Evidence of meeting #13 for Justice and Human Rights in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was c-9.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Andrew Lawton Conservative Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON
I'd like to speak to the same point of order. I can offer—
November 27th, 2025 / 3:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marc Miller
We'll suspend briefly to check the record on that, Mr. Lawton, and get back to it shortly.
Conservative
Andrew Lawton Conservative Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON
Just to respond to that, the point of order I raised at the beginning was as to the timing of when I was recognized. I thought it might be more opportune to recognize me before you chose to proceed to clause-by-clause instructions. You dealt with that point of order very accurately and clearly, and then you gave me the floor after, and I think the audio will reflect that, Chair.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marc Miller
Thank you, members.
There were two separate times.... Mr. Lawton did indeed say “point of order”. I then recognized him to say that he should have his time, and I then recognized him, so he does have the floor.
Conservative
Andrew Lawton Conservative Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I feel that, after that suspension, it's important to recap to members what has happened so far. The reason we are debating this motion is that the Liberal government, in its desire to ram through legislation that, by its admission, will censor what Canadians can say and post on the Internet, has decided not to hear from witnesses who desperately wanted to share their thoughts on this to ensure that we get this legislation right.
I'll just point out that we put forward a number of suggestions for witnesses who, even within the five-meeting constraint that we initially set out for our study of Bill C-9, never received invitations. I do not impugn motive for this. I realize that you can only pack so many people into a meeting and so many people beyond that into five meetings. There were representatives of civil society groups with a range of political and religious backgrounds. They were people who approached Bill C-9 from different perspectives. Some of them never received invitations.
One of them was Lisa Bildy, who is a very accomplished lawyer from London, Ontario. She is the executive director of the Free Speech Union. One of the reasons that the Free Speech Union decided to submit a brief and had wanted to appear as a witness on Bill C-9 was the significant implications that Bill C-9 has for freedom of expression. As the Free Speech Union said in its brief, “Bill C-9 will criminalize expression that should enjoy constitutional protection”.
They refer to a number of sections here, some of which revolve around the way that hate symbols are defined in the bill. Another is the way that the definition of hate is actually redefined with a lower threshold—a threshold that would exist in the Criminal Code if Bill C-9 passed—than what the Supreme Court has already determined should be the threshold for hate. We have heard testimony on this before this committee in the few meetings we did have on the subject. Bill C-9 codifies the definition of hate as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification”—that word “or” is very important—“and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”.
When the Supreme Court has weighed in on this in the past in a couple of landmark cases that have enshrined freedom of expression in Canadian law, it talked about “extreme” and the extremeness of the emotion that activates hate. It also talked about the need for detestation “and” vilification, showing that this is not just some menu that authoritarians can look at when they want to censor what Canadians say.
I say this as someone who is very supportive of the arguments that have been put forward by members of the Jewish community in Canada, which are that there is a significant problem with hate and that Jews have been unfairly targeted by anti-Semitism, not just since October 7, but for decades and millennia. We have seen hate become a lot more brazen in this country since October 7. Many of the problems have been a failure by political leadership to deal with this.
When you speak to people who are in this space—members of law enforcement—they will say that there is an enforcement problem. The issue is not the need for new judicial powers. It's not the need for a lower threshold for hate. It is the need for existing laws to be enforced.
The Liberal government, for example in Bill C-9, has proposed removing mischief as an offence when it pertains to religious property. Why would they do that? Where has the leadership been from the Liberal Party on the hundred and some churches that have been burned and vandalized in the last five years? If we want to talk about hate against religious institutions, we said that there should be stronger penalties—mandatory minimum penalties, one might say—for vandalism and arson of religious property, whether it's churches, synagogues or mosques.
This is what would have come had there been genuine consultation on Bill C-9 with all groups affected by this. They wouldn't be removing a section of the law that has been regarded as a positive one.
We look at some of the other witnesses who were unable to testify. For example, we had put forward on our list the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She is someone who has actually been a tremendous defender in past Supreme Court rulings on freedom of expression. I'm not sure whether Chief Justice McLachlin received her invitation and accepted or declined. It's impossible to know when we lost two full meetings of witness testimony because of the Liberals' desire to condemn something as basic as a mandatory minimum sentence for those who view and traffic in material they refer to in the decision as child pornography—obscene and quite despicable child sexual abuse and exploitation material.
We did have the opportunity to hear from Christine Van Geyn of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and I was very grateful we did, because the Canadian Constitution Foundation is an organization that has done tremendous work in advocating for civil liberties for all Canadians. In her opening statement, Ms. Van Geyn spoke about the chilling effect that this will have. Not only will more people be captured by Bill C-9 than are captured under current laws when it comes to governments charging people under section 319 for hate speech, but more importantly, the government wading into this territory itself will actually send a chill that will make people less able to speak their mind.
