NP View: Liberals look to criminalize faith, while allowing hate to fester

In their attempt to protect vulnerable Canadians from hate crimes, the Liberals are planning to criminalize faith.

This is the compromise they have reportedly made to pass Bill C-9, which would ban the public display of swastikas and terrorist symbols to incite hate against an identifiable group, and create new offences for “hate crime” and religious obstruction.

Considering that public incitement of hatred and religious obstruction are already crimes, the bill is largely redundant. But it gives the Liberals the appearance of addressing the escalating hatred directed toward Jews, including attacks on synagogues and rampant street protests in support of terrorists, so they want to pass it.

To do this, they need one other party to co-operate — and the Bloc Québécois is game, as long as the bill also removes the Criminal Code’s hate speech exemption for religious beliefs.

For now, no one in Canada can be found guilty of wilfully promoting hatred or antisemitism if they can show that, in good faith, they “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.” But should the Bloc get its way, that defence in the Criminal Code will be erased.

The Bloc, observed lawyer Christine Van Geyn earlier this week, seems to be particularly motivated by the case of Adil Charkaoui, an imam who Canada tried to deport for security reasons in the early 2000s and failed due to the obstruction of the Supreme Court.

Charkaoui remained in Canada and, in 2023, less than a month after the October 7 terror attack by Hamas, preached to a Montreal crowd about “Zionist aggressors” and asked Allah to “kill the enemies of the people of Gaza and to spare none of them.”

When Quebec prosecutors examined Charkaoui’s tirade, they decided not to charge him with inciting hatred against an identifiable group. They opined that raving about killing “Zionists” in the days after a bloody massacre in Israel — an obvious threat against Jews — wasn’t enough to take to court, and hence didn’t charge.

It was a terrible outcome that robbed Quebecers of a real explanation by a judge as to why exactly this didn’t constitute hate speech — and worse, it signalled to Jewish-Canadians that their safety wouldn’t be protected by the system.

The Criminal Code exemption for religious belief wasn’t to blame, however. The problem was cowardice within the Quebec Crown prosecution service.

Bloc MPs propose to solve that problem by stripping Canadians of their religious freedom, even though the problem lies within their province’s police and justice ministry.

Aside from Charkaoui, pro-Palestinian activists who break the law escape accountability all the time thanks to the nonchalance of Quebec’s arms of justice. They block streets and pray in clear acts of mischief and traffic violations, as police look on. When journalists film these acts of dominance, police threaten to arrest them.

Instead of dealing with that issue — which would begin with ordering prosecution directors and police investigators before Parliament to explain exactly why calls for violence against Jews and Islamist agitation go largely unpunished — the Liberals and the Bloc want to expose all religious Canadians to the risk of prosecution.

Traditional religious beliefs held by people of many faiths are often interpreted as vile hatred by progressives. The Bible’s assertion — and the belief of many Christians today — that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and that sodomy is a sin, are but two examples.

Culture Minister Marc Miller cited two Bible verses that prescribe death for homosexuality and cheating to justify his stance on censoring the text of the faith, ignoring that those passages generally aren’t taken literally.

Indeed, Christianity holds human life to be deeply precious, hence its opposition to execution, abortion and suicide. It wants to help people find forgiveness and to find God, regardless of who they feel attracted to — not exterminate them.

If a pious father is concerned about his teen daughter’s recent adoption of trans identity, particularly as a matter of faith, and posts about it online, police should have nothing to do with it. The same should go for families with young children who refer to drag queen story time as “Satanic” in an interview with the local news.

Such things are going to make some people uncomfortable, but Canadians should be able to have hard conversations about morality and faith.

The religious defence to hate speech is rarely used in court, and when it is, it hasn’t succeeded (it’s not so absolute that it protects any hateful speech if the speaker takes a religious framing, according to the Ontario Court of Appeal). But that’s not how we should judge its success.

The defence’s practical use comes from all the charges it keeps out of existence by clearly showing police and prosecutors that there’s no point in charging someone in the first place. If it suddenly becomes a lot easier to convict people for merely expressing their beliefs in public conversation, it’s going to be a lot easier to justify charging them.

This amendment to Bill C-9 would repress people of faith while allowing the open hatred on our streets to continue. It will only take Canada backward should it pass.