Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I must say that I am disappointed I have to be here to speak to the need for religious freedom protection, but I'm very thankful to my colleague Mr. Lawton for the amendment he put forward to protect that freedom of religious expression.
There are days in Ottawa when the bills we debate come and go, barely remembered by the time we leave the committee room, and then there are days like today—days when the very soul of our country is at issue. What we're really dealing with right now is not a technical adjustment, a procedural tweak or a footnote in the justice system; what we're debating is whether Canadians should be free to speak from their conscience and whether that freedom can be stripped away because a government of the day finds those beliefs uncomfortable.
Today is one of those moments that will be remembered long after the politics of the day have faded. A future generation will ask us what we did when the freedom to speak one's faith was put at risk. Incredibly, the Liberals and the Bloc have struck a deal to remove key safeguards in the Criminal Code, safeguards that protect Canadians who speak in good faith about their religious beliefs and safeguards that the Supreme Court of Canada has already said are necessary to keep our hate speech laws constitutional—necessary, not optional.
Since the amendment supported by the Liberals and the Bloc passed, we're now in a situation where key safeguards in the Criminal Code have been stripped away, safeguards that protected Canadians' faith. Those protections existed for a simple reason: because people of faith in this country hold deep, sincere beliefs about morality, about human nature and about right and wrong. Some Canadians agree with those beliefs while others disagree, but in a free society, we debate ideas; we don't jail people for them.
With the earlier amendment now adopted, the risk is real that people could be investigated, prosecuted and even face up to two years in prison for simply quoting a verse from the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the Guru Granth Sahib or the Vedas for the teachings of Buddha—in other words, quoting the very scriptures that shaped their lives.
This is not the Canada our grandparents built. This is not the Canada my family came to from the Netherlands after World War II or the Canada generations of immigrants chose as their home because this country promised something rare in the world: freedom of conscience and freedom from religious violence. That's why Mr. Lawton's amendment is so important. His proposal would add a new subsection 6.1, making this clear: “Nothing in this section is to be interpreted or applied so as to interfere with the freedom of expression or the freedom of religion.”
This amendment doesn't undo all the damage of the previous change, but it does put a clear statutory road sign in front of prosecutors, judges and police that says, “When you apply this section, you must not trample freedom of expression and freedom of religion.” It's a line in the sand that says that on the face of the law itself, these charter rights still matter.
The Bloc and the Liberals have justified their earlier amendment by pointing to the case of the Montreal imam. In 2023, he prayed for the extermination of Jews. What he said was vile, anti-Semitic and hateful, and it was already illegal. There's no religious defence for advocating genocide and there is no religious defence for the public incitement of hatred. The authorities could have charged him—should have charged him—but they failed to enforce the law, and that failure is now being used as an excuse to criminalize ordinary Canadians who simply express their faith sincerely. You don't fix one injustice by creating another.
We're now left to mitigate the damage. Mr. Lawton's amendment is one of the only tools left to this committee to send a clear message that Parliament does not intend this section to be used to interfere with core freedoms.
I want people to picture something for a moment. Imagine a mother standing at a school board meeting, reading a passage from her holy book, trying to explain a belief that her family has lived by for generations. Imagine a priest, a rabbi or an imam preaching a sermon drawn from their ancient texts. Imagine a Sikh leader explaining a teaching that's over 500 years old. Imagine a Hindu teacher quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Imagine a Buddhist sharing the words of a sutra.
In the wake of the amendment that just passed, those Canadians are now looking to see whether Parliament will offer any reassurance—any guardrail at all—that they will not be treated as criminals for speaking from their own scriptures. This is what this amendment does. It doesn't solve every problem, but it tells them this section is not supposed to be used to interfere with their freedom of expression or religion.
What troubles me even more is what was said in this very committee last week. The Liberal chair, Marc Miller, looked at scriptures cherished by billions of people—the Bible, the Torah—and said there is clear hatred in them. He singled out Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, and then he said that prosecutors should be able to press charges when Canadians quote those books. Think about that. A senior Liberal, in charge of shaping our laws, believes quoting scripture should be grounds for criminal prosecution. If you want to understand why we need Mr. Lawton's amendment, it's exactly because those are the kinds of views that will guide how this law is interpreted.
Without some explicit protection, we move toward a country in which the government decides which verses from the Bible are acceptable, the state chooses which teachings of the Quran may be spoken aloud and prosecutors decide which parts of a sermon are safe and which are hate. When the state starts policing scripture, it's no longer protecting citizens; it's controlling them.
