Canada has entered the totalitarianism of mandated speech

Canada now has a national law in the books that makes it a crime, among other things, for a person to refer to someone else using different pronouns than the second person doesn't want.

This is the first law in the West, to my recollection, that doesn't just make it a crime to say something non-physically-threatening — it actually makes it a crime to refuse to say something you have been ordered by law to say.

C-16 isn't just a censorship law.  It's so much more than that.

Ordering people to speak things against their will and conscience, and ruining their lives if they resist doing so, is a preposterous violation of the principle of freedom of conscience — you know, that philosophical thing behind the general rule that says you control your mouth, but you do not get to control other people's mouths, and vice versa.

Freedom of conscience is a fundamental principle underpinning the whole of Western civilization.  It's the very thing that allows you to, say, be supportive of gay people, without having to fear vindictive self-righteous pricks with the legal right to behead you or toss you in prison.

Well, it was the thing.  Not anymore.  Now we have vindictive self-righteous pricks who claim that you must be tossed in prison if you resist calling someone by their preferred pronouns.

And now that the principle has been violated, and there's legal precedent to violate it once again, there will be no shortage of vindictive self-righteous pricks who will try to legislate their own commandments on you.

Folks, pay attention: this has gone beyond social justice assholes merely smearing you for not falling in line with their cult.  Now they want you in prison too.

This is exactly how totalitarianism looks like.  What's coming next is not pretty.  Read Solzhenitsyn.  Read about Mao's Cultural Revolution.  Study history, so that you don't become a bloody statistic in it.

Context:

Update: in this debate, you can find positive confirmation of all my allegations in this post.  I wasn't even aware that Canada actually does have institutions literally named social justice tribunals (around minute 37). Further proof that the authoritarians aren't even trying to hide their intentions.