The hon. member for Repentigny has the floor.
Sean Fraser Liberal
In committee (House), as of Oct. 1, 2025
Subscribe to a feed (what's a feed?) of speeches and votes in the House related to Bill C-9.
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament has also written a full legislative summary of the bill.
This enactment amends the Criminal Code to, among other things,
(a) repeal the requirement that the Attorney General consent to the institution of proceedings for hate propaganda offences;
(b) create an offence of wilfully promoting hatred against any identifiable group by displaying certain symbols in a public place;
(c) create a hate crime offence of committing an offence under that Act or any other Act of Parliament that is motivated by hatred based on certain factors;
(d) create an offence of intimidating a person in order to impede them from accessing certain places that are primarily used for religious worship or by an identifiable group for certain purposes; and
(e) create an offence of intentionally obstructing or interfering with a person’s lawful access to such places.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Bill numbers are reused for different bills each new session. Perhaps you were looking for one of these other C-9s:
This is a computer-generated summary of the speeches below. Usually it’s accurate, but every now and then it’ll contain inaccuracies or total fabrications.
Bill C-9 amends the Criminal Code to combat hate by creating new offences for intimidation, obstruction, hate-motivated crimes, and the public display of hate symbols, while codifying the definition of hatred.
Liberal
Conservative
NDP
Bloc
Combatting Hate ActGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Alexandra Mendès) Alexandra Mendes
The hon. member for Repentigny has the floor.
Patrick Bonin Bloc Repentigny, QC
Madam Speaker, we have often said that we want to move this bill forward and work on it in committee. However, it is important for us to remind the House that we have concerns, particularly with respect to the right to protest. In Quebec, we have a long history of peaceful protests.
I would like my colleague to tell us at what point he thinks it could become a crime to obstruct access to a place. We see it as a slippery slope. Does my colleague have the same concerns? Where do we draw the line? At what point is someone obstructing access to a place?
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Madam Speaker, I am a very strong advocate for the Canadian Charter of Rights. I respect our democratic principles, one of which is being able to protest. What I do not respect are hate-motivated protests targeted against a particular ethnic or religious group. I have very little or zero tolerance. I do not believe one should, for example, prevent an individual from being able to go to a place of worship or faith, whether a synagogue or a mosque. I think it is an expectation that people should feel safe to be able to attend things of that nature.
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Surrey Newton, BC
Madam Speaker, on September 16, I got a note from Sarabjit Kaur of Abbotsford, because there were hateful comments made around the Nagar Kirtan they had in Abbotsford. She said, “What is the RCMP and other bodies doing about all these hateful things going on? I feel so unsafe about sending our kids out to school. Do you think schools like the Dasmesh School and Khalsa School should have more security in place?”
I would like to ask the hon. member for Winnipeg North to comment and to give a message to Sarabjit as to why the bill is more important than the Conservatives think.
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Madam Speaker, whether it is my friend and colleague who just raised the question; the Prime Minister, who has made comments on it; or the general feeling not only within the Liberal caucus but also among many others, people have a right to feel safe to be able to participate in the things my friend and colleague just referenced.
Whether it is a Nagar Kirtan or going to a gurdwara, these are things that are a part of who we are, and we should be celebrating them. We should not have to tolerate targeted hate messaging. We need, collectively, to make a strong statement, and the type of legislation that is before us at least is an important step in doing just that.
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Madam Speaker, I would say this to my hon. colleague: We are trying to combat hate, and this is prompted by a question that was asked earlier, but why do we not go after rage farming and the algorithms, bring back the digital services tax and really deal with the threat that promotes hatred?
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Madam Speaker, the Internet in many ways has been such a wonderful thing in terms of advancement of our communities, society and the world in general, but there are a lot of negatives. The rage and hatred we see through different forms of the Internet is something that concerns me, and I suspect it concerns a great number of people. Looking for ideas on how we can minimize the negatives of the Internet is something that I am always open to listening to, at the very least.
Shuv Majumdar Conservative Calgary Heritage, AB
Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House of Commons to speak to Bill C-9, an act to amend the Criminal Code with respect to hate propaganda, hate crime and access to religious or cultural places.
I will be splitting my time with my dear friend, the member of Parliament for Bowmanville—Oshawa North.
I will speak about Gardiner and Voltaire: one an English journalist and the other a French satirist. A.G. Gardiner, in his essay On the Rule of the Road, put it plainly: One's freedom ends where the other person's nose begins. One's right to swing their fist ends when it collides with another's safety. To live together, we accept this social contract, curbing certain impulses so that everyone may move freely. Gardiner used simple ideas like the limits of playing a trombone at midnight to illustrate the point.