This is such a critical discussion. Freedom of expression is a right that you could argue is the most important right. The reason I say this is that, if every other liberty and every other fundamental freedom were stripped away, except that one, you could use your freedom of expression to fight for all the others. You can use your freedom of expression to fight back for your property rights and for your democratic franchise, and any bill that engages this should be viewed with tremendous skepticism.
I do not take the Liberal government's position here that this change in the definition of hate was benign, that this change in the definition of hate was really just a grammatical issue and not one that was genuinely going on with a different definition. That was what the justice minister said. Again, when the justice minister, the person who is ostensibly Canada's lawyer, doesn't understand the importance of words in legislation, it actually explains a lot about the housing and immigration systems, which this minister was previously responsible for. I believe the Minister of Justice, Sean Fraser, has taken the same level of excellence that he brought to immigration and housing to justice, and Bill C-9 is a great reflection of this. This is a bill that has been condemned by.... I believe all the Abrahamic faiths have come out with criticisms of this bill. I believe Jewish groups, Christian groups and Muslim groups have all had a fair amount of criticism.
We have to look at this in the broader context of what the Liberal government has tried to do on speech. Remember, in the last two Parliaments, in both Parliaments, the Liberals tabled bills that they ostensibly said were about online harms, so specifically harms on the Internet. That was what the Liberals said they were targeting. These bills actually re-engaged the Canadian Human Rights Act, section 13, which was a section of law that had tremendous concerns and was actually itself subject to a wide number of high-profile cases.
Human rights codes have a lower threshold than the Criminal Code, because they fall under civil law. That's important because, under Bill C-9, the new definition of hate doesn't just affect the Criminal Code. As my colleague, Mr. Baber, has pointed out quite eloquently, it affects all federal statutes, which includes the Canadian Human Rights Act. Bill C-9 is actually a backdoor way into engaging the very same provisions that were so vehemently opposed by so many people in this country in the previous two Parliaments, with Bill C-36 in the 43rd Parliament, and then Bill C-63 in the 44th Parliament.
We still, by the way, do not know whether the liberals intend to bring back another version of that, but I fear that what they are doing in Bill C-9, under the guise of taking hate seriously—hate that they have allowed to fester—is telling the very people who have been failed by the government that it has their backs. In doing so, they're setting the stage for something that I do not believe Canada can afford and I do not believe Canadians want.
Then you have to address the question of timing. Why is this so needed at this particular meeting? Why were members given an abrupt deadline of not even two business days to submit amendments for a complex piece of legislation amending the criminal law, the Criminal Code of this country, and told on Thursday, at a meeting that was ended two hours early, that we need to submit these amendments by Monday so that we can deal with them today?
Now, we did that. We worked hard. If this bill is going to proceed, it needs to change. In this form, it absolutely cannot proceed, which is why we have been raising so many concerns about this, as have witnesses.
At the very least, as members of Parliament, we have a right to hear from witnesses who want to speak out. A committee that was truly responsive to Canadians would respond to all of the groups that have come forward and wanted to testify and have not yet testified: people like Lisa Bildy of the Free Speech Union; Mike Fegelman of Honest Reporting Canada; Arunesh Giri of the Hindu Canadian Foundation; David Granovsky of B'nai Brith Canada; Brian Doody of Doody Counsel Legal Services; and Aislin Jackson of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which, by the way, has never once in its history been confused for a conservative organization.
Mark Joseph of The Democracy Fund travelled all the way here from Toronto and was not able to testify, because the Liberals decided that they didn't want to send a strong message that we will not stand for child pornographers in this committee.
There's Dr. David Haskell, professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, where I had the privilege of teaching journalism very briefly, and Talia Klein Leighton with Canadian Women Against Antisemitism, again, an outstanding witness whom we did not get a chance to hear from.
There were witnesses proposed by other parties as well. This is not just asserting the Conservative-offered witnesses' right to testify. There is Stephen Camp, formerly of the Edmonton police hate crimes unit; Michal Jacob, Office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism; the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police; the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police; and representatives of the RCMP hate crime unit.
Again, you'd think that people who are going to be tasked with enforcing the provisions in Bill C-9 would be able to testify so that we understand the implications of the laws that we're proceeding with.
There's Deborah Lyons. She is a representative of the Liberal government's efforts against anti-Semitism, and I don't believe any Jewish person in Canada would say that she has managed to rein in anti-Semitism or that the Liberal government has had a desire to do this. There's Mark Neufeld, formerly of the Calgary Police Service with the hate crimes unit. Again, that's someone you would think would be top of mind to hear from as members of the justice committee.
