Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. It is in the same vein, with a heavy heart, that I have to rise once again on one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation the government has ever introduced. Bill C-9 is a bill that has been litigated in the media, across kitchen tables and in town halls across the country. It has been litigated almost everywhere, except in this House and at committee, where the Liberals have availed themselves of a myriad of parliamentary tricks to shut down debate and silence the voices of Canadians.
We are, at this exact moment, I believe, about 25 minutes into the debate on the Senate amendment to Bill C-9. A little over 12 minutes ago, the Secretary of State for Combatting Crime walked in and said that there had been no agreement on this bill and the government would be moving to silence debate once again on this motion. Less than 15 minutes into the beginning of this debate, the Liberal government is already trying to shut it down. It is perhaps very poetic that it is once again censoring debate on its censorship bill.
Let me repeat in this House what I have said in this House, at committee and across the country multiple times: Hate is real and it is a scourge on this country.
I come from London. Just the other day, we had the five-year anniversary of the heinous and hate-motivated murder of the Afzaal family, who were killed for no other reason than their Muslim faith. We have seen the absolutely despicable hate on Canadian streets and streets around the world targeting the Jewish community, with synagogues and day schools being shot up, and posters trying to find a missing Jewish girl being ripped down. We have also seen, and I say this as a Christian, 123 Christian churches in the last five years burned or vandalized. Interestingly enough, when Justin Trudeau was prime minister, he was asked about this and said it was “understandable”. Some would say that is hate from someone who is supposed to be a unifying figure in this country, a prime minister.
Then we have, of course, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who literally said at a meeting of the justice committee, before he was promoted to cabinet, which gives a pretty good indication of what the Prime Minister welcomes among his closest advisers, that people should be criminally prosecuted for quoting certain verses of holy scripture. He mentioned Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans. Two of those are books in both the Bible and the Torah, but he said it could extend to other things as well. He said, and I have the direct quote, if any of my Liberal colleagues would like to call this misinformation, as they so often do, that some verses of scripture are so inherently hateful that they should warrant criminal prosecution.
Some Liberals may say that it is not true and that is not how it is going to unfold. However, if Liberal members cannot even agree on what constitutes hate, how can police, prosecutors, civil society groups and others who are going to be responsible for implementing what is in Bill C-9, if and when it receives royal assent and becomes law?
This is important because that same minister, just yesterday, introduced Bill C-34, with sweeping reforms to Internet regulations. I have not read through the entire bill myself yet, but I will point out that one of the things the Liberal government has tried to do with its two previous online harms bills is weaponize the state against what Liberals view as hate speech, not actual criminal hate speech, but what the Liberal government views as being speech that should be banned and restricted. Therefore, this Liberal government does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on anything to do with speech or conscience.
Canadians see through that. That is why Canadians have been so resoundingly clear that they do not want Bill C-9. That is why Canadians have, through hundreds of thousands of phone calls, contacted the Liberal members, who have in some cases listened to the concerns but clearly not taken them to heart, because they have not only forced through Bill C-9 at every stage, but silenced debate and silenced the voices of Canadians.
In the Senate, we saw this on full display within the last week and a half, when 240,000 postcards urging senators to reject Bill C-9 were sent to members of the Senate. What happened? The Senate mailroom said there were too many and that it could not deliver them all to the senators' offices, so it would send a couple of samples their way and put the rest in a warehouse in Gatineau.
Eventually, due to public pressure, and I thank my colleague, Senator Denise Batters from Saskatchewan, for her efforts on this, the postcards were moved to a Senate office room. Even so, senators were told to come on down if they wanted to get their postcards. Most did not. The very same senators then voted the bill through without seeing the scale of response from Canadians who do not support it. This is coming from Canadians of a very diverse array of political, religious, ethnic, philosophical and ideological backgrounds.
