© Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESSChief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam responds to a question during a news conference in Ottawa, Monday April 13, 2020.
After flip-flopping on basic information about COVID-19 and expecting to be cut some slack for it, the federal government is now proposing legislation that might punish any Canadian for doing just what they first did.
Liberal minister Dominic LeBlanc told CBC News that he's already been in discussion with cabinet members, including Justice David Lametti, to bring in some form of legislation to tackle online misinformation regarding COVID-19.
"Legislatures and Parliaments are meeting scarcely because of the current context of the pandemic, so it's not a quick solution, but it's certainly something that we would be open [to] as a government," LeBlanc told CBC News.
Comment: It all sounds innocent enough - shut down hucksters with fake health cures who are taking advantage of the public's fears. But the question brought up here, as it is in all fake-news-fighting censorship initiatives, is who defines what is fake news. The mainstream media has done a bang-up job of smearing vitamin C as ineffective,
despite evidence to the contrary, so would this information be censored? And how about people calling out the government for instituting lockdowns and continuing them despite overwhelming evidence that the virus is really not that dangerous?
Comment: It all sounds innocent enough - shut down hucksters with fake health cures who are taking advantage of the public's fears. But the question brought up here, as it is in all fake-news-fighting censorship initiatives, is who defines what is fake news. The mainstream media has done a bang-up job of smearing vitamin C as ineffective, despite evidence to the contrary, so would this information be censored? And how about people calling out the government for instituting lockdowns and continuing them despite overwhelming evidence that the virus is really not that dangerous?