Canada's Industry Department Drafted a Plan to Sue Citizens Over Social Media Posts, Internal Memo Shows

What the Memo Says

Blacklock's Reporter obtained the document through an Access to Information request. Dated March 31 and titled "Misinformation And Disinformation Strategy," the 35-page memo originated inside the department officially called Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), headed by Industry Minister Mélanie Joly.

Most of the document was redacted before release. What remained made clear the framework's structure: ISED staff would scan Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn for posts they classified as "factually incorrect, misleading or out of context." The escalation process built into that framework included the option of legal action against individual citizens.

The memo described any punishment as "proportionate and subject to senior level approval," according to Blacklock's Reporter. That means a departmental manager signs off. Not a judge, and not an independent body.

The Core Problem: No Outside Check

The department that dislikes a post is also the department that rules on whether the post is true. There is no threshold defined in the surviving text for what triggers escalation. There is no named external reviewer. There is no requirement that a court determine the post is false before legal action begins.

ISED managers were already monitoring the department's official social media channels and media outlets daily for "comments and recurring inaccuracies," the memo states. The proposed strategy would move that surveillance from reactive to proactive, catching what the government calls disfavored speech earlier.

A citizen who knows a federal department is reading posts, grading them, and holding a lawsuit in reserve thinks twice before criticizing that department in public.

The Government's Own Research Said Canadians Would Hate This

The memo's authors knew the public would push back. ISED's own research found that Canadians believe they can spot false information themselves and specifically do not want Ottawa deciding what counts as true, according to Reclaim the Net's reporting on the document.

The memo also acknowledged that government responses to misinformation can amplify the very claims they're trying to counter, and that targeting individuals risks generating additional backlash. The department mapped these risks and kept the plan on the table anyway.

Four Years of Contradiction

The Liberal government stated four years ago that "the rights and freedoms that individuals have offline must also be protected online." That commitment is now sitting alongside a memo that proposed suing Canadians for their online speech.

Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis called out the contradiction publicly on July 6, 2026, writing that while deliberate fraud, threats, and incitement already carry consequences under Canadian law, "empowering government to become the arbiter of truth is a dangerous path for a free society," according to iPhone in Canada.

The Strongest Defense of the Program

A fair reading of the government's position is that no Canadian was actually sued under this framework, that the memo represents internal deliberation rather than enacted policy, and that governments have a legitimate interest in correcting factually wrong information about their own programs, especially when that misinformation affects public health or safety decisions. Disinformation campaigns are real, they do cause harm, and a department exploring legal options during a strategy session is not the same thing as filing a lawsuit. The redactions may also cover restrictions and safeguards that never became public.

That case deserves a hearing. But it doesn't resolve the structural problem the memo reveals: the framework as described placed the power to define, detect, and punish "misinformation" entirely inside one department, with no external check before legal escalation.

Who's Responding

The non-profit Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) went public after the memo's release, according to iPhone in Canada. The JCCF is actively looking for Canadians who have received government letters demanding that online content be removed, offering legal representation to anyone who submits a request.

As of July 9, 2026, the federal government has not publicly explained how the monitoring program operates, how many times legal escalation was considered, or what criteria a post must meet to trigger a government response.

Bill C-22, described by iPhone in Canada as a surveillance-related measure opposed by Apple, Google, and multiple VPN providers, passed last month without floor debate, adding context to the broader question of where Ottawa's digital oversight posture is heading.

The unresolved question the JCCF is now trying to answer: have any Canadians already received removal demands from ISED, and if so, under what authority were those demands sent?