One of the things I found so fascinating, as someone who had the opportunity to meet with so many Canadians about Bill C-9, is how the strange bedfellows, as the old saying goes, were forming. There were evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims and non-religious civil liberties actors. I cannot say I have had many opportunities in the chamber to link arms, metaphorically, with my colleagues in the NDP and my colleague the leader of the Green Party, but on Bill C-9, both the left and the right saw that the Liberal government cannot be trusted with matters of civil liberties.
The Liberal government members, when facing any of the criticism, of which there has been much on Bill C-9, resort to the same old tired lines. They say that the bill cannot affect someone's charter rights, because the charter protects their rights. If that sounds familiar, it is because that was the identical argument they used to insulate themselves from criticism when they invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022. They said that it could not violate someone's charter rights because the Emergencies Act says it has to be charter-compliant.
What happened in the aftermath of that? Bank accounts of political protesters were frozen. The mobility rights of people engaging in peaceful protest were banned. It was so Orwellian and draconian that the federal court said it was unconstitutional, that it violated the civil liberties of Canadians. The government appealed. It went to the Federal Court of Appeal, which said once again that it violated the civil liberties of Canadians. Then, in the last hour of the last day on which the Liberal government could seek leave to the Supreme Court to appeal that decision, it appealed it, once again telling Canadians that it would defend its right to violate their rights.
That is what the Liberal government would be doing with Bill C-9. Perhaps someone will be wrongfully charged under Bill C-9, will avail themselves of the legal process and be exonerated, but as we have seen in the Emergencies Act case, that is likely to take years.
In anything to do with freedom of expression, the issue is not what decisions the state will make in totality. It is also a question of what chilling effect the legislation would create. Faith leaders all of a sudden are not confident about their ability to preach the totality of their holy book, and for them, not the government, to be the arbiter of which scriptures mean what. No faith leader should ever have to vet their sermons through the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, which is effectively the benchmark we are told must exist because it is the minister who would decide which verses of scripture are hateful and which verses are not.
We looked at the bill, and we saw that the Liberal government would be removing long-standing protections for religious speech, or what is often called the religious defence. This was an agreement between the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois that would remove long-standing protections that have been on the books for over 50 years. These are protections that say good-faith religious expression is not hate speech. It is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for expressing hate. Someone cannot rob a bank, run down the road and yell, “God is good” and expect that the religious defence will save them. I do not recommend anyone tries.
What the religious defence says is that if someone is making a good-faith religious expression or citing a religious text, that cannot meet the definition of hate speech. Calls for genocide and calls for violence, calls that are themselves criminal, were illegal, are illegal and will always be illegal.
The religious defence does not protect against criminally hateful speech. It simply sets out what is not and should not be construed as hate speech to protect against authoritarian censors, like the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who wish to say that good-faith religious expression can and may be hateful. Canadians are so alarmed by this because when we remove good-faith protections that apply only to people who have made good-faith expressions, the only people we are protecting are those who were engaging in good-faith debates, whether they were on a religious matter or an academic matter, or whatever else may come about from them.
The removal of the religious defence is not the only problem with Bill C-9. It certainly became a flashpoint in the discussion. It was one of the most significant points for people of faith, who, I would note, have already seen a litany of attacks on their rights from the Liberal government. Going back a couple of years ago, there was the threat of removing their charitable status. That was an endorsement given by Liberal and New Democrat members. Going back years earlier, there was the ideological and religious litmus test the Liberal government put on organizations that wanted to receive Canada summer jobs funding, as though their ability to hire a summer student to help out should be contingent on their religious and moral beliefs. This is not new. It is why people were, rightfully, so concerned about it.
In the end, we also had the process before us truncated. Efforts to bring in the testimony that the Minister of Justice claimed he would listen to and did not were stymied. Efforts to read letters from faith leaders from very ecumenical backgrounds were not permitted. I wonder why. Even now, I wonder why, just a few minutes into our discussion, the secretary of state for combatting thought crime decided to rise and try once again to shut down debate on Bill C-9. The Liberal government lacks the courage to even defend the totality of what it is doing.
