Threat to the Religious Defense in Canada’s Hate Speech Law

Canada faces the possibility of another round of infringements on freedom of religion and freedom of speech with bill C-9, which proposes to amend Canada’s hate speech law (already an infringement of classical liberal freedoms), to remove the exemption in the law for speech justified from a religious text that one sincerely believes.

More generally, the amendment would endeavor to make prosecutions under the law easier, by removing the requirement of approval from Canada’s attorney general for each prosecution, prohibit the display of certain symbols used by extremist groups, codify hatred as vilification or detestation of an “identifiable group” (i.e., approximately a “protected class” in the United States), establish hate crimes as a separate offense rather than an additional charge to another offense, and make it a crime to obstruct entrance to a house of worship, school, or community center used by an identifiable group.

C-9 has been occasioned by rising antisemitism in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. In particular, Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui called for the extermination of “Zionist aggressors” in public prayer. Although Islamic activities seem to have given the bill impetus, as they did the proposed ban on public prayer in Quebec, the bill affects religious expression generally. It was introduced into the Canadian House of Commons on September 19, 2025, by the Justice Minister and Attorney General Sean Fraser, and proceeded to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Removal of the religious exemption was a demand of the Quebec sovereigntist Bloc Quebecois, whose support is necessary for the minority Liberal government to pass the legislation.

Debate intensified in December, as Evangelical, Catholic, and Muslim spokesmen, supported by the Conservative Party, opposed removal of the religious exemption. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre posted on social media that the change would “criminalize sections of the Bible, Qur’an, Torah and other sacred texts.” On the other hand, removal has been a longstanding desire of LGBT advocates, as religious texts and arguments based on them can be understood as vilification and detestation of an identifiable group (in this case, the LGBT categories).  

There seemed to be some jockeying for position by the various actors in the controversy, with reports that Justice Minister Fraser agreed to remove the exemption without consulting the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Fraser insisting that he was “in lockstep with the PMO” on this issue, the Bloc accusing the Liberals of backing out of removal of the religious exemption, and the Justice committee meeting in which the religious exemption was to be stricken in a phrase-by-phrase review of the bill cancelled in early December. By mid-December, it appeared that Liberals were backing removal of the religious exemption, however. With Parliament in recess since mid-December, the bill is currently still in the committee stage, until Parliament returns on January 26.

Making Emotions a Crime     

The first problem with hate speech legislation (which is unconstitutional in the United States under Supreme Court interpretation of the First Amendment), is that it sets aside truth in favor hurt feelings. Truth is a defense in Canada against criminal charges of hate speech, but not civil actions through the human rights commissions. Thus society, to the extent that hate speech legislation affects it, is dependent on ideology rather than the truth. Beyond that, there is the problem of defining and identifying subjective feelings, which cannot be observed, but only inferred.  

LifeSiteNews.com cited Canadian legal expert John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms to highlight the conflict between the right-not-to-be-offended at the heart of hate speech legislation and the classical right to free speech. Carpay said that C-9 “allows Canadians to express ‘disdain’ and ‘dislike’ without worrying about facing criminal charges, yet Canadians must be careful not to possess illegal emotions that involve ‘detestation’ or ‘vilification.’ It’s not ‘hate’ to discredit, humiliate, hurt, offend, and dislike people; it is “hate” to detest and vilify people. Are we clear?”

Thus what counts as “hate” is necessarily the inference of a judge, Carpay observed. He also noted that the hate speech law basically attempts to “make it the law to ‘punish the emotion of hate,’” But as he observed, judges are already empowered to increase penalties where hate was a factor in committing the crime. C-9 makes “hate” a crime in itself and also increases penalties where it is found in other crimes. It can increase a two-year sentence to five, a five-year sentence to ten, and a fourteen-year sentence to life imprisonment. Carpay also observed that much in C-9 is duplicative of existing criminal law (such as uttering threats or obstructing entrance to a place of worship). The law merely makes it an additional crime if done to protected or “identifiable” groups. The bill also showed ideological bias in banning Nazi but not communist symbols, even though communist regimes, like the Nazis, are responsible for millions of deaths.     

The bill C-9 also removes the requirement that any hate speech prosecution have the consent of Canada’s attorney general. This substantially increases the power of police and prosecutors, Carpay said, to prosecute speech and crimes that they believe are hateful. Online postings can be determined to be hateful and prosecuted, Justice Minister Sean Fraser confirmed. Carpay observed that since much of the bill duplicates already existing laws, it is largely an act of virtue signaling. He also noted that “the bill mentions ‘rising antisemitism’ but says nothing about the arson attacks on Catholic and Christian churches plaguing Canada.” Regarding the last point, Conservative Member of Parliament Leslyn Lewis also pointed to rising anti-Christian violence in Canada, about which the bill makes no mention. Her speech to the Commons compellingly shows this.

