On Tuesday night America This Week co-host Walter Kirn and I were texting, as we often do at the end of busy news days. He sent this:

The Trudeau regime has introduced an Orwellian new law called the Online Harms Bill C-63, which will give police the power to retroactively search the Internet for ‘hate speech’ violations and arrest offenders, even if the offence occurred before the law existed.
This new bill is… pic.twitter.com/4ROF332xR9

— Camus (@newstart_2024) May 7, 2024

I remembered seeing something about Trudeau’s digital censorship bill on Michael Shellengerger’s Public site earlier this year, but the idea of police arresting people on the basis of retroactive searches apparently didn’t register. “No way,” I thought, silently cursing Twitter. But I clicked on the tweet by “Camus,” which linked to a People’s Voice article that quoted Czech historian Muriel Blaive of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes at length. She called the bill “mad” and like Camus decried the retroactive punishment clause, which places a responsibility on Canadians (or visitors to Canada, as I’d learn) to delete any old statements on the Internet that may constitute illegal hate speech under the new bill.

Blaive noted, however, that while you can delete a past offense, the new Canadian law also punishes future or potential crimes. She wrote:

This is where it trips over into as yet unimagined dystopian territory. If the courts believe you are likely to commit a ‘hate crime’ or disseminate ‘hate propaganda’ (not defined), you can be placed under house arrest and your ability to communicate with others restricted… If the court believes there’s a risk you may get drunk or high and start tweeting under the influence — although how is unclear, given you can’t use your phone or a PC — it can order you to submit regular urine samples to the authorities. Anyone who refuses to comply with these diktats can be sent to prison…