Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act now under consideration by Canada’s House of Commons, is seen by many as an appropriate response to a rise in antisemitic violence, but recent amendments that strip from it a protection on religious speech are alarming some religious leaders.
Antisemitic incidents have surged in Canada since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Jewish schools and synagogues have been shot at and firebombed. Statistics Canada recorded 920 police-reported incidents targeting Jews, who were 25 times more likely to experience a hate crime than other Canadians. Several Jewish advocacy groups have urged the government to modernize its hate crimes laws in response.
Bill C-9 would impose stiffer penalties for promoting hate, including making it a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to obstruct someone from accessing a place of worship or other sites such as schools or community centers where Jews, Muslims, and other identifiable groups gather.
It would also criminalize the willful promotion of hatred toward religious and ethnic groups. It would ban the public display of terror or hate symbols, including those of designated terror groups such as the Tamil Tigers, Islamic State, Hamas and Hezbollah. Some have argued that this provision could have a chilling effect on public protests.
Canada has laws against advocating genocide (Section 318 of the Criminal Code), public incitement of hatred (Section 319-1), and willful promotion of hatred (Section 319-2) against an identifiable group.
The Criminal Code, however, exempts individuals from charges of willful promotion of hate if the speech is based in good faith on the interpretation of a religious text.
The Bloc Quebecois only agreed to support the legislation on the condition that the bill removed religious exemptions from the wording. The Bloc is an intensely secularist party that was behind recent laws banning public prayer in the province that were strongly condemned by Quebec’s Anglican bishops.
Needing the Bloc’s support for the bill to pass, the minority Liberal government added an amendment to Bill C-9 that stipulated the religious exemption defense could not be invoked to justify speech that is deemed hateful.
The Conservative Party and some Christian and Muslim groups have strongly criticized the amendment, which cleared the House of Commons Justice Committee just before the holiday recess.
Conservative MP Roman Baber, who is Jewish, made an impassioned speech before the committee arguing that removing the religious defense was more likely to criminalize faith than combat hate.
“When we start going down the road of criminalizing more and more speech, we kill free speech.”
He said that the religious defense has never been used to acquit a defendant accused of public incitement of hatred and pointed out that the religious defense does not apply to Section 318 of the Criminal Code on advocating genocide.
Baber said “everyday Canadians” should not have to fear quoting Scripture. “I’m so tired that there is no nuance in this place,” he said to the committee. “You cannot defend yourself with a religious exemption after inciting hatred or inciting violence.”
On December 5, Christine Van Geyn, litigation director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, wrote in the National Post that the amendment may “gut the defence that protects good-faith religious opinion or speech rooted in religious texts.”
She explained: “Religious texts across traditions contain pleas for justice against enemies, metaphors for divine retribution and expressions of anguish, symbolism and cosmic struggle. This is not the realm of the police. If the state begins parsing Psalms or Hadiths line-by-line in a courtroom, then we have forgotten why the Charter exists at all.”
The lawyer said the defense is already extremely narrow, has rarely been invoked, and, based on her case-law search, has never succeeded. “Courts have also rejected attempts to cloak hateful speech in religious language.”
Van Geyn added: “Religious expression is messy, symbolic, and deeply human. It concerns the nature of justice, suffering, good and evil—the most intimate dimensions of identity and conscience. These are precisely the areas the criminal law must not tread. We don’t want the government parsing religious texts, or religious speech, especially given that most of our politicians are absolutely ignorant of religion, including, in some cases, their own.
“It’s dangerous for politicians to believe they can use statutes to sanitize Scripture they don’t properly understand. Criminal law is the state’s most violent instrument. It should not be swung at the human soul.”
The Bible is the most banned book in history “precisely because it is powerful and points to an authority beyond the reach of government,” Van Geyn said.
“Strip away the religious defense and Canada will not be combating hate—it will be criminalizing faith.”
A December 13 editorial in the National Post agreed: “In the past, people of faith who expressed their genuine belief on transgenderism and homosexuality, for example, enjoyed full free speech protections; that immunity won’t be certain for much longer. … C-9 started out as an exercise to play-act more protection for the faithful, but ended up as an attack on that already vulnerable group.”
A joint statement signed by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, B’nai Brith Canada, and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre addressed the Bloc amendment by saying they knew different opinions exist, but they believe the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures the right to freedom of religion.
Globe and Mail columnist Robyn Urback argued that “the law, as it is currently written, is working just fine. It’s the enforcement of hate speech laws” already on the books “that needs the government’s actual attention.”
The House of Commons Justice Committee is continuing to review the act, and a floor vote on it has not yet been scheduled.
Sue Careless is senior editor of The Anglican Planet and author of the series Discovering the Book of Common Prayer: A Hands-On Approach. She is based in Toronto.