There's Rabbi Daniel Mikelberg. He's the head clergy at Temple Israel in Ottawa. He's local. I believe he could have quite easily found time to come here if the committee had allowed time to hear from witnesses on Bill C-9. There's Mohammed Hashim of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Another potential witness was a former justice on the Supreme Court of Canada, Rosalie Abella. I know that her late husband was a tremendous scholar of anti-Semitism in Canada.
I'm not familiar with Brittan Hudson's work, but I believe they were on the witness list for a reason, and justice committee members would have been able to learn something, perhaps. There's The 519. I mentioned Dr. Benjamin Roebuck. That was someone I believed should be brought forward—and he is in the motion we're debating right now—as the federal ombudsperson for victims of crime. Given what Liberal bail laws have done over the last 10 years, I believe the number of victims of crime has ballooned to a point where we probably need to get a few more helpers for Dr. Roebuck.
Michael Levitt, with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, is another person who would have had a great deal to offer us, as well as Maureen Buchan of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations. In fact, we have not really heard indigenous perspectives on this bill. There's Jackie Lombardi with the Chiefs of Ontario, again, another witness who was offered up but we did not get the chance to hear from. There's Jay Jayaraman of the Hindu Federation.
Now, we have heard from some witnesses in the Indian community who have raised some pretty key concerns about the way that the bill describes hate symbols, specifically representatives of the Indian community Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. They dislike the use of the word “swastika”. They also dislike the resemblance part of Bill C-9, because they're worried that this will be an assault on their religious freedom. Again, I don't think we can particularly trust this government to stand up for religious freedom.
There are others, such as Brian Sauvé with the National Police Federation. We had him on our bail study, and he would have offered a lot on this as well. This is the union that represents the brave men and women of the RCMP. We also have on the list Joseph Neuberger of the Canadian Jewish Law Association.
There is an association of local Crown counsel in Alberta. ALCCA is the acronym, and Rochelle Direnfeld was one of the witnesses who were put forward, as was Michael Polowin, who is a municipal lawyer. I don't know what municipality, but that might have been one of the things we would have learned had Mr. Polowin been able to testify, as well as how he believes Bill C-9 will affect civil liberties in Canada.
Ted Cohen, the CEO of Hillel Lodge, is a very key witness whom we have not had the opportunity to hear from. There's David Sachs, an anti-Semitism specialist with the Jewish Federation of Ottawa—again, someone else local. In fact, if we wanted to hear from witnesses, I bet we could call up Mr. Sachs and have him come down right now to testify. However, again, we cannot do that, because we have been shortchanged out of our right as members of Parliament to truly study Bill C-9, and that is because of the Liberal government's desire to ram something through that attacks civil liberties with as little scrutiny and accountability as possible.
Terry Teegee, another witness, regional chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, was eager, I bet, to travel across the country to testify because he thought that members of Parliament and Canadians would have the ability to hear what he has to say. My colleague from the Bloc suggested, from the Barreau du Québec, Marcel-Olivier Nadeau. I don't know what the Barreau du Québec's view on Bill C-9 is, and I never will, unless this government agrees to give Bill C-9 the proper study that it deserves and that we have a right to engage in as members of Parliament.
There were other witnesses who wished to appear. I have not read all of their briefs, so I don't know if all of them have.... They include the Assembly of First Nations; Husein Panju with the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association; James Turk, director of the Centre for Free Expression; Garrison Settee, grand chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak; the Anishinabek Nation and the Union of Ontario Indians; Khaled Al-Qazzaz of the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council; and Louise Smith of Independent Jewish Voices. Now, I have a great many concerns with the rhetoric and tone of what Independent Jewish Voices says, but I also believe that we should be hearing from Canadians of all perspectives on this.
There is Pe'er Krut of the Canadian Union of Jewish Students; Jeremy Johnson, as an individual; Victoria Pruden, another potential witness whom we were not able to hear from, the president of the Métis National Council; Nadia El-Mabrouk, the president of Rassemblement pour la laïcité, another witness we do not get to hear from; and Imam Mohammad Tawhidi of The Global Imams Council, a man who has been an outstanding voice against radicalism and religious extremism, not just in Canada but around the world. I believe he's from Australia originally. There's also Jennifer Boyce, the director of communications for Egale Canada, another witness we do not get to hear from.
