Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House of Commons to speak to Bill C-9, an act to amend the Criminal Code with respect to hate propaganda, hate crime and access to religious or cultural places.
I will be splitting my time with my dear friend, the member of Parliament for Bowmanville—Oshawa North.
I will speak about Gardiner and Voltaire: one an English journalist and the other a French satirist. A.G. Gardiner, in his essay On the Rule of the Road, put it plainly: One's freedom ends where the other person's nose begins. One's right to swing their fist ends when it collides with another's safety. To live together, we accept this social contract, curbing certain impulses so that everyone may move freely. Gardiner used simple ideas like the limits of playing a trombone at midnight to illustrate the point.
True freedom comes with the responsibilities of restraint, rules and tolerance. Without responsibilities, liberties clash and dissolve into anarchy, where no one is free. With these responsibilities, we achieve freedom for all, including minorities.
Voltaire, in his writings and satire, came to the same truth from another perspective. For him, freedom of speech was the lifeblood of progress. A society advances when ideas, even unpopular ones, can be expressed and tested. He fought censorship, knowing that suppression is always the tool of tyranny. A phrase often attributed to him, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, was in fact penned later by Evelyn Beatrice Hall. Voltaire defended free expression, while rejecting incitement, libel and sedition, insisting that open dialogue is the only safeguard of liberty.
Taken together, Gardiner and Voltaire remind us that freedom lives in the balance in between. Without restraint, it collapses into anarchy, and without expression, into tyranny. It is against this balance that we must measure the state of our country today.
Taking into account the understanding that Gardiner and Voltaire provide us with, let us chart out Canada in the last decade and provide three principal critiques of Bill C-9. The hate crime legislation before us right now is legislation that we should have been debating several years ago. We will take no lessons from Liberals when it comes to fighting hate. Let us talk about the last decade.
Since 2015, when the Liberals took office, hate crimes have gone up 258%, police-reported hate crimes have increased six years in a row and anti-Semitic hate crimes are up 416%. We have a government in place that has allowed Jewish Canadians, who account for less than 1% of our population, to become the most-targeted minority in our country. Seventy per cent of all hate crimes are targeted at less than 1% of the population. It is a government that, for far too long, has decided to place political expediency over moral clarity, choosing appeasement over principle.
A synagogue was fire-bombed twice in one year. Two Jewish schools were shot up. A bomb threat targeted Jewish institutions across Canada. A Jewish man was assaulted in a Montreal park. A Jewish woman was stabbed in the kosher section of an Ottawa Loblaws. The government's announcement, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, of granting a state to the people who practise state terror as statecraft, emboldening mobs and violence upon our Jewish communities, is just the latest example.
It has been a decade of waiting for the rule of law over mob rule. Christians across our country have been subjected to over 100 church bombings and attacks. Communities are divided against one another as political projects of Liberals, rather than as a country being raised on the basis of the rule of law for all its people. Truckers took to our streets to protest for their rights and freedoms, as the Prime Minister then betrayed civil liberty and sowed distrust in our financial institutions, calling those very protesters seditious.
Trust is broken in this country. Our institutions, whether media, bureaucratic, judicial, financial or academic, have all been subjected to radical conformity, not critical thinking. The rot of one ideology as supreme against all others has shaken the confidence of Canadians, and restoring that trust requires much more than the performance art and virtue signalling that much of Bill C-9 presents.
The same Liberal members of Parliament who stood and watched as trust eroded and communities were torn apart stand here today to claim that they have solutions for the very problems they caused. They claim they have majestically changed since their new Prime Minister took office. We cannot forget the damage and division they sowed, the trust they have broken.
It is against the backdrop of the rising hate and violence the Liberals have caused that I offer three three principal critiques of Bill C-9. First is the removal of the Attorney General from the process of approving charges for hate crimes. The requirement for AG consent has long served as a safeguard against abuse and as a means for accountability. By removing that oversight, the government would risk giving unelected bureaucrats unchecked discretion over prosecutions, paving the way for radical ideological judges.
My friend, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, put it best on September 24:
Right now, our biggest problem is that enforcement is not consistent. Bail is virtually automatic, and charges are often dropped. Serious charges are plead down. That is where Parliament's attention should be: on stronger enforcement, on swifter prosecutions and on support for victims. Unamended, this bill risks punishing the unpopular while the truly dangerous slip through.
Second is a question of identity. Where the bill currently refers to the protection of identity, it shifts attention away from protecting individual dignity. This carve-out from free speech would give Liberals the opportunity to define what they do not like as hate speech. Identities and human association are complex and subjective, but the concepts of the individual's rights and dignity are objective. Our laws should defend every Canadian against intimidation, harassment and violence, not protect abstract categories that are open to interpretation.
Third, another concern with Bill C-9 is its approach to defining “hate” itself. As drafted and as the government indicates, the bill would codify the Supreme Court of Canada's definition of “hatred” as “detestation or vilification”. On its face this seems consistent, but by removing the word “extreme”, the government would lower the legal threshold, enabling police to lay a multitude of charges with less scrutiny and less investigation. In practice, this would risk opening the floodgates to inconsistent prosecution and litigation. This is the kind of overreach we have come to expect in the United Kingdom, but not here in Canada. The Conservatives are the party of free speech, not the party of prosecuting those whose speech we do not agree with.
There is a lot at stake in Bill C-9. We must resist the left's troubling argument that words alone constitute violence. Words are words. Violence is violence. Conflating the two licenses the idea that real violence is a legitimate response to speech, a principle that is both dangerous and indefensible. The only correct response to offensive or hateful words is more words and more debate.
If there has been a rise in hate in Canada, it is not because we fail to police speech; it is because we fail to police actions: barricading neighbourhoods, assaulting members of religious minorities, burning down churches, shooting up synagogues or vandalizing minority-held businesses. It is because we have a government that sows division, pitting one community against another, and that treats one speech as sacrosanct and the other as seditious. It is because our government does not have the resources to act and because the Liberals have created a justice system that lets offenders walk back onto our streets.
The solution to violence is enforcement of the law by police and by courts, accountability for wrongdoers and genuine condemnation by public officials, none of which we have seen. Bill C-9, as written, falls short. As hate crimes have risen across this land, successive public safety and justice ministers have failed to bring focus to the source of these crimes. They have failed to provide both legal and moral leadership to stand against the mob and call for civility in Canada, honouring what Gardiner and Voltaire described. Without them, violent crimes go unchecked.
It is time to jail the haters, not for what they say, but for what they do. Bill C-9 fails to strike the balance Canadians expect. Despite having had the support of the Conservatives since the election, the Liberals only table a law that would essentially repurpose an existing law and would contribute very little to dealing with one of the biggest crises our country has to confront. We must confront hatred with the rule of law and the love of liberty. We must protect Canadians from violence, not expose them to arbitrary prosecutions. We must hold the government accountable for legislation that leaves our communities vulnerable.
That is our responsibility. That is our commitment. That is the standard Canadians expect.
