Bill would `apply existing laws to online world,' justice minister says
“If this account of the bill is true, it's Lettres de Cachet all over again,” she wrote.
The lettres de cachet were orders signed by the king for a variety of purposes.
Their most infamous usage, however, was to imprison suspects without a trial, have them shunted off to a convent or hospital or banish them to the colonies.
The Marquis de Sade, the sadistic French activist and writer, was imprisoned repeatedly via lettres de cachet.
In her X post, Atwood shared a link to an article headlined “Trudeau's Orwellian online harms bill” that was published in the conservative British magazine The Spectator.
“The legislation authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime,” the article says.
Justice Minister Arif Virani took issue with The Spectator's characterization of the bill in a response posted to X, though he did not specify what he thought the article got wrong.
“Grateful for your interest in the Online Harms Act — which would keep kids safe, apply existing laws to the online world and address the rise in hate — but the article you've shared mischaracterizes the bill. Happy to discuss,” he wrote.
He also added a link to a story by The Canadian Press for “more context.”
In the article, Virani said “safeguards,” including the need for evidence and the approval of a provincial attorney general, should prevent the law from being abused.
Atwood compared the Trudeau government's new law to the “thoughtcrimes” described in George Orwell's 1984.
Thoughtcrime is an idea brought up regularly in discussions of censorship, but in the case of the online harms bill, a more apt literary comparison may be to Philip K. Dick's 1956 novella The Minority Report, in which an entire police bureaucracy — called “Precrime” — exists to arrest suspects before they get around to committing crimes, with the help of “precogs,” which are human mutants who can see into the future.
Some scholars argue that efforts at a form of “pre-crime” policing have become less of a dystopian sci-fi future and more of a reality, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
“Anticipating crime and pre-empting wouldbe criminals are no longer confined to fantasy — it is now the rationale for profound and very real changes in contemporary approaches to security, crime and justice,” says the introduction to a 2015 scholarly study published in Routledge Frontiers of Criminal Justice.
When the bill was announced, bureaucrats used the example of someone who posts on social media that they plan to set a cross ablaze on the front lawn of a bi-racial couple.
The family seeks a peace bond, and the judge concludes that the “family does have a reasonable fear, assessed objectively, that the defendant will commit a hate crime,” and so may prohibit the person from going within 100 metres of the family home for a year.
There's no reason to suppose, however, that a peace bond couldn't be sought for a potential hate crime offence of lesser magnitude, which has led to concern from civil liberties groups.
While there are some safeguards in place, noted Josh Dehaas, a lawyer with the Canadian Constitution Federation, the bill could still have a chilling effect on free speech, even if those with unpopular opinions aren't routinely punished for speaking or writing.
“Even if judges are cautious, there's still a huge chilling effect because people don't know where the line is between legal speech and what the Supreme Court has said can be outlawed as criminal hate speech,” said Dehaas.