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First published at True North on July 9, 2019.

It was only a few weeks ago that a Canadian parliamentary committee recommended legislation to regulate online speech and social media platforms. Less than a week ago, Tommy Robinson was found in contempt of court over broadcasting commentary on and coverage of now-convicted sex grooming gang members.

This week, Canada and the United Kingdom team up to promote press freedom to countries around the world.

The first ever Global Conference for Media Freedom kicks off Wednesday in London. The summit is co-hosted by Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, and her British counterpart Jeremy Hunt.

There are undoubtedly issues facing journalists working in conflict zones and fundamentally unfree countries, which will be addressed at the conference this week. But I hope the affair doesn’t manifest as Canada and the United Kingdom resting on their laurels while telling everyone else how to do better.

I’ve been in London since last week covering Robinson’s trial, though the real purpose of my visit was to cover this press freedom summit. True North has been approved to attend, though this project wouldn’t have been possible without the generous financial support of True North supporters, who crowdfunded my costs in their entirety. As I said when that campaign launched, it’s paramount to stand up for free speech when those inclined to censor keep moving the goal posts.

We saw this in last month’s report from the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, which recommended the House of Commons regulate online hate speech without defining it. And we’ve seen it from the government’s continued efforts to regulate the internet and digital publishers over “fake news” while Liberals accuse media coverage they don’t like of being fake news. Just a few weeks ago, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould threatened to shut down social media companies that don’t hew to the government’s definition of misinformation, the government’s digital charter defines that, in part, as content that sows societal tensions – which any rigorous debate could.

Press freedom is free speech, for nothing should distinguish the right of a journalist to speak out on issues of importance from that of any ordinary citizen. I hope the governments involved in putting this summit together realize that.

It’s important not to mistake the need to protect media freedom with the idea of protecting market viability, however.

A look at the agenda for this week’s conference shows its organizers – the Canadian and British governments – have put considerable emphasis on “media sustainability,” with sessions like “What can governments do to increase Media Sustainability?” and “Why public media matters” listed among the scheduled events.

What I’m hoping will emerge from this conference is a dedicated commitment to free speech that can be adopted by Canada and the United Kingdom, and hopefully other countries willing to embrace such a focus in their domestic policies. Though I also want to see how the panelists, politicians and media organizations involved see solutions to the stated issues emerging, particularly if those proposed remedies involve government regulation of speech.

First published at SteynOnline on July 8, 2019.

I’ve just come off of two days holed up in London’s Old Bailey. The famous court was once a beacon of justice, though you wouldn’t know it from what happened there to Tommy Robinson.

Robinson stood trial last week for the purported offence of filming sex groomers and gang rapists on their way into a Leeds courthouse last spring. During a 90-minute Facebook Live stream, he broadcast their arrivals and asked them how they felt about the forthcoming verdicts. Several responded with lewd comments about Robinson’s wife and mother.

Nevertheless, Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court, ruled that Robinson was causing them anxiety and distress, thereby interfering with justice and putting him in contempt of court.

He was also found guilty of filming in a manner “likely to impede justice,” though it had no such effect, and violating a reporting restriction on the proceedings – despite not being in the proceedings to report on them, and also despite a court officer’s admission that staff “failed” to post warnings of a publication ban in three required places, which Robinson and his team had checked beforehand.

The information Robinson shared about the defendants during his live stream came from prior news reports that are, to this day, accessible online. The Judicial College’s official guidelines on reporting restrictions say these orders cannot bar discussion of matters already in public domain. However, the barrister appointed by Her Majesty’s government to prosecute Robinson argued the law itself says something different.

Even if that were true, which isn’t clear, how is one to know they’re to do the opposite of what’s laid out in the document published by the government for the express purpose of directing those reporting and commenting on trials, as Robinson was? Unless, that is, one accepts a basic incompetence in the English judiciary, which isn’t that far-fetched, come to think of it.

The finding of guilt was a fitting end to what was always a politically motivated show trial. Last week’s hearing was ordered by Theresa May’s attorney general after Robinson’s previous conviction, for which he served 10 weeks of a 13 month prison sentence, was unanimously overturned by an appeals court.

Robinson had been arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced and jailed within a matter of five hours. I’m not even sure North Korea is so efficient. It just goes to show how the establishment is far more concerned with what you think than what you do.

The sex grooming gangsters Robinson filmed had been operating in Huddersfield with relative impunity for years, as countless others have in Rotherham, Rochdale, Bradford, and as many as 70 more English communities.

These cases were not simply flying under the radar of the state and the mainstream media, but operating in plain view, being met with politically correct silence and wilful ignorance.

Robinson threatened the establishment’s indifference, and has been its enemy ever since.

In doing so, he’s proven that if they want to get you, they’ll get you on something. It’s worth noting that he’s far from being a perfect hero. There are chapters in his past for which he’s legitimately had to answer, though the media’s criticisms have been solely about delegitimizing him rather than any noble pursuit of the truth.

He’s had milkshakes dumped on him. He faces threats of violence from Pakistani Muslims in his own hometown. And he’s been subject to numerous police visits over the years. But it’s contempt of court, which is supposed to be an administrative charge but has been treated as a criminal matter with him, that strings him up.

Adding insult to injury, Robinson’s bus, stationed outside the Old Bailey during the trial alongside the lawful rally of his supporters, was given a parking ticket. After slapping the ticket on the bus window, the beta male meter maid walked towards the bank of press cameras cackling and bragging, “Oh, I do love my jobs sometimes.”

