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“Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force.” – George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature, 1946.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say, as some are saying, that Canada is on the cusp of establishing a “secret police force” to engage in surveillance, preemptive arrest and other such dirty work in flagrant trespass upon the rights of the people to freedom of speech.

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But perhaps only a bit.

Ordinarily I prefer that Orwell is left out of these kinds of debates because his insights and arguments tend to get so badly abused, but in the public conversation about Bill C-51, his name keeps coming up. And it so happens that just the other day I hiked the wind-shredded eight kilometres of rutted track on the Hebridean island of Jura that leads to the remote deer-stalker’s redoubt where Orwell wrote his dystopian classic, 1984, while he was dying of tuberculosis.