Like many television viewers around the world, former federal cabinet minister and past CBC president Perrin Beatty watched last week as American late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel returned to the airwaves after ABC suspended his show the week before over comments Kimmel made in a monologue in which he said that “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

U.S. President Donald Trump called Kimmel’s suspension “great news for America,” and said that he “absolutely love[d]” that CBS announced in July that it was ending Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show in 2026.

Returning from his recent state visit to the United Kingdom, Trump mused to reporters travelling with him on Air Force One that since the networks give him “only bad press … maybe their licence should be taken away.”

Such action would not happen in Canada, said Beatty, who as communications minister in former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government in the early 1990s was responsible for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which licenses broadcasters.

“I’m confident that in Canada, people understand the importance of protecting free speech and ensuring that the broadcasting regulator is free from political interference,” said Beatty, who also served as president and CEO of the CBC. “In a free society, the only thing that’s worse than the abuse of free speech is censorship.”

He said that any government “imposing its will on the media is antithetical to a free society.”

“At the end of the day, that’s how you define our democracy,” said Beatty, who noted that he was “very concerned” in recent years about “cancel culture on the left, where people were trying to shut down free speech on campus.” 

“I’m worried now that we’re also seeing it on the right,” said Beatty, who served as secretary of state for external affairs in former PC prime minister Kim Campbell’s government.

Celebrated CBC science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki said he believes the chilling effect on free speech in the United States will cross the border into Canada.

He recalled that when he participated in a protest in Toronto on Sept. 20—the goal of which was to press Prime Minister Mark Carney’s (Nepean, Ont.) government to focus on such issues as climate action and Indigenous rights ahead of the Nov. 4 release of the federal budget—“the loudest people were pro-Kirk and they drowned us out.”

The next loudest group were evangelical Christians, said Suzuki, the former longtime host of CBC’s The Nature of Things television series and a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Suzuki said that free speech comes with “a responsibility to at least tell the truth” and referred to a story in The New York Times that noted he “told public lies or falsehoods every day for his first 40 days” in 2017 during his first administration.

“Free speech for anybody to say anything is chaos,” said Suzuki. “Trump says he’s for free speech, but as long as it’s free speech within the Trump world.” 

“If he believes in everything he’s saying, he belongs in a mental institution. If he knows what he’s saying is not true and still says it, then clearly he belongs in jail,” said Suzuki. “Anybody that criticizes him is not met with a conversation; it’s ‘You’re a nasty person.’”

Suzuki, a zoologist and former genetics professor at the University of British Columbia, said that he spent all his life “trying to say: take science seriously.”

Yet, as he pointed out, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—secretary of health and human services in Trump’s cabinet – wrote a 2021 book titled The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, which accused Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to “allocate [US] $6.1-billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for rigged scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe” and accused Fauci and Gates of using “their control of media outlets” to disseminate “fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence” while muzzle[ing] debate and ruthlessly censor[ing] dissent,” according to a synopsis of the book.

As for the president, he told the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23 that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

Hours later, Trump threatened to sue “ABC Fake News” for allowing Kimmel to recommence his show, which featured a performance by Canadian musician Sarah McLachlan. Two days before, she cancelled a performance in Los Angeles to coincide with the U.S. premiere on Disney+ (and distributed by ABC News Studios) of a documentary on the Lilith Fair festival that she helped create to protest “the muzzling of free speech,” following Kimmel’s suspension.

On Truth Social, the president wrote that the “White House was told by ABC that [Kimmel’s] Show was cancelled!” 

Trump accused the talk-show host of putting ABC “in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE” and said that Kimmel “is yet another arm of the” Democratic National Committee “and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution.”

“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this,” the president added. “Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars.”

Trump launched a defamation suit in 2024 against the network and ABC host George Stephanopoulos, which resulted in a US$15-million settlement from ABC News.

Also last year, when he nominated Brendan Carr to serve as chair of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Trump hailed him as a “warrior for free speech.”

A year later, in a CNBC interview, Carr—marking an unprecedented intervention by the head of the American broadcast regulator—said that Kimmel “appear[ed] to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact,” and had urged ABC affiliates to stop airing his show before the network imposed what became a temporary pause.

Democracy Watch co-founder Duff Conacher said that Carr’s remarks about Kimmel and Trump’s threat to sue ABC for returning Kimmel’s show to the airwaves should serve as a wake-up call for Canadians.

“Our system is wide open to having a person like Trump get into power and abuse their power in every way because the prime minister has more unchecked power than the president of the U.S.,” said Conacher, who holds a PhD in law from the University of Ottawa.

“We need to put in the safeguards to ensure that doesn’t happen—and one of the best ways to do that is to change the appointments process and make it fully independent, fully non-partisan, fully merit-based for every single watchdog that enforces every key law.”

That includes the chairperson and chief executive officer, and all commissioners, of the CRTC, the Canadian equivalent to the FCC.

The Hill Times reached out to the CRTC for comment on the Trump-free speech matter and the implications for Canada from Vicky Eatrides, the commission’s current CEO.

While “it would be inappropriate for the CRTC to comment on events occurring in other countries,” said CRTC spokesperson Leigh Cameron in an email in which she stated that, “the CRTC is an independent quasi-judicial tribunal that regulates the Canadian communications sector in the public interest.”

Conacher said that he is also concerned about Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act that is at second reading in the House of Commons and which he said could have a chilling effect on free speech in Canada in terms of the types of complaints received.

“One person’s hate speech is another person’s satire or critical comment,” said Conacher.

According to a Justice Department backgrounder, the definition of “hatred” is focused on “the concepts of detestation or vilification” and not based on “mere dislike or disdain or acts that merely offend or humiliate.”

Conacher’s remarks on what is considered hate speech echo those of the late U.S. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan II, who wrote “one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric” in the majority opinion of the 1971 case, Cohen v. California, in which the high court held that the First Amendment prevented the conviction of Paul Cohen for the crime of disturbing the peace by wearing a jacket bearing the words, “Fuck the Draft” in the public corridors of a California courthouse.

As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently highlighted, U.S. law does not recognize “hate speech” as a legal category, but the First Amendment “prohibits the government from punishing speech even when it is controversial or offensive.”

The ACLU noted that earlier this month, “lawmakers have bullied schools into taking disciplinary action against teachers who have criticized Charlie Kirk’s political views” and “journalists and the media companies they work for have also felt a McCarthy-like pressure from the government, with popular late-night hosts losing their jobs after engaging with the ideas of a free speech provocateur [Kirk] whose tagline was ‘Prove me wrong.’”

U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Attorney General Pam Bondi “have encouraged the public to call the employers of anyone expressing views disfavoured by the government; vowed to use every resource the Department of Justice and Homeland Security have to identify, disrupt, and destroy groups the administration perceives to be an enemy; and claimed that ‘there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech’ while threatening to ‘absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,’” said the ACLU.

The FCC’s Carr accused Kimmel of “the sickest conduct possible,” and told Fox, “We’re going to hold these broadcasters accountable to the public interest—and if broadcasters don’t like that simple solution, they can turn their license in to the FCC.”

On X, former U.S. President Barack Obama wrote that “after years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.”

The Hill Times