Marni Soupcoff: Don't make free speech the next COVID-19 victim in Canada

Need to point out, the Canadian government could be using its power to secure personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, facilitate increased testing capacity, and eliminate regulatory red tape that gets in the way of efficient investigation of vaccines. It is certainly understood that these steps could be helpful, and they are just three examples out of many. Referring to this, one may question why federal politicians use their time to make plans to censor the online expression of a pandemic that could use more creative ideas.

It certainly sounds great to crack down on dangerous “cranks” that push “disinformation.” This is so until it is discovered that a couple of months ago, anyone suggesting COVID-19 could and would spread via community broadcast here, an idea that Canadian public health leaders scoffed at, would have been considered like a “hobby”. And it’s just a couple of weeks ago, anyone who claimed that wearing a mask in public was helpful in stopping the spread of COVID-19 would also have been considered a fool by federal standards.

Pandemic that uncontrollable

Undoubtedly, in the face of this pandemic, the government does not have a monopoly on the truth and is that it is barely competent enough to recognize the truth when the truth hits it in the head. Do you really want that entity to have the power to decide which ideas about COVID-19 are valid and can be expressed and which are wrong and should be punished? Clearly, it is not necessary to imagine, in the abstract, what kind of damage this type of censorship would do since the scenario has already developed in China.

In December 2019, ophthalmologist Li Wenliang tried to sound the alarm in China about a mysterious new virus that was causing symptoms similar to SARS. Within days, he was detained by the police and reprimanded for “making false comments on the Internet.” He died of COVID-19 six weeks later. Furthermore, as the deadly disease spread through China’s Hubei province, WeChat censored instructions and advice on wearing face masks and handwashing, information that would have saved lives but was considered false news by Chinese authorities at the time.

It goes without saying that this is an example that Canada should not follow. A man’s whistleblower is the conspiracy theorist who ravages another. Allowing one of those men to impose criminal penalties on the other is a detrimental way of dealing with the difference.

This is clearly a matter of freedom of expression. And during a pandemic, freedom of expression and the unimpeded flow of information can mean the difference between life and death.

Source: Marni Soupcoff | National Post