Mr. Speaker, I rise today not only as a member of Parliament, but also as co-chair of the Parliamentary Black Caucus, a position I share with my dear colleague from Terrebonne, who just gave a very good speech.
I would like to bring a slightly different perspective to our discussion this evening on Bill C-9. The Senate amendment, which seeks to designate the noose as a symbol of hatred, is very important.
The Senate did excellent work that deserves our support.
I would like to speak about what this bill means to the Black communities that I speak with every week, about what this bill means to us and about what it means that Parliament is finally doing it.
The word that comes back every time I have a discussion about this is “finally”. Finally, we are dealing with an issue that is of great symbolic importance and is a real symbol of hate for our community.
I have been in and around public life for a long time, and for as long as I can remember, Black communities have been telling governments the same thing. They have described a noose left on a workplace, a drawing on a wall or an actual noose being held at a construction site, for example, and what that means to them. They are threats that police have had trouble categorizing, or incidents reported and then quietly filed away because the law had no clear box to categorize them in. They told these stories to commissions, to committees, to ministers and to members of Parliament from every party, and they have told them with a patience, frankly, that these communities should have never needed.
For most of that time, the answer they got was sympathy. Sympathy is welcome. Sympathy is appreciated. Sympathy also costs nothing, and communities know the difference between a government that feels for them and a government that legislates for them. Bill C-9 legislates.
As I mentioned, as co-chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, I hear from Black Canadians from across this country. They are parents, workers, students, children and elders. When the subject of hate incidents comes up, the pain in those conversations rarely centres on the incidents alone. It centres on what happens afterward, because it is not what happens to someone but what happens afterward that is most important, and the legal process takes what is a racist act and changes it into a generic file. People can carry a great deal. What wears them down is carrying it while institutions look away.
When this bill names the noose explicitly in the law of Canada, I want this House to understand how that lands in our communities. The noose has a very specific and painful history for Black Canadians. My hon. colleague talked about the symbol of lynchings.
I do not want to be too explicit, but I have to say that hanging, lynching, is not something that just happens by accident. It is often an act that follows torture and terror.
It gives a very different perspective. When that symbol appears at a Canadian work site, the person who finds it instantly understands what it means. They know that they could never hold into themselves what the law does not do to protect them. This bill would change that.
The law of this country would say in plain text that this symbol, used wilfully to promote hatred and terror, has no place in this country. It would be a message for Black Canadians. This sentence in the Criminal Code would be a recognition that decades of telling the truth about their experience has registered somewhere, that it registered here in this Parliament. Confronting anti-Black hate means naming it, and this Parliament is about to name it.
The noose is a symbol that everyone recognizes, and the daily reality of anti-Black hate is usually quieter. It looks like threats, harassment, vandalism and intimidation, and it builds over months. The stand-alone hate crime offence at the heart of Bill C-9 is what would give the justice system the means to treat those acts as what they are.
I will leave the legal mechanics to the colleagues who have covered them and will cover them. I just want to say that communities have learned to measure laws by whether anything changes. If they call the police, will actions be taken? That is how people measure whether there is really justice in this country. This bill is built to change what happens when they call.
Parliament, as members know, moves slowly, and in moving slowly, often there is wisdom, but sometimes it is the symbol of avoidance; it is an act of avoidance. Regarding the question of hate-motivated crime, I believe we have been slow in the second way.
The evidence has been in front of us for years, if not generations. Statistics Canada has documented the rise of anti-Black hate crimes and of police-reported hate crimes year after year. Community organizations have produced report after report. The gap between what communities experience and what the law can capture was identified long ago, and it was identified by people far less powerful than any one of us in this chamber. However, they kept on raising it anyway.
It should not have taken this long. I say that as a member of the governing party, and I say that because communities that are watching at home know this to be true, and we need to be honest about what this legislation would do. What I have also learned is that the second-best time to act is now, so let us all support this bill. Bill C-9, finally, would catch up to where people are.
I will end with what I started with. Somewhere in the country tonight, there may be a worker going into his workplace and seeing the symbol of the noose being displayed or seeing a drawing of it. Right now, there is a parent explaining to their child what these various symbols of hate represent, having that difficult conversation that so many Canadians have to have with their children and their family. There are people right now deciding whether or not their place of worship, whether it is a church, a synagogue, a mosque or a gurdwara, their holy place, needs security equipment installed to ensure the safety of the people who come to worship.
These Canadians are owed many things by their country and by their Parliament. One of them is a criminal law that sees what is happening to them clearly and responds firmly. Black Canadians deserve to know that their government sees that reality and is taking it seriously. So do all the communities that hate has touched, and this bill is how we show it to them.
In conclusion, on behalf of the parliamentary Black caucus and on behalf of Black Canadians around this country, I ask every member of this House to please support this bill.