Mr. Speaker, I stand today on behalf of my constituents of Bowmanville—Oshawa North to oppose Bill C-9 and to support efforts to further scrutinize and study the legislation.
I will be sharing my time with the member for York Centre.
There are many problems with Bill C-9 and the Liberal attempt to amend Bill C-9 to criminalize the reading and sharing of Bible verses in this country. We oppose this for many reasons, but I do want to draw attention to an area that has not gotten enough attention: the efforts of the Liberal Party to enact a form of cultural imperialism on Christians, Muslims and Jews in this country.
I want to share an academic definition of “cultural imperialism” because I am sure many members of the House probably are not used to hearing that term to describe what the Liberal Party is attempting to do to citizens of our country. This definition comes from EBSCO, a research database. Published in 2024, the definition reads:
Cultural imperialism refers to the imposition of one culture's values, beliefs, and practices over another, often leading to the erosion of the latter's unique cultural identity.... It manifests through various mediums, including education, religion, and media, where dominant cultures often shape and redefine the social and ethical frameworks of less dominant societies....
Cultural imperialism causes changes that are usually faster than would otherwise occur, and in a direction that benefits those from the dominant or influencing culture. The faster pace can mean that the changes have a destabilizing effect on other aspects of the culture, and the association of the changes with benefits accruing to members of the dominant culture, taken together mean that one party is benefiting from actions that are harmful to others.
I share this definition to provide some context for what I believe the Liberal Party is doing right now. It has been in power for over a decade and has tried its very best to exercise influence over every institution in this country. It has abused the power of the federal government to impose its values, beliefs and practices on as many institutions in our country as it possibly can. Today we see evidence of that through Bill C-9 and the Liberal effort to amend Bill C-9, an effort to exercise that cultural imperialism over churches, mosques and synagogues.
I have provided an academic definition of cultural imperialism, but I would also like to provide a pop culture reference. In the hit song from last year, Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, Lamar uses some language to describe colonial thinking, in his diss track to Drake. He says:
...you not a colleague,
you a...colonizer
That is precisely what the Liberal Party is attempting to do to Christians, Muslims and Jews in this country. Liberals are not treating the diverse communities of our country with any degree of respect. They are not treating them like colleagues, listening to them, working with them and respecting their traditions and faiths. Instead they are behaving like colonizers, attempting to abuse state power to exercise undue influence by attempting to criminalize things that families in this country have believed in since the very founding of this nation by the English and the French.
The Liberals will make, of course, as they have made throughout this morning and afternoon, efforts to characterize our concerns over the legislation as theatrics, but I bring it back to the actual language used by the now Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who was promoted by the Prime Minister after he made the following comments. As chair of the justice committee, on October 30, he said that three books of the Bible, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, are hateful.
The minister used the language of hate to describe verses in the Bible that people have prayed over, read to their children and shared in communities all across this country for a very long time. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which the Liberal Party pretends, and I emphasize “pretends”, to care about, enshrines the right to religious freedom precisely as a sign of respect for the fact that there are things the government should not have its fingerprints on.
The government should not make its way into churches, mosques and synagogues in an effort to bring Liberal values, nor use the criminal justice system to enforce Liberal values on the private religious lives of Canadian citizens, but that is precisely what a colonizer would do. That is precisely what a cultural imperialist would do. They would look at churches, mosques and synagogues and ask how the federal government can make its way in there. It is wrong, it is unethical and it is against the traditions of this country. It is an insult to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
One thing I have observed in the relatively short time I have been a member of Parliament is that the Liberal Party does something that I do not know what to name; perhaps it is mind games or false presentation. It is making an effort to convince Christians, Muslims and Jews of various cultural backgrounds that they respect them. The Liberals make an effort to show they want to hear them and welcome them into Canadian politics.
I have seen with my own eyes Liberals in the Toronto area running around at cultural events and holidays, eating samosas and jerk chicken and pretending they respect people from diverse community backgrounds. They run around offering people DEI slogans like “Diversity is our strength.” They say all kinds of funny things, like “diversity, vote for me”. I know the kind of attitude they bring around our communities.
What do they do when they come to Ottawa? They want to culturally imperialize the people of this country and their children. They actually have no respect for diversity at all, and any Christians, Muslims, or Jews whose ancestors come from any part of the world must be able to unite in recognizing that the Liberal Party has no respect for our religions, our traditions or our values. The Liberals believe that the federal government is superior to us, and they believe they have the right to impose their values on our churches, mosques and synagogues.
When we talk about the language of colonizers and cultural imperialists, we have to recognize that when they attack scripture, when they attack the Bible, when they attack our religions and when they try to justify bringing the criminal justice system into our places of worship, they are trying to strip away the things that make us well-rounded people. To them we are simply economic inputs. We should have no culture. They believe we should have no meaning in our lives.
They offer us nihilism. They offer us the chance to be a column on a spreadsheet used to calculate GDP. That is all they think of us and of the efforts we make to be well-rounded people, to be part of a community, to believe in something, to have conviction and to be connected to the traditions of our fathers, our mothers, our grandfathers and our grandmothers. They ridicule and they insult. They call it hateful to believe that we come from something.
However, we stand on the shoulders of giants who sacrificed for us to be here. They sacrificed for us to have the life we have today, and we will not denounce the very people who have made our lives possible. We will not denounce the cultures and traditions they come from. We will not sit here quietly and idly while the Liberal Party seeks to call our ancestors hateful. We will not accept that. We will reject their cultural imperialism. We will call them colonizers when they behave like colonizers.
In closing, I will suggest that one of the reasons the Liberals denigrate Canadian history, one of the reasons they keep the Canadian flag at half-mast for a year, and one of the reasons they support teaching our children in this country that our country should be ashamed of its own history, is that they are embarrassed by what they see in the mirror. They have not learned the lessons from history, and they repeat the mistakes made in history of colonizing and imperializing over other people.