Censorship In Canada

Transparency in the Canadian Government is being used inefficiently and unfairly. Over many years since Canada has been a country their have been many different censorship laws. Censorship has been included, in film, broadcasting, print, art, and the internet. As years pass the Canadian Government has been lenient towards censorship towards film, broadcasting and the arts. However, with the expansion of technology the Government still censors and denies multiple files and information from the General Public. The Harper Conservative government and CSIS have denied access to multiple government files and even censored out files allowed viewing by the general Public and now Canada has had the most files censored currently in the history of the

The three parties have been known to censor out and deny government file requests. Between June 2013 to June 2014 there were around 28 000 requests for government files. Out of all those requests CSIS only allowed 21% of the files were returned free of redactions. 2% of the files were denied completely. More than half of the files requested were partially censored by CSIS and RCMP, and this is the highest amount of censored files in the history of Canada. Because these files are censored it doesn’t give reliable information to the general public and organizations. This lowers respect from Canadian citizens. An example on how some files are censored when they should have full access is the Cyber-Bullying document in the Internet Safety Act. The government has censored this document excessively to the point where even the word Canada is blacked out in Government of Canada. This document is one of the most requested documents by the public due to the rapid growth of the internet. The censorship towards this document will deny people of their rights, and appear to be above the law. Side from the requests for multiple censored documents, the Harper Conservatives have been in between a conflict with them muzzling scientists. Canadian scientist were not allowed to reveal to the public about their discoveries, even if the discovery proved to be

Many are for online gambling and many are against. In early 2015, Quebec made it illegal and made their own government run gambling site, because they projected that they would make 13 million dollars if they banned all third party sites. The Quebec Government is willing to deny peoples rights to gambling just so they can make more money, putting them over the law. In the criminal code there are limitations towards gambling, however none of the restrictions have any correlation with online casinos and gambling sites that Quebec is blocking. Therefore they are wrongfully blocking websites that have not broken any laws, just for economical gain. The plan that was created is likely face a legal challenge, both on free speech and jurisdictional grounds, since the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over telecommunications regulation. Many people are able to get by these blocked websites by changing their web VPN to display they are coming from different regions in the world just to access these sites. This has also sparked controversy as you can change your location to avoid blocked websites. Denying people the rights to gamble freely online makes them commit wrongful acts online. If Quebec were to keep the third party sites unblocked there wouldn't be any problems with people illegal changing their online location. Canada has tried to defend an open internet policy. The telecommunications act states a Canadian