Again, we couldn't hear from all of these witnesses in the six hours when Liberal obstruction denied us the right to engage in witness testimony, but we could have heard from some of them. Had we done a proper study on Bill C-9, one that is more concerned about getting it right than about ramming it through quickly, we could have heard from a lot of these people. In fact, some of the ones I mentioned were not even invited to submit briefs. We had to proactively go to them and say that they should be submitting briefs if they want their perspectives to be heard. I have some of those briefs available. I don't know if they have been circulated to all members, so I will cite a couple of them as it gets up here.
The point of this is that, when we are talking about a bill that engages civil liberties, arbitrary deadlines for amendments that do not give anyone the opportunity to actually go through and thoughtfully go back and forth internally, to debate these things, to change wording.... We had to submit ideas, and we were just given from the drafters, “Here are the amendments.” There was no time to really make that many revisions. I'm not saying that there are issues with them; I'm just pointing out that when you have an arbitrarily imposed, accelerated timeline like this, it makes it impossible to do anything with it if you want to actually go through the process of getting this right.
I note that the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs came out with a statement this week in which they expressed their desire not to see Bill C-9 pass carte blanche with a rubber stamp, but to actually make it the product of cross-party consensus. Again, that is not—
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
I have a point of order.
I don't believe the CIJA's position is that they don't want us to go to clause-by-clause. I think they do actually want us to go to clause-by-clause, and—
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
I suspect you know it's not. Weren't you a chair once, Anthony?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marc Miller
That's enough, Mr. Genuis. You don't have the floor. You are allowed to speak here, but you do have to maintain the decorum of this committee.
Mr. Lawton, try to stay accurate, please.
Conservative
Andrew Lawton Conservative Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON
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.
Conservative
Roman Baber Conservative York Centre, ON
I have a point of order.
I am having difficulty hearing member Lawton because of all the noise on the other side of the room.
Would the chair please ask for some decorum here?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marc Miller
People can have discussions. Let's just keep it down so Mr. Lawton can continue.
Mr. Baber, you are sitting beside Mr. Lawton. I assume you can hear correctly, but I get your point.
Go ahead, Mr. Lawton.
Conservative
Andrew Lawton Conservative Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON
Thank you very much, Chair.
As I said, I'm aware that in standing up for freedom of expression, I am actually defending the right of people to say things that are very hateful about me and about things that I value. For example, there's the right of someone to say that verses of scripture are hateful. I would defend that right. I would defend that right because I believe it's important. I believe we should be able to defend our views and do so in an open forum. I believe wholeheartedly in the marketplace of ideas. I do not believe the government is capable or legally entitled to make that determination.
On religion, I don't know what amendments to Bill C-9 are going to come forward in the course of our clause-by-clause consideration. I do know that there is a private member's bill from the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Monsieur Yves-François Blanchet, that would remove the religious exemption, or rather the religious defence, that exists in section 319 of the Criminal Code. This defence is crucially important, for two reasons. Number one, it protects religious freedom. It talks about how you can use a defence, if you are facing a charge under section 319, that you were speaking in a manner listed under paragraph 319(3)(b), which says, “if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text”. I believe the private member's bill also engages paragraph 319(3.1)(b), which says, “if, in good faith, they expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text”. I'm happy to read that section in French, if members desire.
I bring this up because it was not only an attack on religious freedom to remove that, as the private member's bill from the Bloc would do and as has been suggested in testimony and discussion before this committee. More importantly, that was a critical part of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the existence of section 319 in the first place. Even when the Supreme Court decided that it was justifiable to have a section dealing with hate propaganda, even when they did that, they understood that it was necessary to have these limitations on that so that it would not be unconstitutional.
I think the dissent from former chief justice McLachlin in the Keegstra decision is probably one of the greatest pieces, even though it was a dissent, of legal writing in Canada, certainly when it comes to freedom of expression. We saw that section 319 itself was only saved because it had these carve-outs and because it had these protections.
Again, I do not believe you should have the right to say anything and everything simply because you hide behind religion. That is not what I am saying. More importantly, that is not what the law says. That is not what the Criminal Code says. A critical part of paragraph 319(3)(b) is that it's “in good faith”. You cannot call for genocide in good faith. You cannot call for extermination of the Jewish people in good faith. You cannot call for the mass disenfranchisement of people and violence in good faith.
This idea that we need to erode religious freedom and jeopardize the constitutionality of a section of criminal law that has been working in Canada because the threshold is so high.... To say that we're doing that for an objective that isn't even connected to that removal is crucial. It was proposed on this committee. It was not an amendment, but it was proposed as an idea.
Of all the times we did speak to witnesses, Mr. Chair, that was the only time you saw fit to intervene. That is your prerogative. I'm not disputing that, but it was very concerning to Canadians, who are of a variety of religious beliefs. It engages why people are inherently distrustful of any desire by the government to reopen issues pertaining to hate, especially when there is a lower threshold, a lower definition.
