Originally a comment by Artymorty on A new power.

It’s insane. This bill is so childish. It’s basically the BAD PEOPLE BILL. They’ve decided there are BAD, HATEFUL PEOPLE and they must legislate to punish them. But they’re leaving it ENTIRELY UP TO LATER to define who these bad people are.

The people supporting this bill aren’t even asking WHO will be doing this crucial defining. It’s a nightmare.

It’s literally impossible to ethically support a bill that proposes a bunch of penalties — right up to the nation’s maximum penalty of life imprisonment — before anyone has bothered to set the fucking definitional terms of what they’re criminalizing. It’s purely an irrational appeal to emotion. That always works out well, right?

Ban it first; define it later.

I can predict all the excuses:

“The definition is self-explanatory, ok? It’s just hate.” I can hear people argue that. “Look, hate is just bad. No one has ever politicized the definition of hate before, right?”

(Ridiculous!)

It’s going to become life and death what counts as hate in Canada. But nobody can fucking bother to decide who makes that call. There are stupid situations, and then there are STUPID SITUATIONS.

And yet, even SKEPTICS of this turd of a bill fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book: the original draft was LIGHT YEARS WORSE, and now that the government has retreated and then returned to proffer a “moderate” proposal RELATIVE TO THE ORIGINAL SHITSHOW, the loudest critics have fallen for it and they’re cooing about how reasonable the new version of the bill is (Overton Window Suckers), and they’re now placated enough to not be raising nuclear alarms…

I despair at the state of Canada right now. The Online Harms Bill seems very obviously like a disaster to me.