Thank you, Mr. Ehsassi.
Let's continue on this theme.
I'll confess to you that I found a bit puzzling, Mr. Rosenblood, your opening submissions about paragraph 319(3)(b), first because the preamble of the Constitution talks about the supremacy of God and the rule of law, and second because it's well known in law that we carve out accommodation or exemptions for religious or conscience beliefs, most recently in the one issue that I think all of us will remember for our entire parliamentary careers—medical assistance in dying—wherein you had a direct conflict within people who felt, pursuant to their conscience, that they didn't want to be compelled to perform a certain type of medical procedure. That was enunciated in the penultimate paragraph of the Carter decision, since you're citing Supreme Court case law. It's also entrenched in Bill C-14.
I just put that forth as a talking point.
You also mentioned, Mr. Rosenblood, that you're cautioning us not to act quickly. I would actually say to you, if you were listening to the people earlier, that there's a real need to act quickly. I think the need to act quickly is that people are being radicalized towards violence online in Canada—that's part of the court record in the Bissonnette sentencing hearing—and around the planet. I think it is incumbent upon us to act quickly.
I was also a bit puzzled by your citation of a dissenting decision in Keegstra, rather than the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in more recent jurisprudence, which is Whatcott, in which Rothstein, writing for the entire court, upheld section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act as striking the appropriate balance.
There's no doubt that balance needs to be struck. The question I have for you, then, is this: Is section 13 of the CHRA, whose analogue was upheld in Whatcott in a unanimous 6-0 decision by the Supreme Court, the right balance? If it isn't, what's needed? Is what is needed what would effectively be a redundant but perhaps necessary political paragraph that simply says, “Nothing in the aforementioned passages derogates from the constitutionally held right to freedom of expression held by all individuals within Canada under section 2(b)”?