My goodness, why have we forced something like this? What is the hurry when there are so many live concerns, so many very real concerns, that we have not yet had the opportunity to really engage with as members of Parliament?
Again, I do not accept the justice minister's view that there was no change to the definition, that omitting the word “extreme” and changing “and” to “or” was purely coincidental or that maybe it was autocorrected. I don't buy that, and I don't think Canadians do either.
That suggests one of two things has happened. Number one, the government is trying to sneak in a lower threshold for what constitutes hate speech and, by design, it would literally lower the threshold by which you could be charged, which then means it's expanding the scope of who can be charged for something. That's the first point. Number two, they're so sloppy that they don't see that as being relevant, and the brightest legal minds in the country, who Canadians would hope are the ones drafting and introducing legislation, don't actually understand the difference between extreme manifestation and not. They don't understand the difference between “and” and “or”.
I mentioned earlier that I'm not a native French speaker, but even I, in French, a language I do not profess to be fluent in, could tell you the difference between “et” and “ou”, between “and“ and “or”.
There is a sneakiness to what Bill C-9 is doing, and I go back to the applicability of Bill C-9 not just to the Criminal Code, but to the Canadian Human Rights Act, the law that would have been changed by the online harms act, section 13 specifically, had that gone forward in the previous Parliament.
I am glad, with the news of Minister Guilbeault's resignation from cabinet, that he won't be around to table that. I know that was one he was very keen on, but I suspect there are going to be others lining up behind him to do it, because we have seen a very transparent desire by this Liberal government to rein in civil liberties, to rein in the constitutional freedoms of Canadians and, specifically, to rein in freedom of expression, which is sacrosanct not just in Canada but in all free societies.
We've just passed Remembrance Day. I know that many members of Parliament, from all parties, did videos for Remembrance Day that we could share with our constituents. When I did my video and when I spoke to members of my community, specifically to veterans at a number of cenotaphs I went to, in St. Thomas, in Vienna, Ontario, in Port Burwell and all of these places, it was a very chilly day, but it was important to be there. There was a general sense that those who have fought and died in wars wearing a Canadian flag—or before that, a British flag—did so because they wanted to stand up for the freedoms we hold dear in Canada. That includes—maybe not chief among them, but certainly at the top—freedom of expression, freedom of speech.
Whenever we're talking about this, we often hear people say, especially when they want to defend Liberal government incursions on speech, “Well, freedom of speech is an American concept. We have freedom of expression here in Canada.” I would agree that “freedom of expression” is the term in Canada, but if you read jurisprudence on this, freedom of expression is actually broader than speech. Speech is what you say. Expression is what you say and what you do. Freedom of expression includes art. Freedom of expression includes speech. Freedom of expression includes song. I would not be so hurtful to the committee as to engage in song. I will not use my freedom of expression for that.
Conservative
Andrew Lawton Conservative Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON
Yes, there we go. It would be, Chair. I appreciate that.
It's important to have that freedom, and I go back to former chief justice McLachlin's ruling on this. It especially includes political speech, because we realize that the right to disagree, especially to combat and challenge authority, is so critical.
One of the fascinating things when you see this discussion unfold is that the speech that is most necessary to protect is the speech that is most jeopardized and threatened by censorship. You know, I could say with my time here that I love puppies, and it's true. I do. My wife is a cat person. I'm a dog person. We compromise by having neither, but puppies are cute. Why do I need a constitutional right to free speech to say that, when no one is going to try to censor me for it? When we start talking about contentious political ideas, however, that is when censorship is engaged, when you start saying things that people don't want to hear and that they want to deny you the right to say.
I think this is an interesting point here. The reason we are trying to introduce this motion is that we believe that if we are going to proceed with Bill C-9, it needs to be done properly. We cannot proceed with clause-by-clause analysis of Bill C-9.... By the way, it is not the most crucial justice issue facing Canadians. The first clause of my motion is to prioritize the study of Bill C-14, the bail and sentencing reform act. Conservatives ran a campaign on stopping crime. The Liberals were successful in the election, and I congratulate them. They said they were going to take very serious measures to deal with bail and sentencing issues. I expected, when I was appointed to the justice committee, that the very first thing we'd get to deal with would be a bail and sentencing bill. The only reason that on this committee we got to engage in a study of bail is that Conservative members initiated it. We demanded a study of bail. We have been doing this and are just about to finish it. We have our final meeting on this on Monday.
