established as a response to the most serious threats, the scene is set for it to migrate to more minor threats.”

Article content

Scholars often use the example of terrorist cells that are broken up before they actually commit an offence. In the case of the 2009 conviction of several of the Liberty City Seven, a Florida-based religious cult with plans to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI said the suspects hadn’t actually purchased explosives and described their capabilities as “aspirational rather than operational.” Guantanamo Bay, the infamous U.S. prison in Cuba where some prisoners have never been convicted of a crime, is also cited as an example.

When the bill was announced, bureaucrats used the example of someone who posts on social media that they plan to set a cross ablaze on the front lawn of a bi-racial couple and their five children. They family seeks a peace bond, and the judge concludes that the “family does have a reasonable fear, assessed objectively, that the defendant will commit a hate crime,” and so may prohibit the person from going within 100 metres of the family home for a year.

There’s no reason to suppose, however, that a peace bond couldn’t be sought for a potential hate crime offence of lesser magnitude, which has led to concern from civil liberties groups. While there are some safeguards in place, noted Josh DeHaas, a lawyer with the Canadian Constitution Federation, the bill could still have a chilling effect on free speech, even if those with unpopular opinions aren’t routinely punished for speaking or writing.

Article content

Canadians might simply shy away from speaking about controversial topics.

“Even if judges are cautious there’s still a huge chilling effect because people don’t know where the line is between legal speech and what the Supreme Court has said can be outlawed as criminal hate speech,” said DeHaas. “The point of these laws seems to be to just get people to not talk about controversial issues that they should be allowed to talk about, and that the Charter protects the right to discuss.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.

Article content