Censorship in Canada
The collaborative efforts of a significant portion of the Montreal arts community was ordered destroyed by the mayor and was done so by municipal workers with police escort.
[6] In December 1993, the Metropolitan Toronto Police's Morality Bureau raided the Mercer Union Gallery and confiscated fictional works consisting of five paintings and thirty-five drawings from Eli Langer's exhibit.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association condemned parliament for the fast speed in which the legislation was passed without amending it enough to account for adverse outcomes.
[7][8] Following the Supreme Court trial R v Sharpe in 2001, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin maintained that "Parliament was justified in concluding that visual works of the imagination would harm children".
Ten months into the exhibition, then-Mayor of Edmonton Stephen Mandel ordered the works removed after reportedly receiving a 700-name petition complaining of the sculptures' "disrespectful" nudity.
[21][22][23][24][25] In an interview with the Edmonton Journal's Paula Simons, David Goa, religious scholar, cultural anthropologist, and director of the University of Alberta's Ronning Centre for Study of Religion and Public Life, states "In India, Lord Ganesha is on everything — playing cards, advertising signs, lotto tickets, even diapers, I suspect."
[27] After meeting with seven Hindu community group representative to seek out their opinion of the donation, the Edmonton Arts Council received a response that McCourt's sculpture was "an offense to their religion" and that the ban enacted by Mayor Mandel should remain in place.
[28] As a result of this consultation, "the Public Art Committee unanimously voted to decline acceptance of the gift, as the artwork did not meet "community or civic suitability" criteria."
[30] In 1937, under Maurice Duplessis, Quebec's Union Nationale government passed the Act to protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda (commonly known as the "Padlock Law"), which banned the printing, publishing or distributing of "any newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, circular, document or writing, propagating Communism or Bolshevism".
The idea of classification was first proposed by Ottawa child welfare advocate, and future mayor, Charlotte Whitton in 1920; however, at the time it was criticized with one newspaper editor claiming "A film that's not suitable for a ten-year-old should not be seen at all.
The censors argued that McNeil had no standing to sue as he had no direct interest in the case, but the Nova Scotia Supreme Court stated that "there could be a large number of persons with a valid desire to challenge".
[53] Six minutes from The Stewardesses were removed in 1971, but Attorney General Al Mackling ordered for the film to be seized, threatened to increase censorship laws, and filed charges against the Metropolitan Theatre for obscenity.
The Canadian National Council for Combating Venereal Disease, which was led by William Renwick Riddell and Gordon Bates, sought to distribute The End of the Road in Ontario in 1919.
Williams made a statement asking the public if that wanted to see a film using objectionable words, in reference to Tom Jones without naming it, and received 213 letters against and 24 in favor.
[91] In 2015, the province of Quebec proposed legislation which would require unlicensed online gambling websites, as defined by Loto-Québec, to be blocked by Internet service providers in defense of the Loto-Québec-operated Espacejeux.
[94] In July 2018, the law was struck down by the Quebec Superior Court, citing these matters as being responsibility of the federal government, and the notion of net neutrality upheld by the CRTC.
[95] On January 28, 2018, FairPlay Canada, an industry coalition formed by major Canadian telecom and media conglomerates, proposed to the CRTC the formation of a mandatory system to block websites "blatantly" involved in copyright infringement.
The system would utilize an independent organization to submit blocklists to the CRTC for approval; there would be no judicial oversight, and the Federal Court of Appeal could only intervene after the fact.
The proposal has been widely criticized for the possibility of abuse; Michael Geist described the proposal as being "ill-advised and dangerous", citing criticisms surrounding other site-blocking systems, the lack of judicial oversight, concerns that accidental overblocking could violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and statistics showing that Canada was below global averages for unauthorized music distribution, and had more Netflix subscribers per-capita than countries with site blocking rules in effect.
[99] On November 18, 2019, in the first ruling of its kind, the Federal Court of Canada approved an interlocutory injunction requiring major Canadian ISPs to block a pirate IPTV service.
[107] After the bill had passed through the Senate, Heritage Minister Rodrigeuz and the Liberal government removed a key amendment that was protecting against the regulation of user-generated content.
[111] In March 2019, following the Christchurch mosque shooting, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale stated that the government was planning to carefully evaluate whether social media platforms should be required to censor hate speech and extremist content.
[113] After Bill C-36 did not pass due to the dissolution of Parliament and the 2021 Canadian federal election, a new version was drafted in 2022 where a Digital Safety Commissioner would oversee and remove internet content considered harmful.
Martin said that hate crimes, slander and libel would still be outlawed under the Criminal Code, while his motion would stop the federal human rights tribunal from imposing restrictions on freedom of speech using taxpayers' money.
[134] The law he was convicted on was found to be unconstitutional,[134] with the conclusion "those who deliberately publish falsehoods are not, for that reason alone, precluded from claiming the benefit of the constitutional guarantees of free speech".
[134] The legislation passed with support from all parties, making the act of publicly "denying" or "downplaying" the Holocaust a crime subject to imprisonment not exceeding two years.
[132] In 2023, New Democratic Party MP Leah Gazan put forward a bill to criminalize denying or downplaying the genocide that occurred in the Canadian Indian residential school system.
"[143] According to Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, "[h]uman rights commissions were never intended to act as a form of thought police, but now they're being used to chill freedom of expression on matters that are well beyond accepted Criminal Code restrictions on free speech.
"[144] A group of several dozen professors from the 7,000-member American Political Science Association contend that recent free speech precedents in Canada put academics at risk of prosecution.
The group includes Robert George and Harvey Mansfield, and they have protested holding the scheduled 2009 APSA annual meeting in Canada for this reason.
