When Canadians lose their freedoms, it isn’t through the brazen form of vote-stealing that brings tens of thousands into the streets to protest. The process here is much more gentle. It goes unnoticed by most of us — a simple partial turn of the tap on the oxygen tank. 

The most recent instance was a two-paragraph addition quietly slipped into page 429 of Bill C-59, the omnibus bill implementing last fall’s economic update. The amendment’s proponents say it was designed to combat corporate “greenwashing,” a practice of falsely claiming that a company’s products or activities will protect the environment or combat climate change.