I repeat that this is not a rejection of the existence of hate and the need to respond to it. I will specifically recognize hate against the Jewish community. I remember that one of my colleagues, the member for Mount Royal, who has been very outspoken in standing up for the Jewish community in his riding, was at one time entertaining leaving the Liberal caucus because of the Liberal caucus's anti-Semitism problem. Irwin Cotler, a renowned human rights advocate, was urging my colleague from Mount Royal to leave the Liberals because they were not standing up against the hate facing our Jewish community. This is why I do not take the Liberals seriously when they say they have the solution to a problem they have allowed to fester, and it is why Canadians do not trust them.
Interestingly enough, one of the fascinating conversations I had in the course of our deliberations on Bill C-9 when it was before the House was with the Rabbinical Council of Toronto, which is a group of Orthodox rabbis, not just in Toronto, but actually across many parts of the country. These are men I met with who face tremendous discrimination and hate. They do not even feel safe walking around parts of Toronto looking visibly Orthodox. They said hate is real and anti-Semitism is real, but they are not going to be protected by laws that limit their ability to preach their faith and read their scriptures.
Religious freedom for one is religious freedom for all. That is why faith groups like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the United Church of Canada, the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council, some of which are more liberal with a small "l" and some of which are more conservative with a small “c”, but all of which represent different faith groups, have all found problems with Bill C-9. In some cases, they have found problems with the entirety of it. In others, they have found problems with the parts dealing with removing long-standing protections for religious speech.
We do not protect anyone from hate and we do not protect anyone from persecution if we take away their rights. This is why Bill C-9 and the Liberal government's insistence on forcing this through have been such a clarion call for people across this country.
I will speak specifically about the section of the bill criminalizing hate symbols, because this is what is at issue in the amendment that has been returned to us from the Senate. The amendment would add a noose, a symbol with a tremendously hateful history, which actually did not get much exploration when Bill C-9 was before the justice committee and was not part of the original list the Liberal members put forward.
I do not actually recall whether there were any questions from Liberal MPs, or any MPs, on this. I could be wrong on that point, but I certainly know it did not take up any substantive amount of time in our committee's study on this. However, the problem that did arise on the hate symbol section was twofold. One part was a question of redundancy. Displaying a hate symbol in Canada is already a crime if someone is doing it for an illegal purpose.
I can give a very recent example of this. In the fall, there was a man whom I find to be utterly despicable, actually, in my part of the province, sadly, who decided to inflict hate on the community by mowing a Nazi hakenkreuz, often referred to as a swastika, into his front lawn. He lived on a main highway. It was very jarring for people, certainly those in the Jewish community, who had to see it. Police investigated. They did amazing work. They determined it did meet the standard of wilfully promoting hate, an existing Criminal Code offence. The evidence was the fact that he was displaying a hate symbol in a manner to wilfully promote hate. The law worked.
The idea of needing to ban hate symbols is utterly redundant, because they are already illegal, as is much of what is in Bill C-9 in general. The offences relating to obstruction, intimidation or blocking access are things already covered by existing laws. If we have a problem with existing laws not being enforced, we need to deal with that, but new laws are going to fall victim to the same cultural attitudes, which, again, I would attribute to a lack of political leadership more than to anything else.
However, the problem when we do prescribe specific hate symbols is that now all of a sudden we have introduced a new layer of ambiguity into the law. We have introduced a new problem, which is, does the displaying of what the Liberals say is a hate symbol, alone, constitute a criminal act? The Liberals claimed this was not the case. The justice minister claimed this was not the case. However, the testimony actually said otherwise.
For example, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group said that the offence is written in such a way that the “simple display” of one of the symbols included would in and of itself “be considered a wilful incitement to hatred.” A plain reading of the offence by police or the courts could reasonably be that it is the simple display of an image that in and of itself promotes hatred. Intent does not matter. The “simple display” is all that matters.
