The government will not be supporting this amendment. It is not clear whether the amendment means that conduct must be discrimination that is contrary to the Canadian Human Rights Act, for example, specific practices described in the CHRA relative to the workplace and the marketplace, or whether discrimination is used in a more general sense, which is not defined in law, and only the grounds of discrimination in the CHRA are invoked. However how it is interpreted, it would broaden the existing defence of provocation for the list of prohibited grounds in the CHRA which are tailored to discrimination in the workplace and marketplace, and are inappropriate to the criminal context.
No other common law jurisdictions have amended the provocation laws to include discrimination. For instance, New Zealand and the Australian states of Victoria, Tasmania, and Western Australia have abolished provocation. New South Wales renamed it defence of extreme provocation and now limits it to criminal offences punishable by at least five years in prison. The United Kingdom abolished provocation and replaced it with a defence of loss of control that is available where the accused either had a fear of serious violence from the victim, or where the victim did or said something of an extremely grave nature that gave the accused a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged.
The government does not support the amendment for those reasons, among others.