Thank you, Chair.
I was incredibly accurate, and I can read directly from the statement here. I appreciate the opportunity to cite from this.
Again, all of us, I believe, should have been engaging with a number of stakeholders on this. However, what CIJA said in its statement was that this needs to be the product of cross-party consensus. They want targeted amendments. It is difficult to offer targeted amendments and work across party lines when we are given a two-business-day window to do this. Again, is it more important to get it right, or is it more important just to get this through so the Liberal government can do what it loves to do, which is claim a win without actually doing the work, and in some cases going beyond to make problems worse?
I am aware that we are sitting on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights here. I think that's tremendously relevant, because it is this justice portfolio that should have been engaged when the Liberal government previously invoked the Emergencies Act. Why that's relevant to the motion we are debating right now is that the Emergencies Act had the government taking a statute that was designed for a very good reason—and some would argue a necessary reason—to deal with eventualities and emergencies that might require extraordinary action. They used that to deal with a protest.
The Trudeau government—the Liberal government—used the Emergencies Act to deal with a protest of people who were saying unkind things about the Liberal government. In doing so, it violated the law. I don't mean that it violated some bylaw. I don't mean the government violated some minor statute. They actually violated the most supreme law in the country, which is the Constitution of Canada. This is not my opinion—this is a decision by the Federal Court, which said that not only did the Liberal government break the law in invoking the Emergencies Act, but they broke the law in the measures that they chose to use the Emergencies Act for, namely restricting mobility and freezing the bank accounts of political dissidents. How can we trust the government?
By the way, the Liberals are fighting that in court. They are appealing that decision in court. How can we trust a government that so brazenly violates the charter rights of Canadians to redefine hate and, in doing so, lower the threshold of what people can say on the Internet, lower the threshold of what people can say online?
After the Minister of Justice testified before our committee and admitted that Bill C-9 will, in fact, affect online speech and social media posts, I saw on social media that there were lots of people from the United Kingdom looking at examples of police literally knocking on people's doors because of their tweets, because they posted something on social media. These are not even people who were charged, necessarily. Some were, which was quite shameful, but some of them were logged as “non-crime hate incidents”, a term that has emerged in the United Kingdom to deal with these cases where no one's even arguing there's a law broken, but they want to send a message. The state, the authorities, want to send a message that you don't get to say things as a free citizen unless they tell you to.
It's interesting. The Liberals want to claim to be a united front. I know that Steven Guilbeault quit the Liberal cabinet today. This is news that has just come out, which is quite interesting. This is, again, another example where the Liberals have decided to ignore the Constitution of this country on energy policy. If they're ignoring the Constitution on energy policy, in which the federal government has the latitude to approve pipelines, how on earth can we expect them to follow the Constitution when it comes to freedom of expression? Now, I suspect we might see Mr. Guilbeault in an orange jumpsuit scaling the Peace Tower any day now, so if members want to take a suspension to go watch that, they may.
The reason we are talking about the trustworthiness of the government here is that their desire to ram through Bill C-9 is, in itself, a symptom of the issues that we've been raising and that witnesses have been raising.
Bruce Pardy, a very accomplished lawyer and law professor from Queen's University, testified before this committee. He said that the way the Criminal Code is written, misgendering could be a criminal act of hate under the right circumstances if the government decided to go down that way. By the way, this is not at all an endorsement of any particular expression. This is saying that, as free people in a country that values freedom of expression, we should be able to engage in rigorous debate on issues that there is a range of opinions on. We should be able to have debates about gender and sexuality. We should be able to have debates about religion. We should be able to have debates about anything.
This doesn't mean we as a country are all in agreement. In fact, it means quite the opposite. It certainly doesn't mean that the state has a right to decide what the correct positions are and what the incorrect positions are. I say this very aware of the fact that, where I stand on Bill C-9, there are going to be some forms of expression that make me very uncomfortable. I'm defending the right of people to say things I may find very hurtful and target beliefs I hold dear.