We also heard something very similar from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, pointing out the redundancy, that “public display of a hateful symbol can already be part of a broader pattern of behaviour that leads to criminal conviction.” The CCLA gave another example from 2010, where someone “was convicted of public incitement of hatred for burning a cross”, and “ In 2012, an individual was convicted of mischief for, among other things, drawing symbols associated with the [KKK] in front of a Black family's house.” Existing laws were used to go after, in that case, anti-Black racism, which is very real, does warrant a response and should be prosecuted, as should all other illegal forms of hatred in this country.
The problem when we start enumerating hate symbols is that we are going to end up with a never-ending process of people wanting to add more symbols onto it. If we are going to go down that road of enumerating these symbols are illegal and these ones are not, we have to be prepared to look at all the symbols that cause people hate. We actually explored this at the justice committee in the House of Commons. I moved an amendment to add the hammer and sickle to the list of hate symbols. It is a symbol associated with Communism, responsible for claiming 100 million lives. The Liberals voted this down.
The Liberals are interested in only some types of hate. They are interested in going after only some types of violence. What about the logo for antifa, again, a network, a philosophy, a belief system, an organization, however we want to refer to it, responsible for demonstrable violence, threats of violence and hate? Where is that on the list?
With respect to the list of terror entities that the Liberal government has put as the main focal point of the hate symbol section, a list that is subject to change and that the government could effectively change unilaterally, there were issues raised by witnesses about, if not the veracity, certainly the integrity of that list. I think getting into that would probably be something that takes up more time. I guess I have unlimited time, but it would take up, theoretically, more time than the House would like to spend on the technicalities of it. However, it was a point that we did not get the opportunity to really interrogate about much further, because of the Liberals' desire to shut down debate on the bill.
As fascinating as I am sure a lot of Canadians find the inner workings of Parliament, or as fascinating as I wish they found them, it is actually quite frustrating. I go back to the reason I came here. One of the things I said in my maiden speech was that I came to Ottawa and Parliament to make Canada a freer place.
I was so focused on the things the Liberals have done to erode these freedoms that needed to be undone. It was shocking to see how many more things they continue to heap on and how many more bills and pieces of legislation have come forward that attempt to put the government more in control of things as fundamental as what Canadians say, what scriptures Canadians read and what religious beliefs Canadians can share and exhibit with each other.
This idea of control is so deeply ingrained in the Liberal ethos. It is shameful. I remember that many years ago, freedom of speech was a non-partisan concept. I remember how the great Senator Jerry Grafstein, a Liberal senator who was one of the champions of freedom of expression, was one of the champions of opposing section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act as it was used against people for their opinions. Where are those Liberals? Where are the freedom-of-speech-loving Liberals? I see Liberals who love censorship, and I see Liberals who love silencing people. I see them all the time. Where are the Liberals who are prepared to stand on principle for freedom of expression?
Interestingly, when the Bill C-9 debate was first going on in this House, I heard from a number of Liberal MPs who were very quietly supportive of what we were saying on the bill. They were hearing from their constituents from the Muslim community, the Christian community and all communities, raising issues about this. Those Liberal MPs seem to have been silenced by their own party, their own whip or their own Prime Minister. When push came to shove, they were whipped into voting for this bill, which their communities and constituents did not want.
As an aside, I am very interested in seeing, when this particular motion goes to a vote, how my colleague from southwestern Ontario, the member for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong is going to vote, because I stood in this House with her as she eloquently railed against Liberal assaults on civil liberties. She stood up and talked about how the Liberals wanted to put her in jail for her religious beliefs. Will there be room for that member to stand and vote her conscience in the Liberal Party? I do not know. History would indicate no. I know people of faith are watching. Perhaps they are praying for a miracle. I do not know.
I look at the discussion that took place in the Senate. As someone who has been a member of Parliament for a little over a year, there is a lot I need to learn, and a lot we can all learn, about how the procedures and mechanisms work in this place. I have not had the opportunity to delve too much into how Senate procedure works.
