Canada is not a democracy.
Freedom of speech is a requirement of a democracy.
As for barbarism
I know a little about that as well
I went to public school in Canada.
Your point is well-taken, but -- and maybe I'm flogging a dead horse here -- there is so much more freedom of speech in Canada than in China that any similarities one can point out are going to be very strained. I'm certainly not defending the path away from true liberty that Canada has chosen (along with western Europe and the U.S., to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the country). But these Western countries are not totalitarian states.
Yes, there are problems with the Western democracies (or so-called democracies). But equating them with China or with other similar dictatorships obscures the truth about the dictatorships. It unintentionally runs parallel to the left-wing agenda of claiming that all societies have equal claim to our moral and political approval. It also obscures the arguments needed to try to bring the West back to the philosophy of freedom, because our problems (and therefore the ideas we need to reach for solutions) are very different from those of the dictatorships.