Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to speak to Bill C-9, although I have grave concerns, not with the objective, but with the manner in which the Liberals have gone about trying to achieve it.
From the outset, let me say that I am grateful the Liberals have finally recognized there is a wave of hate sweeping this country. I am glad they have realized what the Jewish community in this country, among others, has been crying out for for years, which is a government that will listen to these concerns and understand the very real threats that are targeting them on a regular basis. However, just as the Liberals have done with Bill C-2 and the firearms file, they take a legitimate issue and offer a remedy that attacks the rights of citizens and expands the state’s power, often without the checks and balances necessary.
Bill C-9 would do five things: “repeal the requirement that the Attorney General consent” to proceedings for hate charges, “create an offence of wilfully promoting hatred against any identifiable group by displaying certain symbols in a public place”, “create a hate crime offence of committing an offence...that is motivated by hatred”, “create an offence of intimidating a person in order to impede them from accessing certain places that are primarily used for religious worship” and “create an offence of intentionally obstructing or interfering with a person’s lawful access to such places.”
Of these five things, three are already covered by existing laws, such as creating an offence of wilfully promoting hatred by displaying a symbol. Subsection 319(2) of the Criminal Code already targets the wilful promotion of hatred. It targets the incitement of hatred, and the courts have been very broad in their interpretation of how that communication must take place. Symbols are a part of that. I can give an example from my own riding, where someone was charged, just within the last two weeks, in Central Elgin, Ontario, with a hate charge under subsection 319(2) after mowing a swastika into their front lawn. The display of a hate symbol led to a hate charge under the existing law.
Creating a hate offence is also redundant because hate motivation is already an aggravating factor under section 718.2 of the Criminal Code, and it has consistently been applied by the courts.
Offences of intimidation and obstruction at places of worship are already criminalized under sections 423, 431 and 434.1 of the Criminal Code, as well as under the laws pertaining to threats in section 264.1.
What we are left with when we strip away these three things, which are already covered by existing laws, are two things. Bill C-9 really does two things. Number one, it would remove the requirement for the Attorney General to consent. This has been viewed by activists and advocates on the left and the right in this country as a necessary safeguard against overzealous and political prosecutions by law enforcement or by Crown attorneys who simply do not understand this because it is a rarely applied provision of the law.
The next part is the most egregious part, where I will spend the remainder of my time. The government is codifying a new definition of hate. Bill C-9 describes hatred as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”. The government has said this is adapted from the Keegstra Supreme Court decision, a seminal free expression case in Canada, but it actually changes something very key. In Keegstra, the court held that hatred “connotes emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” This was expanded upon in the Whatcott decision, which says that hatred is “extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words 'detestation' and 'vilification'.” The word “extreme” does not appear in Bill C-9.
The government is very proud of this bill. The Liberals have had all summer to work on it, and they have had I do not know how many stakeholders, staffers, bureaucrats, lawmakers and lawyers go over every clause, I imagine, with a fine-tooth comb. Omitting an operative, very key word in a very key section of this bill is no accident. The government is, to use a legal term, wilfully lowering the threshold on what constitutes hate and, by extension, expanding the state's power and lowering the threshold of what can be regarded as free expression in this country.
The reason this is so important to me and to the Canadians who have been speaking out about Bill C-9 to this point is that the government has been, to its credit, very transparent on where it wants to go on free expression.
In the last two Parliaments, under the auspices of tackling so-called online harms, the Liberal government has introduced sweeping censorship bills that have been decried by voices on the left and the right. The Liberals have told us, as recently as last week, that this is coming back. The online harms bill is still very much a live issue, so we cannot look at Bill C-9 in isolation. We cannot disentangle it from the Liberal government's stated attitudes about freedom of expression and, quite frankly, the contempt in which they hold free expression and open debate.
I am going to quote someone for whom I believe the Liberals have a great affinity, and that is former Canadian chief justice Beverley McLachlin.
In her Keegstra dissent, she wrote:
If the guarantee of free expression is to be meaningful, it must protect expression which challenges even the very basic conceptions about our society. A true commitment to freedom of expression demands nothing less.
We do not need to look far to see what happens when the threshold for hate is lowered. In the United Kingdom, police are not even rarely knocking on doors and arresting people over mean tweets, because the same desire that we are seeing behind some of the negative and concerning impulses in Bill C-9 is criminalizing hate based on the grounds that words are violence. Censors justify their limitations on freedom of expression by elevating speech to violence. It is not for the state to discern, let alone prosecute, hate that may exist in one's heart; the law is to punish action, and the existing laws already do this.
I would be remiss not to point out that the Liberals get tough on crime only when they are talking about thought criminals. These are the only people that the Liberals want to put behind bars.
Let us look at some of the real hate crimes across the country. According to Juno News, 130-some churches have been vandalized or victimized by arson since 2021. Synagogues in Canada have been firebombed and vandalized. Jewish schools have been shot at. If the Liberals were serious about real hate crimes, they would be seeking mandatory 10-year prison sentences for these heinous assaults on places of worship. Again, the law should punish bad behaviour and not bad feelings.
To be fair, we cannot confront the hatred that exists in Canada and in Canadian society without acknowledging some of the root causes of it. The crisis of hate is a direct consequence of 10 years of divisive Liberal identity politics and the reckless breaking of the immigration system by the Liberal government. We cannot talk about hate without talking about the breaking of the immigration system that has resulted in the importation of foreign conflicts, and, in some cases, very hateful ideologies into the country.
Much of this happened under the watch of the justice minister who tabled the bill. He was the immigration minister who looked at the first six years of Justin Trudeau's government and how immigration was bungled there and said, “Do not worry; I can do worse”, and he did. It is no coincidence that hate crimes have risen as Canada has become less discerning and more reckless in its handling of the immigration system.
This is a crisis of the Liberals' creation. I do not trust those who caused the problem to solve it. I think that all people who may agree with the motivation behind this bill should be very cautious about handing over this level of power to the Liberals, when they have already demonstrated where they want to go. They have already demonstrated what they want to do.
I will return to another quote by former chief justice McLachlin.
She says:
[It] is not to say that it is always illegitimate for governments to curtail expression, but government attempts to do so must...be viewed with suspicion.
The Liberal government does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on hate. It does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on protecting charter liberties. It does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on any of the problems that it has been instrumental in either allowing to fester or, in some cases, in causing outright.
In Bill C-9, the good is already done by additional laws. The bad should be a warning sign. The Liberals should be very ashamed of trying to sneak this through the back door with a lower threshold for hate in a country that needs to protect and double down on free expression.
