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Imagine this: You spent a couple of hours watching “Juice: Power, Politics, and the Grid,” the excellent new documentary produced by Robert Bryce and Tyson Culver, and you find out the next day that both have been perp-walked off to jail and charged with the crime of saying nice things about fossil fuels.
Don’t laugh: If one Canadian member of parliament has his way, that will become law up in the Great White North. That MP, Charlie Angus, introduced a bill Monday that would invoke criminal penalties that reads, in part, “It is prohibited for a person to promote a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel-related brand element or the production of a fossil fuel.”
Here’s an excerpt from the story at the Toronto Sun:
Angus tabled Bill C-372, “An Act respecting fossil fuel advertising” on Monday, comparing it to the ban on cigarette advertising.
“The Big Tobacco moment has finally arrived for Big Oil. We need to put human health ahead of the lies of the oil sector,” Angus told the House on Monday.
At a Tuesday news conference, he repeatedly made similar references to Big Tobacco and claimed that his bill was about stopping the spread of falsehoods by the oil industry. The reality, though, and it appears Angus is not overly familiar with reality, is that this would criminalize true statements even by ordinary Canadians.
[End]
So, Angus says the bill is about “stopping the spread of falsehoods by the oil industry,” but the bill actually says it is about making it a crime to “promote a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel-related brand element or the production of a fossil fuel.” The actual language in the law would make it a crime to advertise the price of gasoline or for Chevron to run TV ads bragging about the additive it calls “Techron.”
The actual language, in other words, has nothing to do with objective truth. It has to do with banning speech this Canadian MP doesn’t like.
For several years, the great standup comic Jeff Foxworthy hosted a TV show called, “Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?” Obviously, MP Angus would flunk that show since every 5th-grader who ever appeared on it would immediately notice the logical conflict between the bill’s language and the promotion of it by its author.
Hey, maybe we should instead pass a law making it a crime for MPs or members of the US congress to spread falsehoods about the bills they’re trying to pass. That would actually be a true public service and would end up with about 99% of those politicians facing charges.
Make me dictator for a day, and that would be among my very top priorities, right behind banning those insipid Jardiance ads.
That is all.
