Thank you to the witnesses for bearing this out tonight and keeping your attention rapt. I'll do some work here to see if we can engage you in this process.
I want to make very clear that I want to talk to the committee today about Bill C-9, which, if passed with BQ-3, would strip away long-standing protections for freedom of expression and religious liberty in this country. This goes directly to supporting the amendment by my colleague Andrew Lawton, the latest amendment.
This bill represents the most significant assault on Canadians' ability to speak openly about their faith perhaps since the charter was written. It comes in an especially telling moment. I can't tell if this is ironic, disturbing, deliberate or accidental, but during the Advent season, at a time when Christians reflect on scripture, hope and the coming of Christ, we witnessed the astonishing spectacle of the previous Liberal justice committee chair declare that parts of the Bible and the Torah contain clear hatred.
He singled out Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, and that was not a random commentator. It was the individual responsible for overseeing the justice committee. Just last week, he was promoted to cabinet as the minister responsible for Canadian identity and culture. Only this Liberal government would reward someone for asserting, essentially, that God himself is hateful. I would encourage the new minister to revisit the preamble of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which affirms that Canada is founded upon principles recognizing the supremacy of God and the rule of law, as well as our national anthem, which asks that God keep our land glorious and free.
The Liberal government frequently boasts about defending the charter, yet they conveniently ignore the charter's protections of the freedoms of religion and expression, as well as its own explicit acknowledgement of God in the preamble, as in the national anthem. This hypocrisy is the backdrop of everything in Bill C-9.
At the centre of this bill is a political deal between the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois. In exchange for the Bloc's support, the Liberals have agreed to eliminate long-standing Criminal Code safeguards—namely paragraphs 319(3)(b) and 319(3.1)(b)—that protect Canadians from being prosecuted for expressing, in good faith, an argument on a religious subject or a belief rooted in sacred text.
These protections are not loopholes. They are constitutional guardrails upheld by the Supreme Court that ensure Canada's hate speech provisions remain consistent within the charter. My colleagues before me have gone to great lengths, doing so with great eloquence—far more eloquence than I could muster—to express this point quite poignantly.
The Liberals and the Bloc want to tear these protections out by the roots. The Bloc justifies this change by referencing a single case. Montreal imam Adil Charkaoui, in 2023, used a prayer to call for the extermination of Jews. This is abhorrent. His statements were vile and deeply anti-Semitic. The simple truth is that what he said was already illegal. It was illegal under section 318 for advocating genocide and under subsection 319(1) for the public incitement of hatred.
This is another example of the government failing to act and failing to execute on laws that already exist on the books for the protection of Canadians and their fundamental rights. The religious text defence does not apply to either provision, and there is absolutely no evidence that prosecutors declined to charge him because of that defence. The only reason he was not charged is that authorities failed to enforce the law. This is unbelievable.
Instead of fixing that enforcement gap, the Liberals and the Bloc have chosen to target law-abiding religious Canadians. That is hypocrisy of the highest order, especially as they claim this bill is meant to protect the very communities it would most deeply wound.
For nearly a decade, this government has repeatedly marginalized Canadians of faith. They have attempted to strip charitable status from religious charities and pro-life organizations. They imposed the Canada summer jobs values test, punishing groups that refused to renounce their core religious beliefs. That is unbelievable and unconscionable.
I will note that this ideological overreach is not new. In fact, an early 2022 report from an advisory panel to the Department of National Defence recommended that the Canadian Armed Forces not employ chaplains whose religious traditions do not align with the government's ever-shifting vision of equality and inclusion.
That panel singled out the entire Abrahamic faith traditions—traditions that reserve the priesthood for men and that believe in the traditional view of marriage—as being incompatible with serving in the military. Think about that. Really, we as legislators need to think about this. A government that claims to champion diversity and inclusion was actively entertaining the exclusion of religious Canadians from serving as chaplains precisely because of their beliefs.