I was watching some of the debates that took place at the Senate human rights committee, which was reviewing Bill C-9. I was actually heartened that it had many witnesses testifying who had been barred by the Liberals from testifying when the bill was before the House, like Lisa Bildy, who is a tremendous human rights lawyer from the Free Speech Union of Canada, Professor David Millard Haskell, from Wilfrid Laurier University, and a great many others, including The Democracy Fund's Mark Joseph. These people all said something very similar, which was that as the bill is written, the only assurances we can take that the wrong people would not be charged are the government's assurances that that is not what it is trying to do.
I realize that we are getting late into the evening. Even if we take the Liberals at their word, which I do not think people generally do, and certainly not these Liberals, we are relying on every single person in the country reading the definition of hate the same way. We are relying on every police officer, every provincial attorney general, every civil society group and every faith leader to read this the same way and understand it. Hate is a subjective concept.
One of the changes that I am glad was made to Bill C-9 was an amendment to the original Liberal definition, which everyone agreed significantly lowered the threshold to charge someone for their speech. I am glad that we were able to change it. However, there were other amendments that the Liberals rejected. One that I was actually quite shocked to see them reject was an amendment to remove the applicability of the Liberals' new stand-alone hate offence to all federal laws and limit it to just the Criminal Code, because the new stand-alone hate offence is a criminal law.
Under Bill C-9 as written, that law would apply to even non-criminal statutes like, for example, the Canadian Human Rights Act. Someone could be criminally charged with a Liberal-defined hate crime for breaking a non-criminal law. The Liberals had no interest in fixing what many people assumed might have been an accident or a drafting error. They had no interest in fixing that.
Then we can look at some of the other arguments that were put forward in the Senate. Now, the Senate human rights committee originally added more amendments than just the one that we are discussing today. Some of those attracted a great deal of swift response from people across the country. For example, the Senate proposed a specific criminalization of residential school denialism:
Everyone who, by communicating statements other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous Peoples by condoning, denying or downplaying the Indian Residential Schools System...is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or...is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
This is an amendment that passed the Senate human rights committee. It almost passed the Senate but was rejected at report stage, ultimately. This is an amendment that has actually been denied and decried by a great many indigenous leaders, who fear that something like this would bar them from even telling their own stories and discussing their own approach.
Interestingly enough, we heard from the government's representative in the Senate. I am not just saying she is a Liberal senator because Justin Trudeau appointed her, but she actually bears the title of the government's representative in the Senate. She said that the reason she voted against that amendment was because it did not go far enough. She thought it did not go far enough, and she said the government was instead working with a member from the NDP, the member for Winnipeg Centre, I believe, who has a private member's bill that attempts to do something very similar. The only reason the Liberal government's representative in the Senate said no to that amendment was that it did not go far enough. That is worth noting.
The original amendment that dealt with the noose issue was an amendment that would have actually prohibited a noose, a burning cross or a white pointed hood, or any other symbol that is used or associated with the promotion of ideological violence based on race, ancestry or ethnic origin. Nobody wants to see hate in this country. No one wants to see hate symbols. No one wants to see the proliferation of burning crosses, nooses, things used to traumatize and terrorize people, things associated with very real historical harms.
I remember some years ago, there was a Liberal member of Parliament, the member for Vancouver Centre, I believe, who spoke. It ended up being completely made up, but she spoke about some rash of cross burnings in a community, which ended up not being accurate. I do think that for people who have actually experienced these things, it is horrible, and we should condemn it. We should use existing laws that deal with hate.
Then I look at when the discussion came to the Senate human rights committee on the religious defence, the most contentious part of the bill. This was the part of the bill that was ultimately responsible for the hundreds of thousands of phone calls to Liberal MPs, for the hundreds of thousands of postcards, for the emails that I have gotten and still continue to get about this bill, and for the conversations that, in my riding, real people have with me because they have heard what the Liberals are doing and cannot stand it. It was the removal of the religious defence.
