Last week, the Liberal government tabled Bill C-9, containing three new criminal offences targeting hate speech — as a response to the alarming and appalling rise in antisemitic violence in Canada in the past two years, along with attacks against places of worship, schools, and community centres.
The new offences primarily capture acts of intimidation of a physical sort: blocking access to a synagogue, mosque, or temple, or promoting hatred by waving flags or symbols of groups listed as terrorist entities.
But two of the offences will apply to speech online and raise questions for me about where they fit in the panoply of hate speech offences in Canada — and whether we’re likely to see further regulation of online speech this fall.
I thought I’d write this short post to help situate the new offences in the Criminal Code’s existing hate speech provisions, highlight what they add to what we already have, and remind readers about Bill C-36 in 2021, which sought to revive a human rights law that would make hate speech a form of actionable discrimination — since it may be coming back.
Sep 19, 2025
A new article in AI Magazine draws an illuminating comparison between what AI is doing to writing and what photography did to art in the 1840s. It helps to make sense of a question many of us are thinking about more often: does increasing reliance on AI signal the end of writing?
The insights in this piece resonate with me, given the quantum leap in my own use of AI over the past few months.
I’m now making such frequent use of it — integrating it into my research, writing, and editing — that it has me wondering what’s really happening.
As I describe in a piece for the CBA’s National Magazine, I’ve been dipping in and out of Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity constantly — to get a quicker lay of the land on new topics, reword sentences, and tighten drafts. But the pace and intensity feel like a transformation as momentous as the shift from typewriter to computer, or from paper-based research to the internet.
To be clear, I’m not using AI to create texts. But using it more often to edit, it sometimes causes me to think about my claim to authorship. At what point does a suggestion — or re-write of a paragraph — mean it’s no longer me?
Aug 30, 2025
This week, parents of Adam Raine, a California teen who committed suicide in April after a lengthy interaction with GPT-4o, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. The case follows a suit brought in late 2024 by the parents of a Florida teen, Sewell Setzer, who took his own life after engaging with a Character.AI chatbot impersonating Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.
In early August, ChatGPT was also implicated in a murder-suicide in Connecticut involving 56-year-old tech worker Stein-Erik Soelberg, who had a history of mental illness. Although the chatbot did not suggest that he murder his mother, it appears to have fueled Soelberg’s paranoid delusions, which led him to do so.
OpenAI and other companies have been quick to respond with blog posts and press releases outlining steps they are taking to mitigate risks from misuse of their models.
This raises a larger question left unanswered in Canada after the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act died on the order paper in early 2025, when the last Parliament ended: what guardrails exist in Canadian law to govern the harmful uses of generative AI?
Jul 23, 2025
Over a month later, the controversy over the Strong Borders Act continues.
Privacy experts are still sounding the alarm over the astonishing breadth of some of the new powers — allowing police to demand from a doctor, lawyer, anyone who “provides a service” information about a person’s account without a warrant; a power to compel Shaw or Google to “install equipment” that would give police or CSIS access to personal data — the list goes on.
Following my last post that looked in some detail at parts of the bill, the government has issued a Charter statement that drew criticism for being self-serving, even misleading. Along with others, I wrote opinion pieces and spoke about the bill on Law Bytes and other venues.
But I noticed there was still some confusion and uncertainty about many aspects of the bill. Rather than wait for a Parliamentary backgrounder to appear, I decided to put together my own overview of all aspects of the bill touching on privacy — and to offer an independent assessment of them in relation to section 8 of the Charter (guaranteeing “a right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure”).
The result is a paper I’ve posted to SSRN titled “Bill C-2 Backgrounder: New Search Powers in the Strong Borders Act and Their Charter Compliance”.
Jun 8, 2025
The Liberal’s first bill in Parliament last week proposes a raft of new search powers to give police easier access to our private data. They may turn out to be the most consequential search powers added to the Criminal Code in the past decade.
They have little to do with the primary aim of the bill, strengthening borders by expanding powers in customs and immigration.
Tucked in the middle of Bill C-2 are measures that revive long-standing aims to pass “lawful access” legislation that will make it easier for police to obtain subscriber information attached to an ISP account (with Shaw or Telus) and give police direct access to private data held by ISPs or platforms like iCloud, Gmail, or Instagram.
I’ve written a general overview of these powers for The Conversation here, and Michael Geist has a very informative op-ed in the Globe that sets out a wider context and walks through some of the provisions in detail. If you’re new to this story, you might begin there.
In this post, I offer a few thoughts on the constitutionality of three key powers in the bill: the new production order for subscriber info; the new information demand power; and the provisions that compel service providers to assist police in gaining direct access to personal data.
This is a long post, almost 3k words. It might have been three shorter ones, but I thought I’d put it all in one post.
It’s meant for those looking for a deeper dive on the constitutional questions.