Instead, the first justice legislation that the Liberals put forward was Bill C-9. The departmental officials could not say when they began working on Bill C-9 relative to when they began working on bail and sentencing. In fact, at the time we had those officials, I'm not even sure that Bill C-14 had a number. We were just being told that it was coming, that something was coming. Then, what we saw was a bill that addressed a lot of the concerns that Canadians have been talking about—certainly the Conservatives have been talking about them—but it did not go far enough, specifically in dealing with the principle of restraint. We will hopefully have an opportunity to hear from witnesses about the shortcomings of Bill C-14, but, again, we can't do that, because the Liberals have decided to make censorship their first priority. They've decided to make Bill C-9 their first priority.
Again, they're going to say that Conservatives are the ones obstructing, when what we are saying is that we cannot pass through, wave through and green-light bad law just because of arbitrary deadlines imposed by the Liberals.
There is no way we would have gotten through clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-9 today, which is why we've put forward this motion, resetting this committee's work and putting an end to Liberal obstruction of real justice issues that need to be addressed. Where I think there is going to be more cross-party consensus than there is on Bill C-9 is on the bail and sentencing reform act.
I believe the Bloc Québécois also put forward a very important study, which we were proud to support as Conservatives, on judicial appointments. When judges are appointed, you can often look up their names in Elections Canada and find that, coincidentally, many of them are past Liberal donors. There is a little bit of a problem in the judicial appointment system. More importantly, in some of the heinous decisions we've seen from judges on bail and on sentencing, there are clearly competence issues emanating from the judiciary that need to be addressed, and I would hope would be, in this study on judicial appointments. For example, I'd be keen to know why a judge in Quebec thought that someone who had hundreds of images of children as young as three being raped deserved a 90-day sentence. I would love to know why and how a judge who would make such a decision was appointed.
Unless this motion goes forward, between Bill C-9 and Bill C-14 and other justice legislation coming before this committee eventually, whether it's private members' bills or perhaps something dealing with child sexual exploitation and abuse material, which this committee has called on the government to put forward before the end of the year, there's no way we'll be able to do this study. Again, it's almost as if we have given this authorization to proceed with a study that the committee, by which I mean the Liberal members of the committee, have no intention of actually proceeding with.
I remember also that we were expecting to engage in this committee's work on Tuesday and never received a notice of meeting. I don't know why. It doesn't matter for the purposes of what we're discussing here, but that would have been an opportunity. We would have been discussing bail, and it was yet another obstruction that prevented us from doing our work as members of Parliament on this committee.
We have invited Minister Sean Fraser to appear before us to discuss his mandate and priorities. He did come forward on Bill C-9 and was very eager to come forward on Bill C-9. I know when we were debating in this committee, it was interesting how that was a priority—to get him to only talk about Bill C-9—and we still have not had the opportunity to talk to him about his mandate and priorities. Paragraph (3) of this motion is that you, Chair, be instructed to reiterate the invitation. I believe you passed it along. I believe the minister received it. I don't know if he put it in the filing bin that looks and sounds like a shredder or if he was planning to make it to us at some point. I think he should be reminded that he has an opportunity—not an obligation, I understand, but an opportunity—to appear before us to discuss his mandate and priorities.
There are a number of priorities that I think are very interesting and that I'd be keen to explore, such as why censoring what Canadians see and say online was more of a priority for him than dealing with bail and sentencing. I'd love to hear his response to some of the witnesses we've had from police associations and police services, including OPP commissioner Thomas Carrique, who's also with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. He came before us and said that the Liberal government's gun confiscation scheme was a waste of police resources when the actual problems that police need to be dealing with are repeat violent offenders.
Where the priorities of this government are is something I'd be very keen to hear from the minister, if he graces us with his presence on his mandate and priorities. I just want to make sure he is aware that he has an outstanding invitation. I'm a new member of Parliament. I realize that sometimes an email can linger in your inbox for a while, which is why I think sometimes you need to bump it to the top there. This motion, which I'm sure will have cross-partisan support, will reiterate that invitation, and I hope Minister Fraser will join us soon.
On Bill C-14, we will need to hear from the minister on that specifically. I hope that, when he testifies to that, he will address why he is trying to tweak the principle of restraint instead of getting rid of it and why he is trying to skirt around the edges of the core problem that has been identified by so many people in this country who have come before this committee and other stakeholders and communities all over: that you can draw a direct line between the principle of restraint and the revolving-door bail system that has resulted in criminals getting released on the streets over and over again, sometimes hours after they've been arrested.
It is interesting that in the last week, the Ontario government came out with an approach that I think is important—and I would actually love to hear testimony from the Ontario Solicitor General on this—which would reimpose cash bail. This was identified by a couple of our witnesses on the bail study, and I suspect it would come up during Bill C-14, because one of its major shortcomings is not dealing with the surety system. It actually makes no changes to the surety system, in which you have criminals vouching for criminals and you have unenforceable bail conditions. It does not change that at all. That would be important to hear, because bail conditions and sureties are a crucial part of the bail system. I would actually say that we could learn a little bit from what various provinces are doing.