The Senate human rights committee voted against reinstating the religious defence. It was focused more on adding more restrictions and more layers and less on preserving the fundamental nature of freedom of expression and freedom of religion that should underpin all work we do here, upholding the fundamental values that are enshrined in our charter but definitely predate the charter.
Then, when those amendments were rejected at report stage, we had another discussion, at third reading in the Senate. Conservative Senator Yonah Martin tried a much more modest way of telling faith communities in this country that their rights would not be targeted, and that was to take the Liberal pablum that was inserted to try to pacify people. I will read that. This was after the justice minister said he was going to canvass faith communities and said he was going to listen to their concerns. Some people called us and said, “Hey, great, we won. The justice minister said he's going to fix it.” They then saw the text and realized that, once again, a Liberal had written a cheque that could not be cashed.
The line that the Liberals put into the bill, referring to the section to do with wilfully promoting hate, was this:
For greater certainty, nothing in subsection 319(2) or (2.?2) of the Criminal Code shall be construed as prohibiting a person from communicating a statement on a matter of public interest, including an educational, religious, political or scientific statement made in the course of a discussion, publication or debate, if they do not wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group by communicating the statement.
To put that in plainer text, what the “for greater certainty” clause says is that one is not wilfully promoting hate if one is engaged in a religious or political or educational discussion, unless one is wilfully promoting hate. I am not sensing the clarity there. It is circular reasoning if ever there was some.
We had lawyers, scholars and faith leaders who weighed in on this, who said they know how we can salvage this. We can take off that last line, the circular line, “if they do not wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group”. That was rejected when we tried to do it at the House justice committee, and it was rejected when Senator Martin tried to do it in the Senate. Again, the government's representative in the Senate refused to budge on any of this, refused to give even an inch on sending a signal to faith communities in this country that their rights and freedoms will be protected.
I mean no disrespect to our colleagues in the Senate, but it was interesting hearing the debates both on the Senate floor and in the Senate human rights committee, when none of the thorny issues that one would think would have to be addressed when dealing with these definitions was actually asked about. For example, when the amendment on criminalizing residential school denialism or downplaying was being discussed, nobody that I heard asked what that means. Nobody asked how we define it, how we distinguish academic inquiry on a subject of historic significance from downplaying in a way that is, as the legislation defines it, hateful.
Even when talking about the noose, no one actually interrogated the point of what a noose means. That may sound silly to some people, because we can all in our minds imagine what that is. When we are talking about the point at which a symbol becomes illegal, it is a very different question. The point at which a symbol becomes illegal needs to have a very clear definition, especially if we weave it into the dialogue we heard from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and others, that a display of a symbol is inherently hateful regardless of intent.
I do not wish to sound glib here. I do not wish to do what the Supreme Court does, which is to concoct all these reasonable hypotheticals to try to rewrite law. I will point out that there have been stories where someone has thought something was a noose and it was not. I could see situations in which someone sets up a really terrifying Halloween display on their home, for example, and someone may misunderstand the intent and call the police. This is the problem. When we are enumerating symbols and we are separating out intent, which is what lawyers have said the stand-alone hate symbol ban does, we are going to have a chilling effect on discourse, which is precisely the problem.
Just as when we remove long-standing protections for religious speech from the Criminal Code, we are sending a signal to people of faith that their sermons, their beliefs and their scriptures are now fair game for prosecution. That is the message that we are sending. That is the message that is being sent when the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture says that some verses of scripture are so inherently hateful, they should attract prosecution. That is the message we can draw when Justin Trudeau says it is understandable that someone would want to burn a Christian church. All of this is part and parcel of why Canadians were so alarmed.
