How the Government-Communications Industry Threatens Free Speech
And just what is it that they're so busy trying to communicate?
Two of our civilization’s greatest treasures are Magna Carta and the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution. Both had the immediate effect of limiting government control over the lives of their citizens. And both inspired continued expansion of the underlying principles.
I’ll freely admit that, as a Canadian, I’m jealous of the First Amendment. Sure, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects expression. But it’s a protection that’s tentative and fragile.
For instance, legislation or the courts could explicitly limit expression as long as the limit satisfies the Oakes Test. Oakes principles depend on a court’s judgment that, for example, an imposed limit’s objective is pressing and substantial. Historically, courts have imposed serious constraints on Canadians’ rights of expression based on what might be considered exaggerated definitions of pressing and substantial.
To be fair, in Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v Whatcott (2013), the Supreme Court of Canada did rule that offensive language that just “ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of” protected groups isn’t actionable. But they nevertheless criminalized speech that “exposes or tends to expose to hatred”.
For context, speech that actually incites violence is already criminal. Although, as we’ve seen from countless illegal street and campus protests over the past couple of years, the law is seldom enforced.
How hard would it be to imagine a scenario where someone - perhaps the Macdonald Laurier Institute - publishes a balanced and carefully footnoted criticism of serious flaws in a government bill. The post is accused of "exposing or tending to expose to hatred" towards the bill’s protected-class supporters. Could such a finding lead to government-funded prosecution of the authors in a human rights tribunal? And even if the Supreme Court might, in theory, eventually reject the charges based on proportionality or impairment concerns, do the authors have the money and resources to get anywhere near the Supreme Court?
I don’t believe that the Charter sufficiently protects Canadians from the suppression of their political- or conscience-based speech. And I do believe that the real threat of subjective and politicized judicial decisions has a chilling impact on speech and even thought.
Wait. Hang on. I’ve been banging on about protecting citizen communications. What’s that have to do with the government communications in the post title?
Well they’re obviously not the same thing. But it’s fair to suggest that whenever citizen expression is suppressed, government speech is amplified. Which does make it that much more important for us to understand exactly what government is currently saying and how they’re saying it.
To some degree - especially since the creation of state school systems - communicating has been at the center of many government activities. For better or for worse, that’s unlikely to change. So let’s ignore public education for now and focus on governments’ relationships with their adult citizens.
I’m certainly not suggesting that governments cut themselves off from the public and refuse to respond to queries and complaints. Transparency is necessarily the product of successful communications methodologies, and I’m all for transparency.
Instead, what I’d like to discuss is a couple of official federal government policy initiatives designed to control content that’s perceived as disinformation.
As I’ve written, The federal government spends millions a year outsourcing some communication work to private sector press release agencies. As these things go, the aggregated total doesn’t amount to all that much money. But when you consider how every department probably maintains its own in-house communications officers, we’re probably looking at just the tip of the iceberg.
This post isn’t about costs, though. I’m much more interested in figuring out what all those communications officers actually do with themselves. Reading the government’s Countering Disinformation: A Guidebook for Public Servants document should be helpful here.
It seems that the government expects departments to regularly monitor media - and social media - to quickly identify trends in public conversations. Civil servants are encouraged to conduct public environment analyses to help them understand the “broader context in which disinformation is spreading”.
Armed with this awareness, they’re expected to assess content for authenticity, evaluate any potential for harm, and proactively counter disinformation using public awareness campaigns and “debunking” exercises.
As a result, Canada’s internet neighbourhood is filled with publications from multiple departments and agencies promoting digital best-practices, including:
Many of the kinds of disinformation such programs target are, in and of themselves, non-controversial. I have no warm feelings for illegal call center operations that cheat seniors out of their savings so I’ve got nothing against protecting and supporting their victims. And I’ve never been a big fan of foreign election interference.
But I’m not convinced that bureaucrats are the best candidates for these particular public information tasks. Banks should - and in many cases already do - provide excellent resources for countering financial threats. And fighting Chinese Communist Party interference is probably something best done quietly by the professionals without a lot of public fanfare.1
But there’s also a real risk that this kind of feel-good communication is being used as cover for something much darker. The Guidebook, after all, isn’t shy about how feds should also be policing everything they consider disinformation. That’s especially frightening where objectively distinguishing between information and disinformation isn’t straightforward - and has significant political implications.
We only need to recall how many of the slam-dunk COVID-related assumptions of 2020 turned out to be completely wrong. When official government positions need correcting, the temptation to stack the communications deck must be hard to resist.
Had the federal government never taken noisy official positions in the first place, changing gears as “The Science” evolved would have been far simpler for the public health community - and a whole lot less painful. Would Canadians’ safety have been in any way compromised had the government’s official message at the time simply read: “be careful and listen to your family doctors and local hospitals”?
Instead, government communications officers chose to proactively run up their departments’ truly depressing levels of mistrust among the people they’re paid to serve.
Besides communications efforts common to all departments, were you aware that there are also multiple discrete programs and an entire ministry devoted to shaping the way we think and speak? Those would include:
The Digital Citizenship Contribution Program, a ten million dollar a year project of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Democratic Institutions, under the control of the Minister of Public Safety, Democratic Institutions and Intergovernmental Affairs
Even if I did think government were the right folks to create this stuff, there’s currently so much disinformation-related content scattered through the canada.ca domain that no single human being could possibly read it all.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t be raising a very public fuss to protest the fact that “the professionals” haven’t been doing their job on this file.
I was, twenty five years ago, a federal government media relations officer for three years. Happily it was an era before widespread use of the internet and social media, such a simpler time.
The emphasis was always on the feel-good stuff and there was indeed pressure from above to ensure that our messaging was positive but we always did our best to be as truthful and transparent as possible within the constraints of the guidelines provided.
It seems to me that nowadays almost everything that comes from the government is an exercise in deflection, obfuscation and corporate doublespeak that effectively gives no useful information. Shameful.
When the state has merged its intrinsic coercive power with the economic power of corporations compliant by nature of the evolved regulatory environment, you have a fascism consistent with that authored by Mussolini which happens to describe pretty much all nations today save perhaps North Korea and Venezuela. The US is also included but has two remaining constitutional impediments, the First and Second amendments. The underlying cultures may differ and thus the flavor of state censorship with some decidedly "woke" and culturally Marxist and others, culturally conservative and even theocratic, and in the west, thanks to ME immigration, a schizophrenic blending of the two. It's become a difficult place for a free speech absolutist where being perceived as offensive to some apparently warrants punishment more suitable to those urging or participating in violence.