Four Weddings and a Funeral? That was so 1994. Meet Three Contempt Charges and a Parking Ticket.

Being a bigoted, racist Islamophobe, as the media continuously (and falsely) charges, isn’t illegal. But parking a bus on a London street sure is, so let’s go with that.

It brings to mind the notorious jailing of Al Capone for tax evasion, which is far more insidious than the charming way it’s spoken of would suggest. Even so, Capone was actually guilty of the serious things the government couldn’t make the case on. Robinson isn’t. The state created a crime to suit its pre-selected defendant.

All the official voices you’d hope would pipe up in his defence have been silent. The 10 weeks he served in prison were predominantly in solitary, with him unable to eat because of threats he was getting from Muslim inmates working in the kitchen.

A Somali warlord who served a day of Robinson’s sentence would have had Amnesty International beating down the door of 10 Downing St.

He believed the wrong things and angered the wrong people. In 2019 Britain, that’s apparently a crime.

First published at SteynOnline on June 18, 2019.

“No monarch, no parliament, no government, and certainly no bureaucratic agency operating the pseudo-law of section 13 can claim jurisdiction over my right to think freely, to read freely, to speak freely and to argue freely.”

Those were the closing words of Mark Steyn’s testimony before parliamentarians on the Canadian House of Commons’ so-called justice and human rights committee just two weeks ago.

His call fell on deaf ears.

Yesterday, the justice committee tabled its report on “online hate” in Canada’s parliament.

The report laid out nine recommendations, one of which being that government should provide a “civil remedy for those who assert that their human rights have been violated under the Canadian Human Rights Act, irrespective of whether that violation happens online, in person, or in traditional print format. This remedy could take the form of reinstating the former section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, or implementing a provision analogous to the previous section 13 within the Canadian Human Rights Act, which accounts for the prevalence of hatred on social media.”

Once you strip away the mumbo jumbo bureaucrat-speak in there, it means the Canadian Liberals wish not only to revive section 13 from the dead, but to give it untold powers to force social media companies to purge online speech from whomever the government deems the hatemongers du jour.

This is apparent in another recommendation, that lawmakers “establish requirements for online platforms and Internet service providers with regards to how they monitor and address incidents of hate speech, and the need to remove all posts that would constitute online hatred in a timely manner.”

Of course there’s no provided definition for what “hate speech” is in the context of this desired law. Just a promise to figure it out later.

Before section 13’s repeal under the previous Conservative government, there was a quasi-judicial body to decide if online posts were sufficiently “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Those found guilty of violating this provision were slapped with a fine or gag order, while having none of the protections afforded to criminal defendants throughout the process.

This regime seems like child’s play compared to what’s proposed in this report–elimination of online speech by social media giants under the threat of government penalty. Not sure which I like better, actually: the opaque, unappealable hammer or the sham tribunal that at least pretends to give you a shot at beating the rap.

Mark detailed the battle against section 13 in his book, Lights Out. Though it appears that title is not entirely accurate in describing the online censorship mandate’s life. The law and its 100 per cent conviction rate were bad enough the first go ’round in how they targeted individual bloggers and forum posters. There is a particular insidiousness this time in the government wishing to turn tech companies into state enforcers.

Many of these companies censor their users without the heavy hand of government as it is. Holding them responsible for what individual users post removes the one defence for this digital oligarchy’s behavior—that private censorship is distinct from that emanating from the state.

I see a few probable outcomes here:

• Government bureaucrats will have a direct line into Facebook and Twitter, telling them when a Canadian’s account or post needs to be zapped.
• Activist groups representing the LGBTQ community, the Muslim community, the LGBTQ Muslim community, and the like (these are the groups most prominently represented on the justice committee’s witness list) will flag content they don’t like with social media giants, threatening to send it to the human rights police if the companies don’t remove it.
• Social media companies, not wishing to deal with the hassle of Canadian kangaroo courts, will just pre-emptively and broadly censor users who cut close to the arbitrary line at which free speech becomes “hate speech.”

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with engaging organizations representing minority interests. But giving them a trump card on defining online hate is a recipe for disaster. Especially when British police are already harassing people for misgendering trans individuals, proving the line between incivility and illegality has been obliterated.

This relationship between activist groups and Big Tech may even be part of the design here.

The justice committee’s recommendations also include dumping money into “civil society organizations” for the purposes of “data collection,” because “members of marginalized groups often feel more comfortable reporting hate incidents and hate crimes directly to civil society organizations which reflect their community rather than law enforcement officials.”

It’s less important for the law to be enforced by lawmen and lawwomen than it is for the diversity industry to be on the front lines of these things, evidently.

The good news is that with only days left in the parliamentary calendar, it’s unlikely this report will trigger legislation prior to October’s Canadian election. Though should the Liberals win re-election, this will serve as a roadmap to not only pushing the state back into the regulation of online speech, but doing so with an unprecedented mandate and unrivaled gusto.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the outcome of this committee’s study was determined before it even began. Of the nearly five dozen witnesses invited to testify, the number whose testimony focused on preserving free speech could be counted on one hand. Dozens specifically called for a restoration of section 13.

The document detailing the scope of the study cited the repeal of section 13 as leaving some sort of void in the law. In other words, this charade was based on a fundamentally false premise—that something is needed to regulate online speech in Canada.

If you ask legislators to find a solution, they’ll make up a problem to justify it.