A bill has been proposed by the government of Canada’s Manitoba province led by the New Democratic Party (NDP) that seems oblivious – either of the timing, the greater international political context, or both – as it tries to legislate against allegedly crucial in their influence “election misinformation” methods like deepfakes.
Nevertheless, here it is: If adopted, the bill would allow the province’s elections commissioner to order removal of content deemed as “misinformation” within 24 hours, or impose fines of up to $20,000 per day and imprisonment for a year.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
And the provincial justice minister, Matt Wiebe, actually believes the move is “keeping up with the times” – in addition to, “enhancing” the existing legislation.
That would be the Elections Act, and when all’s said and done, the “keeping up with the times” argument is quite weak, since the bill’s origin goes back to 2024 era, and then chief electoral officer Shipra Verma’s efforts to amend the said act as a way of preventing the spread of “false information.”
According to the Canadian press, what the Manitoba government seeks to root out here in addition to “false information about candidates” is “impersonating election officials, and more.”
Eligible for this kind of censorship would be content that is posted “intentionally” – i.e., by people knowing that what they posted was false.
Needless to say, someone would then have to be the arbiter of what’s “intentional” in this context – and this is where a huge majority of similar legislative efforts, or even online platform rules, fail the “objectivity and unbiasedness test.”
Not least because the wording is almost universally simply reiterating the need to have an authority be the proverbial judge and jury of speech – without expanding on what qualifies that authority for the role, beyond the fact they are currently in power and drafting laws, or social media policies.
There’s another familiar type of online content, that had in the past an immense amount of significance pinned on a particular brand of “transparency” – even though that trend appears to be fading, too. But not in Canada.
The Manitoba bill wants to make sure that members of the public have an avenue to “complain about political ads.”
“Political parties would be required to set up a publicly available code of ethics on advertising that would include a process for handling complaints,” a report summed up the intention behind this portion of the proposal.
