How the Recent Floor Crossing Changes the Digital Rights Calculus

For those who have a keen eye on the digital rights file, the recent floor crossing might be worrying.

If there is one thing that has been very apparent over the last decade and a half, it’s that digital rights and politics has long been intertwined in a weird sort of oil and water mixture. In one world, it’s politicians who invariably have no idea how this whole interweb thing works and increasingly want to find some way to control it while enforcing their complete lack of understanding regardless of how completely nonsensical that thinking might be. In the other world, you have an internet that has evolved from its days of a feisty upstart that is there to do great things for the public to what it is today where it is basically dictated by a couple of giants more interested in hoovering up everything for their own personal benefits at the expense of everyone else – a situation that does necessitate some form of regulation ranging from anti-trust enforcement to reasonable privacy laws – and both remain frustratingly elusive to this day.

When you have these dynamics at play, a mess is pretty much a sure thing and, well, that is exactly what we have these days. You have anything ranging from thought control to mass surveillance to straight up censorship roaming wild and either threatening to make things much worse or already is making things worse. At any rate, when you cover anything related to digital rights, having one eye on the world of politics is pretty much mandatory in this day and age because otherwise, you are flying partially blind. This regardless of how much touching on politics may make you groan.

The last few days here in Canada have been a great case in point.

How We Got Here

As Canadians already know, Canada is currently in a minority government. While one party has more seats in Parliament than any other political party, it is still mathematically possible for every other opposition party to come together to vote something down. For the most part, in the last several years, this has definitely helped to prevent a lot of nasty internet bills from going through. Some terrible laws do still slip through such as the Online News Act, Online Streaming Act, and the Digital Services Tax, but the prospect of bad bills getting delayed to the point where it has no hope in passage is definitely a possibility. The thing is, the world of politics is gradually shifting below the surface.

A major factor in all of this is the Conservative party – specifically the leader, Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre has long been an insufferable douchebag, but unless you are heavy into the world of politics, most Canadian’s really didn’t know this. He’s long been anti LGBTQ+ rights, stamp out anything related to protecting the environment, attacked free speech whenever an organization says something the far right doesn’t like (ala the war on CBC), and even quietly supported the armed terrorist occupation in Ottawa to name a few things. This along with MAGA style angry mayonnaise noises where everything he doesn’t like is “woke” (something that even seeped into the political advertising on top of it all).

Most Canadians, for a time, didn’t know what kind of person he really was until the last election. At the time, the Liberal party was facing a number of scandals such as the fallout from Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland. Trudeau was hoping for some economic good news and that didn’t happen. So, in order to present the next budget, he basically decided to let Freeland deliver the bad news through the budget and let Freeland take the fall. For reasons that should be obvious, this pissed off Freeland who opted to, instead, resign rather than take the fall. The blowup, while not the only reason the Liberals were suffering in the polls, was a major flashpoint.

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives were able to capitalize on the political blunders at the time and, at one point, Poilievre even managed to get a 20 point lead. While Conservative Party backers liked to claim that it was because Poilievre was such a great and swell guy, the 20 point lead just before the election was actually more of a testament to how much Canadian’s have no idea who Poilievre actually was rather than him having such a fun and charismatic personality. It was more that independent voters were thinking of just giving the next biggest party yet another chance.

The problem is, there is only so long you can hide the fact that a political party leader is completely insufferable before Canadians, you know, discover this aspect. Compounding problems was that Poilievres political strategy depended entirely on the idea that Trudeau was going to remain as leader of the Liberal party forever as well. So, when Trudeau ultimately resigned and Mark Carney took over, that completely screwed over Poilievres election chances, leaving the party completely flat footed despite that 20 point lead. Canadians began researching Poilievre and were horrified at what they saw. What’s more, Carney took over, pushing his “credentials” as a “banker” at a time when US president Trump was busy blowing up the global economy.

So, not only did you have people being driven away by Poilievres antics, but you also had a semblance of stability that Canadians thought was represented through Carney. The outcome of the elections, in retrospect, weren’t surprising. The Conservative party blew their 20 point lead and, to add insult to injury, Poilievre lost his seat to a Liberal candidate on top of it all. For nonpartisan people who are heavy into politics like myself, the outcome was absolutely hilarious, though for some, it represented the moment that Canadians rejected Trump style politics from being imported into this country from the US.

The Conservative Floor Crossings

While the outcome left Poilievre and the Conservative party completely humiliated, little did Canadians know that this wasn’t even the end of Poilievres humiliation. In the months since the election, it became clear that Carney, like so many other Liberal parties in the past, was fully intent on governing like a Conservative. This through hacking and slashing the public service at a time when Canadians are increasingly needing said public service, rolling back environmental protection laws at a time when climate change literally sets large swaths of Canada on fire every year, and doing everything they can to appease big oil companies along with the other segments of the rich and powerful. The governing style really is just a Conservative party in Liberal clothing. At a time when the Conservative party is screaming “woke” among other things to take that party even further into the realms of the far right – something that would only attract the extreme far right party of the Peoples Party of Canada who don’t even have a seat in Parliament – the outcomes would ultimately lead to further humiliation for Poilievre.

In the months since the election, 3 Conservative party members crossed the floor and joined the Liberal party. Those MPs being Matt Jeneroux, Chris d’Entremont, and Michael Ma. The reasoning for the floor crossings were a mixture of not feeling that the leader represents their best interests and the fact that the Liberals were basically the Conservative party that they had long known and that what the “Liberal” party represents was more in line with their values. While the math was a little messier than subtracting 3 from one party and adding it to another (Freelands resignation did complicate the math a little), the practical effect was that the Liberal party was inching closer to a majority government. It was a reality that sparked plenty of rage tweeting (rage Xitting?) from Poilievre who screamed about betrayal among other things who already had to borrow another Conservative candidates seat just to be back in Parliament again.

