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A troubling bill brings to mind the dystopian world in the film ‘Minority Report’.
By Valerie Hudson
As a science fiction fan, I remember how excited I was when Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella was made into a Steven Spielberg movie, “Minority Report,” starring Tom Cruise.
In the world of 2054, Cruise heads an elite law enforcement unit called “Precrime.” It was called this because they arrest people “precognitively” — that is, before a crime is committed or even thought of by the predicted future perpetrator. In the film, released in 2002, the process is corrupted to snare the innocent, and Cruise must right this wrong.
I thought of this movie when I read about legislation proposed in Canada, bill C-63. Ostensibly a bill about online safety and fighting AI-generated deepfake porn — who could be against any of that? — the bill’s details are a chilling read. Proponents intend to create the first “precrime” enforcement established by a democratic country. Indeed, one of the ways we used to be able to tell an authoritarian government from a democratic government is that authoritarian governments are masters at identifying people they consider “precriminals” and locking them up in gulags for decades. Democratic countries didn’t do that, or try to. Until Canada, that is.
Let me just pause to say that I grew up in a time when most people saw Canadians as the sensible North Americans, while Americans, in contrast, could be somewhat, well, batty. That narrative has shifted 180 degrees. Under the government of Justin Trudeau, we’ve seen an unconstitutional response to a truckers’ strike that involved preventing the truckers (and anyone who contributed to their cause) from accessing their own checking accounts. We’ve seen a galloping rate of increase in euthanasia due to constantly expanding access for people who are not terminally ill. We’ve seen the Canadian government use new anti-discrimination legislation (bill C-16) to police pronouns.
But Canada would take things to a whole new level with bill C-63′s creation of precrime. Let’s suppose you hold an unpopular opinion, such as a certain transgender woman is male....
https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2024/03/13/canada-hate-speech-bill/