Mr. Speaker, if the member for Winnipeg North would hush down, I would be more than happy to intercede on the amendments at report stage of Bill C-9.
As I previously stood up during debate on the closure motion on Bill C-9, I want to reiterate that here we have a government that is bringing in a bill and amendments under the guise of hate speech that are actually an attack on our civil liberties and on our charter freedom of religion. We know that the Liberals are now censoring debate by bringing this closure motion. We only get today in the House on Bill C-9 amendments, and then they are forcing us to vote. They are going to force the bill to a final vote on Wednesday.
This is just the modus operandi of the Liberals. When they want to ram something through, when they want to creep into our lives and erode our civil liberties, they bring in closure, they force a vote and they get their way at the end of the day. That is not democracy. That is not parliamentary procedure. It undermines our country and the freedoms we enjoy.
We know that Bill C-9 came in to address the issues of the imam in Montreal, Adil Charkaoui, who said on October 28, 2023, that he denounced all Zionist aggressors, and he called on Allah to kill the enemies of the people of Gaza and spare none of them.
That in itself comes down to anti-Semitism. It was hate. He should have been charged for it, but the RCMP and the investigators decided they were not going to charge him. They did not believe, because there was reasonable doubt, that there was enough evidence to proceed to charge him under sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits public incitement to hatred against anyone, and identifiable groups. He used the term “Zionist”, and that is not really religious, but we know he was talking about the Jewish people. It is despicable that he would even suggest that.
Christina Van Geyn wrote an opinion piece in the National Post that states, “One may argue that ‘Zionist’ was just code for ‘Jews.’...But the decision not to charge Charkaoui turned on the basic threshold of incitement to hatred, not on the religious defence.”
The problem the Liberals have in this situation is that it was the prosecutors and the RCMP who decided not to investigate, rather than addressing the real issue of going after it, instead of bringing in Bill C-9, which is just a ruse to undermine our civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.
We asked the government to split Bill C-9 into two parts. There are sections in the bill we do want to support, because we all want to stop hate speech. We want to stop the crime that is taking place around this country. Again, though, the Liberals are just ramming this through.
In the dying hours at the justice committee when it was studying Bill C-9 in its original form, the former chair of the committee, who is now the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, the member of Parliament for Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, stated from the chair, using his prerogative, “As despicable and as unlawful as the statements made by Mr. Charkaoui are”, and he said that maybe they needed to go into the good-faith argument a bit more. Then he stated, “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, there are passages with clear hatred.... Clearly, there are situations in these texts where statements are hateful. They should not be used to invoke...or be a defence.”
That is when, all of a sudden, we got this amendment out of nowhere that would take away from the Criminal Code the religious exemptions to ensure protection for those people who are at the pulpit reading the ancient texts, scripture from the Bible, the Torah and the Quran. Now the Liberals are saying they are hateful and should not be allowed.
The Liberals are trying to make the argument that they are still protected under the charter. However, decisions made by the Supreme Court over the last 30 or 40 years have said clearly that the guardrails we need with respect to protection of the religious freedoms embedded in the Criminal Code under paragraphs 319(3)(b) and 319(3.1)(b) are required.
The sections they want to take away state, and it is the same in both paragraphs, that “No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2.1)”, which is hate crime speech, “if, in good faith, [the person] expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text”.
They would be removing that, and they are trying to say, “Do not worry about it. It is all still going to be protected under the charter.” It would not be. As I said before, this is being led by the person who is now the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. He is supposed to be protecting Canadian culture, which includes freedom of religion. He, backed by the Liberal cabinet, the Liberal caucus and the Bloc, is trying to take away the religious freedoms that we have and the exemptions that are granted to protect, particularly, pastors, imams and rabbis who are actually reading and quoting from the Bible, the Koran, the Torah and other religious texts.
There is now a list of almost every religious group and organization in Canada that is opposed to Bill C-9. However, the Liberals say that we should not worry because they are protected under the charter, but they are not.
Again, this a violation of the concept of separation of church and state, which is about keeping government and religion separate from each other. Now the government is trying to step in, and instead of being agnostic as to what faith people want to choose or not choose in Canada, it is now starting to wiggle its way in, inserting the thin edge of the wedge to again divide Canadians on another issue, saying that the church is going to have to take the rules imposed by the government, the state of Canada, on our religious institutions.
Even though we do not have a single law, like other countries have, that says we will separate church and state, there is good reason why we should always keep that separation and the government should not be allowed to dictate what is going to be preached from the pulpit. We do not want to restart what happened under Henry VIII in 1534, when he did not like what the church was saying so he took over the church. He created the Church of England, and today the Crown is still the head of that church.
We also do not want to go down the route of the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China, where religion is outlawed, but that is exactly what the government is starting to walk towards. Even though it may be saying it is officially agnostic, or, as in the case of the Communist Party of China, saying that it is officially atheist, what the government is really trying to do is pick the winners and losers and is trying quash anyone who does not subscribe to its ideology.
When we were in government, we started the office of religious freedom. Stephen Harper said at that time that “governments that violate religious freedom are also prone to impose themselves in every other sphere of life.”
We talk about how the Liberals continue to weigh in on the issues, and this is not the first time they have started to dictate how the government wants churches and other religious groups, the synagogues the mosques and other temples, to behave. We witnessed this five or six years ago when they brought in the attestation for the Canada summer jobs program. They said that if someone was preaching certain beliefs from the pulpit, like the protection life, they could not do that or they would not be getting any government money. That was challenged and was walked back the following year.
Now the Liberals are trying to actually take away the Criminal Code section that protects what we say from the pulpit and ensures that it cannot be used against us in a court of law. I would just remind the House what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms says. In the very preamble, it says, “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”. In section 2 the charter says, “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression”.
This is supported in Supreme Court cases, not the charter, but Criminal Code paragraphs 319(3)(b) and 319(3.1)(b). Both the Supreme Court cases of Big M Drug Mart and of Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay, the city, say that religious neutrality must be maintained and that the government cannot favour or hinder any of that belief.
Everybody should be voting against Bill C-9. Everyone of faith should be very concerned about what the Liberals are trying to do to religious freedom in Canada.