Trudeau channels his inner Xi.

Michael Geist- Criticism of government’s online harms plans is stunning and helps explain why @pablorodriguez blocked access to submissions for months.

The Rest of the Online Harms Consultation Story: Canadian Heritage Forced to Release Hundreds of Public Submissions Under Access to Information Law

For months, the results of the government’s online harms consultation was shrouded in secrecy as the Canadian Heritage refused to disclose the hundreds of submissions it received. I launched a page that featured publicly available submissions (links reposted below), including 25 submissions from organizations and companies as well as six individual expert submissions.

The criticism of the government’s plans were even more widespread than previously revealed. Indeed, reviewing the submissions uncovers very few supportive comments of the government’s online harms from either organizations or the hundreds of individual submissions.

The most notable submission came from Twitter (its must read submission is here), which warned that the proactive monitoring of content envisioned by the government. 

“sacrifices freedom of expression to the creation of a government run system of surveillance of anyone who uses Twitter. Even the most basic procedural fairness requirements you might expect from a government-run system such as notice or warning are absent from this proposal. The requirement to ‘share’ information at the request of Crown is also deeply troubling.”

“The proposal by the government of Canada to allow the Digital Safety Commissioner to block websites is drastic. People around the world have been blocked from accessing Twitter and other services in a similar manner as the one proposed by Canada by multiple authoritarian governments (China, North Korea, and Iran for example) under the false guise of ‘online safety’ impeding peoples’ rights to access information online.”