True freedom comes with the responsibilities of restraint, rules and tolerance. Without responsibilities, liberties clash and dissolve into anarchy, where no one is free. With these responsibilities, we achieve freedom for all, including minorities.
Voltaire, in his writings and satire, came to the same truth from another perspective. For him, freedom of speech was the lifeblood of progress. A society advances when ideas, even unpopular ones, can be expressed and tested. He fought censorship, knowing that suppression is always the tool of tyranny. A phrase often attributed to him, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, was in fact penned later by Evelyn Beatrice Hall. Voltaire defended free expression, while rejecting incitement, libel and sedition, insisting that open dialogue is the only safeguard of liberty.
Taken together, Gardiner and Voltaire remind us that freedom lives in the balance in between. Without restraint, it collapses into anarchy, and without expression, into tyranny. It is against this balance that we must measure the state of our country today.
Taking into account the understanding that Gardiner and Voltaire provide us with, let us chart out Canada in the last decade and provide three principal critiques of Bill C-9. The hate crime legislation before us right now is legislation that we should have been debating several years ago. We will take no lessons from Liberals when it comes to fighting hate. Let us talk about the last decade.
Since 2015, when the Liberals took office, hate crimes have gone up 258%, police-reported hate crimes have increased six years in a row and anti-Semitic hate crimes are up 416%. We have a government in place that has allowed Jewish Canadians, who account for less than 1% of our population, to become the most-targeted minority in our country. Seventy per cent of all hate crimes are targeted at less than 1% of the population. It is a government that, for far too long, has decided to place political expediency over moral clarity, choosing appeasement over principle.
A synagogue was fire-bombed twice in one year. Two Jewish schools were shot up. A bomb threat targeted Jewish institutions across Canada. A Jewish man was assaulted in a Montreal park. A Jewish woman was stabbed in the kosher section of an Ottawa Loblaws. The government's announcement, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, of granting a state to the people who practise state terror as statecraft, emboldening mobs and violence upon our Jewish communities, is just the latest example.
It has been a decade of waiting for the rule of law over mob rule. Christians across our country have been subjected to over 100 church bombings and attacks. Communities are divided against one another as political projects of Liberals, rather than as a country being raised on the basis of the rule of law for all its people. Truckers took to our streets to protest for their rights and freedoms, as the Prime Minister then betrayed civil liberty and sowed distrust in our financial institutions, calling those very protesters seditious.
Trust is broken in this country. Our institutions, whether media, bureaucratic, judicial, financial or academic, have all been subjected to radical conformity, not critical thinking. The rot of one ideology as supreme against all others has shaken the confidence of Canadians, and restoring that trust requires much more than the performance art and virtue signalling that much of Bill C-9 presents.
The same Liberal members of Parliament who stood and watched as trust eroded and communities were torn apart stand here today to claim that they have solutions for the very problems they caused. They claim they have majestically changed since their new Prime Minister took office. We cannot forget the damage and division they sowed, the trust they have broken.
It is against the backdrop of the rising hate and violence the Liberals have caused that I offer three three principal critiques of Bill C-9. First is the removal of the Attorney General from the process of approving charges for hate crimes. The requirement for AG consent has long served as a safeguard against abuse and as a means for accountability. By removing that oversight, the government would risk giving unelected bureaucrats unchecked discretion over prosecutions, paving the way for radical ideological judges.
My friend, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, put it best on September 24:
Right now, our biggest problem is that enforcement is not consistent. Bail is virtually automatic, and charges are often dropped. Serious charges are plead down. That is where Parliament's attention should be: on stronger enforcement, on swifter prosecutions and on support for victims. Unamended, this bill risks punishing the unpopular while the truly dangerous slip through.
Second is a question of identity. Where the bill currently refers to the protection of identity, it shifts attention away from protecting individual dignity. This carve-out from free speech would give Liberals the opportunity to define what they do not like as hate speech. Identities and human association are complex and subjective, but the concepts of the individual's rights and dignity are objective. Our laws should defend every Canadian against intimidation, harassment and violence, not protect abstract categories that are open to interpretation.
Third, another concern with Bill C-9 is its approach to defining “hate” itself. As drafted and as the government indicates, the bill would codify the Supreme Court of Canada's definition of “hatred” as “detestation or vilification”. On its face this seems consistent, but by removing the word “extreme”, the government would lower the legal threshold, enabling police to lay a multitude of charges with less scrutiny and less investigation. In practice, this would risk opening the floodgates to inconsistent prosecution and litigation. This is the kind of overreach we have come to expect in the United Kingdom, but not here in Canada. The Conservatives are the party of free speech, not the party of prosecuting those whose speech we do not agree with.