In fact, the numbers were so close, it actually brought three by-elections into focus. The three ridings are University-Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest, and Terrebonne. The first two ridings were Liberal seats and are basically a foregone conclusion that those seats will hold. Terrebonne, on the other hand, was a very interesting case.

Terrebonne was held by the Bloc Quebecois. During the election, the Liberal party won that seat by a single vote. Since the numbers were so close between the two parties, it sparked recounts. Somewhere along the line, a citizen spoke up and said that her mail in ballot, a ballot that would’ve gone for the Bloc, was returned to her. The reasoning, the woman was told, was because the postal code did not match the address – a reason that makes zero sense to me and is likely a Canada Post error since it is pretty obvious who the intended recipient is (yes, the post office can figure these things out). Either way, a court challenge ensued and the ultimate ruling was that a byelection must be held. Long story short, if the Liberals win that particular seat, the party has secured a majority government.

Well, more recently, another floor crossing happened from the NDP to the Liberal party. That MP was Lori Idlout. This was more of a sad and disappointing development more than anything else. Indeed, for years, the NDP was quite proud of standing up for digital rights. Given their pro-people stance on so many things, it was a match made in heaven with an MP like Charlie Angus leading the way on the digital rights file. Unfortunately, Jagmeet Singh became leader of the NDP and he basically sacrificed almost everything the party stood for at the alter of a short term gain: a pharmacare program. With digital rights being one of a whole host of things that the party ended up ditching (along with Angus falling largely silent on these issues with a brief last gasp in 2021), it became a question of what the NDP even was by the last election. Without a real clear answer, it wasn’t even a surprise that the NDP got completely decimated in the last election with Singh losing his seat in the process. On the plus side, unlike Poilievre, he did the honourable thing and resigned. At a time when the NDP desperately needs to rebuild, the floor crossing really didn’t help matters.

At any rate, thanks to the floor crossing, the Terrebonne riding became less of a focus. All the Liberals really needed to do was hold on to their slam dunk safe ridings and they can cruise to a majority government. The Terrebonne riding would be a 1+ bonus at that point.

The Digital Rights Impacts

Yes, there is a digital rights angle to this. There are a number of different pieces of legislation floating around right now that could be impacted by the political calculus change.

Since there is a lot of negativity here, I’ll start this by talking about the good news. The mass government surveillance and censorship bill, the Age Verification bill, has gone from potentially slipping through to being in very choppy waters. The Liberal party has long made it clear that they were no fans of a quasi-National ID program. They don’t like the idea of censoring the LGBTQ+ community on the internet (at least for now) among other things, and, as a result, have long opposed the Canadian version of an Age Verification law. Unless they suddenly change their minds on this matter, then the chances of this legislation passing has now become quite remote. So, that bit, at the very least, is excellent news from a digital rights perspective.

Unfortunately, there is also bad news in this as well. With the Liberals already tabling warrantless wiretapping legislation, a majority government would make it easier for such a thing to sail through the legislative process. While things are already starting to look grim on this front, I personally have been through this before and know full well it’s not impossible that this legislation can get stalled enough to die on the orderpaper. In fact, there is precedence for this.

In the late 2000s to early 2010s, we had the Harper Conservative government. At the time, the Conservatives had copied and pasted the Liberals warrantless wiretapping legislation. At the time, it was known as Bill C-50, Bill C-51, and Bill C-52. Yes, the Conservatives in those days were huge fans of mass government surveillance of the people – so much so that they had three whole bills devoted to monitoring your every online movement. Of course, those died on the orderpaper because it was a Conservative minority government at the time.

Then, the Conservative party won a majority government and quickly tabled their Lawful Access bill known as Bill C-30. As you can imagine, at the time, I was pretty much crapping my pants because it looked like it was a sure thing that the right to privacy was basically going to go extinct whenever this bill was going to get passed. This sparked plenty of letter writing from digital rights groups, civil rights groups, and concerned citizens alike. The Liberal party opposed this legislation at the time and it resulted in a number of delays. In fact, it somehow didn’t even make it past first reading. When Harper called an early election because he wanted even more power (a power play that backfired spectacularly at the time), it caused Lawful Access to die on the orderpaper. The amount of relief I had can not be understated, but Canada did manage to dodge that bullet.

So, yes, on the file of Lawful Access, it is looking very grim today, but history has shown that it is entirely possible that such a bill can get stalled out. As long as the Conservative party ironically keeps opposing this, it’s not impossible that Canada can dodge this bullet, but it is definitely going to be tough at this point.

The Online Harms bill is, indeed, another worrying one. With the mainstream media and the government trying to take advantage of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, there is definitely a push to make is as palatable as possible to get internet censorship through. While it has been watered down over the years, it was pretty extreme in the early stages with huge fines for all websites that fail to comply within 24 hours to any anonymous complaint being a big example of this. It’s hard to say if things will change for the worse, but with a Liberal majority government, it’s not out of the question that some of the nastiest provisions that were previously removed would make a comeback.

There are, of course, other bills that this will also affect. The common thing being that if the Liberals oppose it, then the bill will have an uphill battle to become law. If the Liberals support it, then it’s going to be rather difficulty (though, not impossible) to stop.

At any rate, there are changes happening in the political landscape and this does alter the momentum of numerous bills currently working their way through government in general.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.