Again, it's a cross-partisan consensus. Wab Kinew, who's the Premier of Manitoba, is a New Democrat, so I suspect he and I disagree with each other on a lot of things. He had a harder line on what we should do with people who peddle in child sexual abuse and exploitation material. I believe his exact line was that they should be buried under the jails.
From the Liberals, we got six hours of obstruction and hand-wringing instead of passing a very simple motion. I said, Chair, that we should actually invite or reiterate our invitation to the justice minister. He's apparently watching, because he's tweeting about this committee meeting right now. Minister Fraser says, “Conservatives are...obstructing the Justice Committee to prevent it from advancing laws to address hate crimes”. It's interesting. The minister has time to watch this committee, but he doesn't have time to visit the committee and testify on his mandate and priorities.
We are not obstructing. We are making an important point here, which is that we cannot stand for censorship shoehorned in under the name of expediency and under the guise of combatting hate, when this is a Liberal government that has no moral authority to do anything connected to freedom of expression. It certainly has no moral authority to take a stand against anti-Semitism when the Liberals have been criticized by members of the Jewish community for allowing anti-Semitism from within the party. I remember when Irwin Cotler, a lion of Canadian politics and one of the most vocal advocates for Jewish rights and human rights in the world, argued that Mr. Anthony Housefather, who's been very engaged in the Bill C-9 study, should leave the Liberal caucus over his position on these critical issues. I think there are a number of things that show that we should not, to quote the finance minister, take any lessons from the Liberals on these issues.
If we are to engage in a genuine discussion of what Bill C-9 seeks to do, it must be responsive to the witnesses we've already heard from, who have been talking about the assault on civil liberties embedded in Bill C-9. That's a very important part of this. More importantly, we need to hear from other witnesses who have wanted to come forward and share so many crucial things. Again, the calls have been coming from indigenous groups, from Muslim groups, from LGBT groups, from Jewish groups, from individuals, from legal scholars and from civil liberties activists.
Mark Joseph from The Democracy Fund came here and submitted a brief on Bill C-9, which was authored alongside Adam Blake-Gallipeau, who is a senior litigation counsel for The Democracy Fund. Mark Joseph is the litigation director there. They offered some positions that I think were very important to have heard regarding the section of Bill C-9 dealing with wilful promotion of hatred, terrorism and hate symbols.
What's interesting here—and we heard similar testimony from the lawyer who joined us from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association about this—is that there is already a provision of the Criminal Code that can prosecute someone for displaying a hate symbol. I believe it was when I was questioning Minister Fraser, I can't recall precisely, that I mentioned there was a case in my own riding, just outside of St. Thomas, Ontario, in which a man was charged with hate propaganda—with incitement, rather—under section 319 of the Criminal Code. One of the reasons he was charged was that he had a swastika mowed into his lawn, which was very distressing to the community, so police laid a charge. Not only did they lay a charge, but they would have done so with the Crown's consent. Because it was a section 319 charge, they had to lay that with the consent of the Attorney General.
This tells us two things that are very important about Bill C-9. Number one is that hate symbols can already form the context that is used to lay a charge against someone for hate. Number two is that the Attorney General consent requirement is not a veto on these charges. The Attorney General consent requirement actually is part of a necessary stopgap that prevents abuse. It gives law enforcement an opportunity to get some counsel on this that they may need before they lay a charge, knowing how high the stakes are when you're charging someone for what may be political expression, when you're charging someone for what they say, what they do or, in this case, what they mow into their lawn.
We already have authorities under criminal law in Canada that have been underenforced. We have authorities that prevent people from being able to block access to a synagogue or a school. We have mischief against religious property. We have charges that deal with incitements to genocide. I know we've heard from witnesses about some of these incitements to genocide when people have gotten up and called for intifada, which is very violent rhetoric against Jewish people. People have chanted “from the river to the sea”, which is literally calling for the eradication of Israel—the only Jewish state in the world. The questions we should be asking are about why law enforcement has not been laying charges that they are legally authorized to. A lot of that comes back to political leadership.
To return to the brief that we received from The Democracy Fund on hate symbols, I shared that bit of context just to establish that hate symbols are already things that can attract charges under section 319. What they say in this brief is that individuals have been charged under section 319 for the display of a hate symbol. They weren't referring to the case in St. Thomas. They were referring to another case, in January of last year, where a man who held what police called a “terrorist flag” at a protest was charged with hate crimes under existing laws before Bill C-9 was even a twinkle in this government's eye, before this government even existed, a government that so often tells us it is a new government. On the display of the Nazi hakenkreuz, I realize there is some contention around whether one can or should call it a swastika, but that is, again, something that can be and is often informative to the decision by police with the Attorney General's consent to laying a hate charge.