There is a lot at stake in Bill C-9. We must resist the left's troubling argument that words alone constitute violence. Words are words. Violence is violence. Conflating the two licenses the idea that real violence is a legitimate response to speech, a principle that is both dangerous and indefensible. The only correct response to offensive or hateful words is more words and more debate.
If there has been a rise in hate in Canada, it is not because we fail to police speech; it is because we fail to police actions: barricading neighbourhoods, assaulting members of religious minorities, burning down churches, shooting up synagogues or vandalizing minority-held businesses. It is because we have a government that sows division, pitting one community against another, and that treats one speech as sacrosanct and the other as seditious. It is because our government does not have the resources to act and because the Liberals have created a justice system that lets offenders walk back onto our streets.
The solution to violence is enforcement of the law by police and by courts, accountability for wrongdoers and genuine condemnation by public officials, none of which we have seen. Bill C-9, as written, falls short. As hate crimes have risen across this land, successive public safety and justice ministers have failed to bring focus to the source of these crimes. They have failed to provide both legal and moral leadership to stand against the mob and call for civility in Canada, honouring what Gardiner and Voltaire described. Without them, violent crimes go unchecked.
It is time to jail the haters, not for what they say, but for what they do. Bill C-9 fails to strike the balance Canadians expect. Despite having had the support of the Conservatives since the election, the Liberals only table a law that would essentially repurpose an existing law and would contribute very little to dealing with one of the biggest crises our country has to confront. We must confront hatred with the rule of law and the love of liberty. We must protect Canadians from violence, not expose them to arbitrary prosecutions. We must hold the government accountable for legislation that leaves our communities vulnerable.
That is our responsibility. That is our commitment. That is the standard Canadians expect.
John-Paul Danko Liberal Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON
Madam Speaker, let us perhaps look in the mirror. The Conservative leader associated with the conspiracy theory convoy. He has used misogynistic keywords in his party's propaganda. He has associated with the alt-right extremist and white supremacist-adjacent group Diagolon. His party spent years appeasing the Conservative Party base, bringing nothing to the table but division and conflict.
What responsibility does the Conservative Party and its leader have for the growing hate and division in Canada?
Shuv Majumdar Conservative Calgary Heritage, AB
Madam Speaker, the hon. member should look in the mirror.
This is a government that has spent the last decade dividing Hindus and Sikhs against one another. This is a government that has failed to utter a single word of strength against a majority of hate crimes being levelled against less than 1% of our population. More than 70% of all hate crimes across the country are focused on less than 1% of the population.
Over the last year, what has the government done? It has accelerated hate and poured gas onto the fire. Synagogues have been bombed, schools have been shot and communities have been threatened.
Conservatives will take no lessons from Liberals on what it takes to confront hate when they are the ones who have been promoting it all along.
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Madam Speaker, I know my hon. colleague was not yet a member of this place or living in Ottawa during the convoy, but I do not think he fully recognizes how awful it was for local businesses and local residents to not be able to sleep and to have horns blowing all the time. We sat in this chamber not knowing if the trucks outside were loaded with explosives.
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Madam Speaker, no one knew what was in those vehicles. I was told by the RCMP that I needed an escort to get in and out of the building because my face was too well known and that I would not be safe trying to get into the building. The buses were not running. The taxis were not running. It was not safe to walk through a crowd.
Does the hon. member really think that was an acceptable situation for Parliament?
Shuv Majumdar Conservative Calgary Heritage, AB
Madam Speaker, let me offer this. It is true that at the time, I was not in the chamber. I did not represent the great people of Calgary Heritage. At the time, I was a writer, a thought leader, at a place called the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
I happened to be in Ottawa at the time of the convoy protest, and I decided to take a look for myself to see exactly what was involved. I walked from one end to the other. I probably encountered a bit too much beer and weed for my taste, but I will tell members that this was a peaceful protest. These were authentic people fighting for their freedoms and doing so in the best interests of our country and our communities.
They were diminished by the farce of what was proposed, the Emergencies Act, against them and against the freedoms of Canadians, freedoms that were shaken in our financial systems with subjective enforcement of the rule of law. These things need to be confronted and should never again be permitted to happen.
Jamil Jivani Conservative Bowmanville—Oshawa North, ON
Madam Speaker, I have heard from many members of Canada's Hindu community across Durham Region who are concerned that, through Bill C-9, the Liberal government is associating one of their sacred symbols with hate. Has the member for Calgary Heritage heard the same concerns?