Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, members of the committee, for the opportunity today to appear on Bill C-9.
My name is Christine Van Geyn. I'm the litigation director with the Canadian Constitution Foundation. It is a non-partisan legal charity dedicated to defending Canadians' constitutional rights and freedoms.
We at the CCF have been involved in landmark free expression cases at the Supreme Court, including Whatcott and Ward. We brought the successful legal challenge to the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022. We provide free public education on constitutional law. I have also authored three books on the subject.
Now, I want to be clear at the outset: Hate is wrong. Hate causes real harm in society, and hateful conduct, especially violence and threats, must be confronted, but the criminal law is our most powerful state tool, and it carries the highest stigma and the most serious consequences for liberty. It must be used with great restraint, especially in matters touching expression, belief and political or religious discourse.
Bill C-9 expands the criminal law into the realm of expression in ways that risk unjustified violations of the charter right to free expression. It lowers the threshold for hate propaganda offences, removes safeguards against politicized or abusive prosecutions, introduces vague new offences and risks chilling lawful debate and protest in Canada.
Our constitutional tradition is clear: Freedom of expression protects even offensive and disturbing speech, and even hateful views, unless they cross a very high threshold.
Courts have always treated this as a question of where limits on protected speech exist, not on whether the speech is protected at all. That high threshold exists so Canadians can freely discuss controversial ideas, especially on sensitive political and moral topics, without fearing criminal sanction. Bill C-9 lowers that threshold and expands criminal liability in ways that threaten legitimate expression, dissent and protest.
Our primary recommendation is that Parliament withdraw Bill C-9.
In the alternative, I propose six amendments that could reduce, though not eliminate, the risk that Bill C-9 would be found to be unconstitutional.
First, the bill introduces a new statutory definition of “hatred” that departs from the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. For over 30 years, the court has required hatred to mean the “emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation”.
Bill C-9 dilutes that standard. It removes key limiting language and shifts from detestation “and” vilification to “detestation or vilification.” It removes the requirement for extremeness. If Parliament chooses to legislate a definition, it must mirror exactly the standard that has already been upheld by the court, because anything less risks a finding of unconstitutionality.
Second, the bill removes the requirement for Attorney General consent before laying hate propaganda charges. That safeguard exists to prevent politically motivated or ideologically driven prosecutions in this uniquely sensitive area of law. Removing it invites arbitrary or inconsistent enforcement. It even opens the door to private prosecutions, however rare, weaponized for political ends.
Third, the bill creates a new stand-alone offence for hate crime offences, layered on top of other existing offences, including non-criminal regulatory offences. This creates a risk of duplicate punishment, prosecutorial overcharging and plea pressure. Hatred is already a sentencing aggravating factor, and that approach preserves proportionality while protecting freedom of expression, so it should remain that way.
Fourth, the bill prohibits certain “hate symbols”. Now, to be clear, these symbols are vile, but banning them outright risks driving hateful beliefs underground, where they are harder to confront, and risks sweeping in political protest speech, however misguided or offensive. The current law already captures symbols when they are used to wilfully promote hatred.
Fifth, the bill adds new intimidation provisions related to religious and cultural spaces. Intimidation, harassment, mischief and blocking access to buildings are already illegal. The solution to unlawful blockades is to enforce existing law.
Finally, we urge Parliament to retain the defences in subsection 319(3), including the defence of “good faith” religious expression, because removing that protection, combined with removing Attorney General consent, would chill legitimate religious debate and moral discussion. Courts already have applied that defence narrowly. It has never been successfully invoked, but its existence has been central to the court’s conclusion that the law is constitutional as it is.
Hate cannot be legislated out of the human heart. What the criminal law can do—and what it should do—is prevent violence, threats, harassment and intimidation.
When we criminalize opinions, we risk making martyrs out of hate-mongers and driving vulnerable people towards hidden spaces of radicalization rather than exposing harmful ideas to the disinfecting force of truth and public criticism.