The Democracy Fund raised what I believe is one of the most crucial objections to Bill C-9, which is the way it redefines what hatred is. This is when we can go far beyond, and we must go far beyond, the Liberals simply saying that they are trying to just clean up some laws and trying to add some more clarity. There is no clarity given. This is a new definition. It departs significantly, The Democracy Fund writes, from the definition used by courts since Keegstra, and I would note that the Keegstra definition has been reaffirmed in subsequent cases. In the bill, hatred “means the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”. In Keegstra, it is an “emotion of an intense and extreme nature”—not just “extreme”, as I mentioned earlier—“that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” We have the and/or distinction, and we have “intense and extreme” versus simply the emotion.
I realize these are emotional subjects. I realize it's emotional when we're talking about people who are saying things that are incredibly hurtful. I do not take the position I do on this because I'm defending calls to genocide. Quite the contrary, I want people who break the existing laws to be enforced to the fullest extent of those laws. But what I do not support, and no Canadian who values freedom of expression could ever say they support this, is trying to cast a wider net on political expression that may be offensive but is also what freedom of expression means.
Again, freedom of expression does not exist for the benign. It does not exist for things that are not controversial. Freedom of expression protections exist precisely for things that are. I look at how we have changed, how society has changed on so many social norms. There was a time when Tommy Douglas, who was a lion of socialism in Canada, a lion of the New Democrats, said in a prime ministerial debate that homosexuality was a mental illness. That was a progressive view at the time, and now we have a situation in which we all realize the importance of equal rights for people of all sexual orientations.
This is something that shows how what is controversial in one era is a norm in another, and we only get there when we have the ability to engage in debate and discussion. Again, courts have reversed themselves as well. I mentioned Beverley McLachlin. It was about 30 years ago or so that the Supreme Court ruled there was no right to die by MAID. Then you fast-forward from the Rodriguez decision to the Carter decision and the court has a different view because norms change over time. We should not be stymying debate and discussion when that is arguably the most important freedom and liberty that we have in this country.
I'll move to my second point now. Where we go from there is that if we do not take a stand now, an unequivocal stand, and draw our line in the sand and defend freedom of expression, we are going to allow a government that has shown a reckless disregard for civil liberties to offer more unchecked power. These erosions happen gradually, but they are very difficult to reclaim. I note what was argued by Christine Van Geyn of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, whose testimony I mentioned earlier.
It isn't just that more people will be charged under section 319, or potentially under the Canadian Human Rights Act or potentially under the Canada Labour Code. My colleague Mr. Baber has pointed this out—the incredible risk of applying this definition to all federal statutes. That, in and of itself, is quite interesting. This is not a case where we should ever put the power to government and just hope that they won't abuse it. I believe this was from an interview with Maya Angelou: “when people show you who they are, believe them”. The Liberal government has shown us who they are time and time again, including with the Emergencies Act.
I had the great privilege of interviewing Dr. Maya Angelou, back when I was in radio, and I'm having some déjà vu today. The late poet Maya Angelou had an incredible view about the human spirit and artistic freedom. It's interesting that when you look at artistic freedom, some of the most vocal critics of the online harms act when it came up were people on the left. Margaret Atwood is someone I would put right up there with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. I don't think anyone has ever confused Margaret Atwood with being a Conservative. If she were ever to run for office, I do not believe I would be sitting anywhere near her on our side of the aisle.
Margaret Atwood understands a thing or two about authoritarianism. She wrote The Handmaid's Tale, a book that was adapted into a TV series, which I believe they filmed in Cambridge, the riding held by my colleague Connie Cody. The Handmaid's Tale shows an extreme example of what happens when an authoritarian state expands its power. As we saw in that, it did not happen immediately; it happened gradually, so we have to be very careful about things that look like they are inconsequential, things that look like they are benign but actually are not.
I'll go to our point on—
Liberal
Anju Dhillon Liberal Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC
On a point of order, Mr. Lawton has been continuing with this Conservative filibuster, and I'd like to point out that we have members of the very communities—
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Chair, I have a point of order. This is not a point of order.
Liberal
Anju Dhillon Liberal Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC
—officials here who are ready to help us proceed with clause-by-clause, and everything he—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marc Miller
I can't determine whether it's a point of order if I can't hear it, can I, Garnett?
Park it for a second, and I'll get to you.
Ms. Dhillon.