Mr. Speaker, this has been a challenging issue, to say the least. We heard from the Liberal government as to what it claims Bill C-9 is and what it would do. Then we read the bill and looked at what the Liberals are doing and how they feel about people of faith in this country.
I think about the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and comments he has shared in the House, in which he said very clearly that he believes that there are some books of holy scripture that, in his view, are clearly hateful, so much so that he thinks prosecutors should be able to criminally charge the people who utter them, criminally charge people who read from the Bible, the Torah or the Quran.
This is very concerning to people in this country. There is a reason that more than 350 Muslim groups, more than 700 Christian groups and dozens of Orthodox Jewish leaders have called on the government to walk away, to backtrack on Bill C-9, specifically the removal of the long-standing protections for religious speech.
We listened to them. I have had the opportunity to go around the country and do the consultations the Liberal government never did with the people who would be directly affected by the bill. People feel hurt. They feel assaulted by a government that claims to be protecting those very people with this legislation. I would like to provide a couple of examples of what happens when this power goes unchecked.
We have all seen, from the United Kingdom, images, videos and stories of police knocking on people's doors over things they have posted on social media. This actually has a name in the U.K. They call it a non-crime hate incident. It is the arm of the state, weaponizing its power against people because of their opinions or because they wrote something that might be off-colour or that hurt someone's feelings. That does not mean it rose to the very high threshold of incitement, which is really what we are talking about when we talk about criminalizing hate.
We have a balance in Canada that has worked for many years. That balance was upheld in part because the Criminal Code has the religious defence, which says that someone cannot be prosecuted for wilfully promoting hate if in good faith they were expressing a religious belief or citing a religious text.
The news reported the other day that there is a priest in Iceland named Jakob Rolland who is under police investigation for expressing in a radio interview his church's view on matters of sexuality. The police are investigating him.
There is a long-running case in Finland with respect to a member of Parliament, Päivi Räsänen, who was a cabinet minister. In Finland, cabinet ministers do not try to throw people in jail for quoting holy scripture. However, this member of Parliament has now been in court case after court case for seven years over a tweet in which she quoted the Bible and affirmed what she believed is a biblical teaching. The mechanism being used against her in Finland is very similar to what we hear from members of the Liberal Party right now, not just in the context of Bill C-9 but also in the online harms act, the legislation the Liberals have tried to pass twice in previous parliaments and have said will be coming back again.
We are here today because we have been listening. We have been listening to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is a body that does not often get into matters of politics, but it felt so strongly about the removal of the religious defence that it spoke out and said that this would jeopardize religious freedoms in Canada.
We have been listening to the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, who similarly said that he has no desire to preach hate but that he can have the freedom to preach the gospel of love only if he has the freedom to decide for himself, not have the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, the Minister of Justice, the Prime Minister and not some backbenchers in the Liberal Party who have had egregious things to say about people of faith in the past, decide. The primate, members of his church and his fellow clergy should decide.
There is the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Rabbinical Council of Toronto and the United Church of Canada. If we put all these groups in one room, they will disagree on so many things, but what they agree on is more important, which is that they all benefit from religious freedom. They all benefit from freedom of expression. If we do not protect religious freedom for every individual faith denomination and religious organization, we have not done our job as parliamentarians in upholding the charter values of freedom of expression and freedom of religion for all Canadians. Religious freedom for one is religious freedom for all.
I have no doubt that we are going to hear from the Liberals that this is all a load of hooey because the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of religion. I am going to give the member for Winnipeg North a bonus question, which I will answer before he even asks it. That protection does not stop a government in real time from violating rights. If he wants proof of that, he need not look further than the decision made last week by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice to appeal once again the decision that the use of the Emergencies Act was unconstitutional. The Federal Court ruled, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled, and now the Liberals are taking it all the way to the Supreme Court.
However, when Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, he used the very same language we hear from Liberals right now to defend Bill C-9, which is that we need not worry about our charter rights' being violated, because the charter protects our rights. Well, a load of good that does. If there is four-plus years of litigation, only to, at the end, have a declaration that maybe we were right, it did not stop the violation from taking place in the first place.
In fact, even the debate we are having right now has been limited to just one single day because the Liberals did not want to hear on record the concerns I have been sharing and the concerns that have been conveyed to me by faith leaders in my riding and around the country, including Manitoba, the GTA, Newfoundland, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
Many of the people who came out to our town halls were not even political. In fact, many of them said they never wanted to get involved in politics, because they believe in the idea that church and state should be separate. That is what we are actually protecting. We are protecting the church from the state. We are protecting all faith institutions from a world in which government decides which religious scriptures we can cite and which ones we cannot, and which religious beliefs are legitimate and which ones are not.
I cannot stress enough that the people of faith in this country, including the hundreds of Muslim groups and the hundreds of Christian groups, representing among them literally millions of Canadians, do not want the right to preach hate. They want the protection that the state will never weaponize the definition of hate to silence them. That is key. No one is asking for a hall pass to commit a crime under a religious pretext. One cannot rob a bank, run down the road yelling “God is good” and expect the police will not follow them, but the religious defence does protect against overzealous and politically motivated prosecutions to silence people because of a hatred and contempt for what they believe, for who they are.
As I said in my last speech on this subject, hate is real. In London, a Muslim family was killed because of its faith. Just this past week there was another church burned, the 124th in the last five years in Canada, this one in New Brunswick. We have seen the brazen anti-Semitism. Hate is real, but no community is protected by legislation that infringes on its right to believe what it wants to believe.
Bill C-9 must be defeated.