OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — The leader of Canada’s far-left New Democratic Party (NDP) Jagmeet Singh said Wednesday that he will continue pushing the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to crack down on legal internet content.
Per Blacklock’s Reporter, Singh told reports that Trudeau’s Liberal government “has not done the job of making sure platforms are following the rules around making sure hate and misinformation are not being spread.”
Singh said that this puts the responsibility back on the “government to do what it should be doing.”
“We are going to continue to pressure the government to do this,” he added.
Singh then said that his party, of which there are only 25 elected MPs, would support a Trudeau bill that would make sure “social media platforms are adhering to proper guidelines around misinformation, around hate.”
“It has to be the government taking responsibility,” he insisted.
Currently, Trudeau’s minority Liberal government is being propped up by the NDP. The two parties have an agreement to keep Trudeau in power until 2025.
Singh made his internet censorship comments possibly knowing that the Trudeau Liberals already have a lapsed bill, C-36, that they could bring back which would censure legal internet content.
In fact, after Bill C-36 lapsed in parliament due to Trudeau’s calling of an election in the fall of 2021, Trudeau’s Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez went on to hint that a form of Bill C-36 could be coming back.
Critics of Bill C-36 warned at the time that the broadly-scoped act would lead to the censorship of bloggers and individual social media users, and could even open the door to giving police the power to “do something” about online “hate.”
Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that as recently as the fall of 2022, Trudeau has lamented the fact that social media content is hard to “counter.”
According to the now-revealed memo that contains said comments, in Trudeau’s view “social media” has allowed for a “new way to foment anger and hate that is different from anything we have seen before, [is] difficult to counter, and it is destabilizing our democracy.”
Despite Singh’s apparent frustration with the Liberals, Trudeau’s government did indeed recently fast-track one of its many internet censorship bills.
The fast-tracked bill, C-18 – also called the “Online News Act” – would, if passed, force social media companies to pay Canadian legacy media for news content shared on their platforms.
The bill is of particular concern for independent media outlets, who say it would “kill” new media and “entrench” government-funded outlets.
Yet another internet regulation bill, Bill C-11, which has likewise faced immense criticism for its implications on freedom of speech, recently passed on to its third and final reading in the Senate.
Critics have long warned that Bill C-11 will stifle free speech online, and even Big Tech giants YouTube and Apple, who both have a history of censorship, have urged the Senate to stall the passing of the bill.