We already see this pattern across the country. In Ontario and elsewhere, doctors with religious objections to euthanasia have effectively been told to violate their beliefs or leave medicine. In Quebec, the government has already banned many public employees from wearing religious symbols. Now they're trying to restrict public prayer in parks, revoke accreditation from religious schools and scrub religious symbols from communications. They say it's neutral, but neutrality that bans faith is not neutrality at all; it's state-imposed secularism.
There was an old Dutch statesman and thinker named Abraham Kuyper who wrestled with this exact problem more than a century ago: How does a diverse society protects freedoms when people don't all believe the same things? Kuyper would tell us something very uncomfortable for modern governments: There's no such thing as neutral regulation of speech.
When the state claims neutrality but quietly decides which beliefs are acceptable to express, it's not neutral at all; it's picking a side. Secularism, for all its polite language, is not an umpire. It's a world view like any other, and when the state permits every ideology under the sun—political, cultural, even extreme—but suddenly tightens the rules when speech is rooted in faith, the problem isn't religion; the problem is honesty. A society that allows every belief except religious belief to speak freely is not pluralistic; it's selective, and it's pretending otherwise. True pluralism doesn't protect only comfortable speech or carefully edited convictions. It protects speech that's real, lived and sometimes unpopular, speech that actually costs something to say. That's the whole point of freedom of expression.
That's why we should all be very cautious of vague hate speech laws that are untethered from objective harm, because when freedom depends on saying the right things, it isn't freedom anymore. A government confident in a pluralistic society should not fear religious voices; it should trust Canadians enough to hear them and be strong enough to govern them without silencing them. Here, in this Parliament, instead of resisting the trend to prohibit free speech, the earlier amendment raced to meet it. Mr. Lawton's amendment is at the very least a way for this committee to say, “We've gone too far.” We need to reaffirm in black and white that freedom of expression and religion still matter in this section.
Let me say, with the deepest conviction, that when a government declares that faith must retreat behind closed doors, it shackles the soul of its own people. Imposed secularism is not neutrality; it is the state asserting its own creed, insisting that the wisdom of our past—our ancient writers—must change, allowing a single, arrogant generation, which is a tiny slice of the history of the world, to impose its small ideas on the past, present and future of mankind. We ignore our ancestors' wisdom at our peril.
History teaches us a hard truth. Time and again, we see that oppression comes dressed in the language of progress, safety and uniformity, but beneath that language lies a quiet demand: that the principles of the individual must bow down.
It is the cold hand of power reaching into the consciences and souls of citizens, demanding obedience. Once that line is crossed, the state does not stop. It grows bolder, and a people that once spoke freely begins to whisper instead. When coercion enters the public square dressed as tolerance, we must speak with courage and clarity.
Witness after witness has told this committee that the good-faith religious defence was narrow. It didn't protect extremists. It didn't protect violence. It didn't protect hatred. It simply protected sincere people of faith who speak honestly from their traditions. That fence has now been removed. The least we can do is build another safeguard—an interpretive safeguard that tells courts and prosecutors not to use this section to interfere with fundamental freedoms.
I want my colleagues to understand this. Freedom of religion is not a niche freedom. It's not a private hobby. It's not something you do only in your home or your place of worship. For millions, it's the framework of their life. It's their moral compass. It's their sacred duty. It's the source of courage, forgiveness, charity, perseverance and hope.
This safeguard has existed in law for decades. It's not some Harper-era carve-out. The Liberal-era Parliament under Chrétien chose to expand, not shrink, the ability of people of faith to express good-faith opinions based on their scriptures. Successive governments, including the current Prime Minister's, left that safeguard in place for two decades. No federal government, Liberal or Conservative, moved to repeal it until now.
For the first time, a government is now not just enforcing hate-speech laws in cases of genuine extremism, but also stripping away the explicit protection of good-faith expression rooted in religious texts from the Criminal Code's hate propaganda provision. This is a major shift. If we're going to do something that serious, the very least we can do is adopt Mr. Lawton's amendment to signal that Parliament does not intend this section to be used to trample the freedoms of religion and expression.
For all these reasons, I support Mr. Lawton's amendment. It's not everything we wanted, but it's an important line of defence left to this committee. I urge colleagues, whatever their party, ideology or personal beliefs, to ask themselves a simple question: “Do I want to live in a country where this section can be interpreted in a way that interferes with freedom of expression and freedom of religion, or do I want the law itself to say that it must not be interpreted that way?” If the answer is that they value those freedoms, I would respectfully urge them to vote in favour of Mr. Lawton's amendment.
Thank you.
