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(LifeSiteNews) — Billionaire Tesla founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk has suggested that come a future election, Canadians should vote in a government that unlike that of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s, will protect “free speech.”

Musk made the comments during a recent Twitter space roundtable with Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, which took place on Monday. The pair’s conversation was geared around the handling of the COVID crisis by governments, as well as government censorship in general. 

“It’s easy for people to take for granted the system we have here in the United States, but it really doesn’t exist anywhere else, you know, not even in Canada,” said Musk. 

Musk then said as someone who is “half Canadian, you don’t have the free speech rights in Canada you have in the United States.” 

“And perhaps a new government in Canada at some point will enact those rights because it’s really important,” he added.  

Musk then said that “if we don’t protect free speech at all times, we don’t have a functioning democracy [and] if we don’t have a functioning democracy, nothing else matters.” 

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, was born in Saskatchewan but grew up in South Africa, where Elon was born. When Elon was 17, he and his mother obtained Canadian citizenship. For a time, he lived in Canada. 

As for Trudeau, in May his government passed the nation’s first-ever internet regulation law, Bill C-11, and has since made known its intention to continue down that path. 

In practice, Bill C-11 now mandates that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) oversee regulating online content on platforms such as YouTube and Netflix to ensure that such platforms are promoting content in accordance with a variety of CRTC guidelines. 

The bill itself has faced immense criticism for its implications on freedom of speech, to the point that even Big Tech giants YouTube and Apple, which both have a history of enacting their own forms of censorship on users, had previously urged the Senate to stall the bill. 

Last month, Trudeau’s Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez confirmed that the federal government by year’s end will try and bring forth a new version of its much-panned internet censorship bill, C-36, that would even more directly target online speech. 

Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre said the Trudeau Liberals were “power” hungry in getting the Senate to vote to agree to regulate Canada’s internet. He noted that although Bill C-11 passed, he will repeal it should he become prime minister. 

This is not the first time Musk has weighed in on Canadian politics, particularly in relation to freedom of speech.

In February, Musk had questioned why Canadian high school student Josh Alexander was arrested by police after trying to attend class following a suspension from his Catholic school for opposing gender ideology.

In April, he got into a row with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which gets over a billion a year in government funding, after he slapped the CBC’s Twitter account with a label that read “69 percent government-funded media.”

Also in April, Musk expressed surprise when he was informed of a radical pro-transgender bill introduced in Ontario that seeks to limit citizens’ ability to protest so-called drag queen story time shows targeting kids. 

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