Canada is quickly becoming a country where your social media posts could land you in jail 

Connolly was imprisoned under section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986, which forbids intentionally using “threatening, abusive or insulting words…or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” and that is likely to “stir up racial hatred.” Dunn and Thompson were jailed under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it an offence to send messages that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,” or to communicate anxiety-provoking messages that are known “to be false.” These hate speech laws aren’t new, but they’re increasingly turned on keyboard warriors. The Times reports that police made at least 12,183 arrests in 2023, up 58 percent from 2019, under section 127 and a similar provision of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. While it’s not exactly Orwell’s 1984, Britain can no longer claim robust protections for free speech. Coming to Canada? Canadians must speak out now to avoid the same fate of facing jail time for what they post online. This country has had similar hate speech laws in place since 1970, but until recently, they were rarely used and virtually never used to target speech online. But today, not only are attorneys general starting to use these laws to target online speech, the federal government has proposed Bill C-9, which would make these laws easier to use by removing the requirement that police get attorney general consent to lay hate speech charges, while lowering the legal threshold for what legally constitutes “hatred.” While Canadians would probably still have more speech protections than Britons due to differences in the wording of our laws and prior case law,  there’s no question C-9 would move Canada closer to the U.K., potentially resulting in thousands of people charged each year for social media comments. This is deeply worrying. No country that jails people for mere words is ever fully free. Laws on the books Canada’s criminal hate speech laws, section 319 of the Criminal Code, forbid public incitement of hatred, wilful promotion of hatred, and, as of 2022, wilful promotion of antisemitism. As a free speech advocate, I don’t support these laws. Mere speech should never be criminalized, whether online or offline. Having the government act as a censor defeats the purpose of free speech: to allow us to debate controversial ideas as a democracy and to seek the truth for its own sake. It is only where speech poses a real threat of imminent violence—for example, saying “Let’s go burn down that house,” that the state should step in. At that point, it’s no longer the idea being targeted but the physical threat. The saving grace of section 319 has been how rarely it was used. There were few prosecutions historically for a few reasons. First, police must get consent from a provincial attorney general before laying the charges, which attorneys general are reluctant to grant. Second, the Supreme Court appeared to set a high bar for what counts as “hatred” in the 1990 case R v Keegstra, and the 2013 decision R v Whatcott, when it stated hatred is limited to “those extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words “detestation” and “vilification.” Finally, attorneys general have been reluctant to find that speech on social media is either “in a public place” or “not in private conversation,” which is required by 319. Authorities saw fit to only regulate hate speech made in public, and it was not until recently that it became clear whether speech on the internet counts. But C-9 would remove the requirement for attorney general consent, allowing police to lay charges directly. Until now, attorneys general have very rarely approved hate speech charges, probably because they don’t want the political pushback for limiting unpopular speech. However, if police can lay charges directly, we can expect them to lay far more. Britain’s experience shows that police are all too happy to enforce these laws. New hate speech frontiers  C-9 would also create a statutory definition of hatred that is lower than what the Supreme Court ordered in Whatcott and Keegstra, where the court emphasized that “hatred” is an extreme emotion. By leaving out the word “extreme,” and defining hatred as merely “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike,” more charges and convictions seem likely. On the mere vilification or detestation standard, harsh but valuable speech about topics ranging from religion to immigration to gender identity could lead to charges and imprisonment. For example, one of the X posts that led to the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport was an aerial shot of a group of apparently transgender rights protesters with the words “a photo you can smell.” While offensive, that ought not warrant an investigation, and the Crown Prosecution Service has since dropped it. But under a mere “detestation and vilification” standard, one could see Canadian police also making that sort of arrest. This all comes at a time when attorneys general have begun to consider social media expressions to be happening “in a public place” and not “in private conversation,” leading to charges for online speech after decades of restricting charges to comments made in streets or pamphlets. The trend of treating Facebook and X as a “public place” in the eyes of the law may have started in Quebec, but it has now spread to Ontario, where a North Bay man was recently sentenced to nine months in jail plus two years of probation for his antisemitic Facebook posts, and Manitoba, where a man faces charges for his allegedly hateful anti-LGBT posts on X. Federal Attorney General Sean Fraser affirmed this understanding recently, saying in a parliamentary committee that he agrees online speech is in public. Considering how much online speech could meet the lower threshold that C-9 proposes, there could be thousands of charges annually. As the great philosopher John Stuart Mill explained in On Liberty, no democracy is “completely free” without the right to express our thoughts, however offensive. When governments control speech, mankind is robbed of “the opportunity of exchanging error for truth.” We can’t have difficult conversations and get to the truth as a democracy if people fear they’ll be handcuffed for sharing a meme on Facebook or posting their thoughts on X. Canada should take Britain’s example as a warning, not a model. The government should not be making it easier to arrest people for mere speech.