If I try to find the silver lining in all of this, it is that I have had the opportunity to have discussions with people I would not find myself on the same side as politically. I have had a great many discussions with people where we can disagree on nine out of 10 other things, but on this, we are united. I do not actually think that is any testament to my ability to attract friends and whatnot. I think it is a testament to how well the Liberals have mastered creating enemies, because the Liberals do not have the goodwill from these communities either. The Liberals know they do not have the benefit of the doubt, and we have seen this in the context of other legislation too.
The Liberals' Bill C-8 and Bill C-22 were both subject to their same pre-emptive defence that they made with Bill C-9, which is, “Don't worry. You can trust us.” Canadians look at that and say, “Oh no, we can't,” and I agree with those Canadians. The Liberal government has to make its case that it is trustworthy and that it is not going to abuse its power and its authority.
Let us imagine a parallel universe here in which the Liberals do not want to weaponize their authority against political dissidents. I know that seems like a very fictional, hypothetical scenario, but let us just imagine that world for a moment. What is to say that the next government would not? This is the problem, and we can look at the Emergencies Act as an example, with laws that give the government power that is supposed to be constrained only by its goodwill. This is why we are so concerned about other legislation in which ministerial discretion is so central to the powers and authorities vested in the laws. It is because we do not trust these ministers.
Quite frankly, earlier today during Oral Questions, a very influential, powerful minister, the minister responsible for the public service, the President of the Treasury Board, was asked a simple question about his file, and he looked through his papers for 30 seconds to find the answer and could not. In the end, he sat down and let someone else answer the question. We can imagine a minister like that put in a role where they get to decide what Canadians say online, or what telecom companies have to do. We can imagine the power that other people in the Liberal government would have, with a minister who will just read whatever is on the page and, if it is not there, will just sit down.
That is why we have to restrain government power, and it is not just because of a distrust of the Liberal government. It is because of a distrust of the state in general that Canadians have. We should not be happy giving the Liberals any power that we would not want Conservatives to have, that we would not want the Bloc to have, that we would not want New Democrats to have and that we would not want the Greens to have. It is not that all of these parties have an equal likelihood of forming government, but I am just using them as an example here.
All should agree with that. All should understand that. We can think of the Emergencies Act. Did anyone honestly think that the Liberals would be so gung-ho to use the powers that they used that act for? What if a Conservative government was doing it against a group of protesters that they felt were more aligned with the left?
All of this is speaking to what I believe is the most central reason that Bill C-9 was so vociferously opposed by so many Canadians. It was not because of all these dog whistles that the Liberals like to use: conspiracy theories, obstruction or certain people wanting a licence to hate. People want freedom in this country. They want to know that their rights and freedoms are protected. They want to know that the Liberal government is not just going to pay lip service to the charter but is actually going to live and embody it in all it does.
The values of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to privacy, all of these things, are not just slogans that the Liberals can discard at their whim when they run up against a policy they want to champion. These are central things not just to Canadian identity but to the human experience.
Freedom of expression is, in many respects, the most important freedom. This is not my thought, but it is one that I have shared a great many times: If all other freedoms were stripped away but one, the freedom of expression, we could use that to fight to win all the others back.
I am standing up today, in what will more than likely be my last opportunity in the House to address Bill C-9, to say that we cannot let our freedoms be eroded. We cannot. It is not just about whether people believe a faith, beliefs or values to be hateful. I do not believe that the majority of people in this country are hateful people. I believe it is is a small minority, and I believe that small minority needs to be addressed. When their expressions and their actions rise to the criminal level, they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
However, I also believe that the issue is not about whether people themselves want to use their freedom to spread hate. It is about whether those who disagree with them will agree not to use the word “hate” to malign them or silence them.
I am so grateful for the leadership of some people who now find themselves in the Liberal Party. I mentioned, for example, my former colleague from Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong, who was a fierce crusader against Bill C-9. I also have to recognize the Liberal member for Nunavut, who was a tremendous crusader against Bill C-9. I applauded her second-reading speech, when she spoke about the powers the Liberal government was trying to give itself. I hope the member will remember her roots and vote against this.