Prohibiting Religious Condemnation of LGBT Behavior

The main concern for Evangelicals and Catholics in Canada is that the Biblical condemnations of homosexuality and identification with the opposite sex will be made illegal, and one could be punished for quoting or teaching from them. As LifeSiteNews explains, current Canadian hate speech law protects speech made “in good faith” on a “sincerely held” interpretation of a religious text. But if C-9 passes with the exemption removed, quoting a religious text to support criticism of abortion or homosexuality could be regarded as prosecutable hate speech, The Bloc Quebecois wants the exemption removed due to rising antisemitism in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. While defeat of the bill would not necessarily bring the minority Liberal government down, LifeSiteNews does report that C-9 and the removal of the religious exemption was “part of a deal” to maintain a parliamentary majority and keep the Liberal government in power.

That criticism of homosexuality or transgenderism may indeed be prosecuted is was made clear by an October 30 meeting of the Commons’ Committee on Justice and Human Rights, in which the then-committee chair, Marc Miller, said that quoting Biblical passages to condemn homosexuality or transgenderism should not be protected by the “good faith” exception in Canada’s current hate speech law. Miller seems to have thought the term “good faith” in the law means correct or virtuous faith; surely it means sincere faith. In the case of the passages condemning homosexuality or transvestism, “good faith” means that one truly believes they are a revelation from God, not merely a cover for another motivation. Miller is certainly correct that the Biblical passages he referenced are hateful, but wrong to think that the government is competent to discern the ultimate truth, and also wrong to think that hatred of homosexual behavior is hatred of persons.  

On the other hand Justice Minister Fraser said at a press conference in December (see video in linked article) that C-9 would “in no way, shape or form, prevent a religious leader from reading their religious texts, it will not criminalise faith.” However, he also said that suggesting otherwise was “a perversion of the values that the major religions in this country and around the world stand for.” Fraser’s comment could reasonably be taken to mean that, from a liberal/left standpoint, condemnations of homosexuality found in most world religions are inconsistent with their overall morality and thus not true religion.

Responses from Religious Leaders and Spokesmen

Shortly after the Liberal agreement to removal of the religious exemption was announced at the beginning of December, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, Justice Minster Sean Fraser, and parliamentary leaders of the various parties in Canada. It notes that the public’s understanding of what Canadian hate speech law forbids is often “far broader than what the Criminal Code captures.” Since the penalty for violation of the hate speech law is up to two years in prison, clergy, teachers in religious schools, and ordinary layman may fear that expression of traditional doctrinal and moral beliefs will be prosecuted. Therefore, the bishops’ main concern with the removal of the religious exemption is the chilling effect that it will have. A posting from Toronto Cardinal Frank Leo expressed similar concerns.

A petition by the Campaign for Life in Canada, whose work could also be affected, has so far garnered thousands of signatures and well expresses the concern that many religious Canadians have about their right to freely express traditional religious beliefs.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) made its submission to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Nov. 21, 2025.  EFC recommends that C-9 be amended to restrict “hate speech” to hate involved in violating the Criminal Code, not “any other act of Parliament,” as C-9 now says. EFC also recommends that the mandatory approval of the Canadian attorney general for any hate speech prosecutions be maintained rather than removed, as C-9 now does. It recommends defining “hate” in law according to the Canadian Supreme Court’s R. v. Keegstra decision (1990), which defined hate as “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation, that belies reason and is predicated on destruction.”

The submission opposes removal in C-9 of protections for religious facilities which exist in current criminal law. This seems to show a strong liberal/left bias since violation of the religious property of an identifiable group is now made a specific crime under C-9, but there is no longer protection for Catholic or Evangelical churches, which have been targets of arson. It also recommends that merely being near a facility “for the purpose of obtaining or communicating information” (apparently especially referring to abortion facilities) does not constitute intimidation. In particular, that the phrase “state of fear” means only what a reasonable person would consider a state of fear, so that peaceful, lawful demonstrations are not made illegal.

Finally, EFC recommends that the religious exemption in current hate speech law be maintained. The submission notes that the Supreme Court of Canada barely upheld the constitutionality of the current hate speech law and did so because of the inclusion of the religious exemption. A minority of the court “found the willful promotion of hatred offense unconstitutional” even with the religious exemption. This suggests that the hate speech law might be struck down if the religious exemption is removed. But the majority decision seemed to shield only a very limited area of expression where an individual is “willfully promoting hatred … an individual’s freedom of expression will not be curtailed in borderline cases.” Persons engaging in religious polemics therefore have “a strong signal” that their expression will not be criminal, the court said. EFC says that “the defence ensures the Criminal Code provision intended to protect minorities from hate is not used to prosecute other minorities.” Therefore, “we urge the committee to reject any amendment proposed to remove the good faith religious belief defence in s. 319(3)(b).”

In a prior release consisting of talking points about C-9, EFC observed that the “good-faith” defense appealing in court to religious texts “has rarely been invoked, and never successfully.” Additionally, courts have been clear that the religious defense does not allow one “to intentionally embed hateful communication within religious language, like a Trojan Horse.” In other words, any claim of religious belief must be sincere. Removing protection for sincere belief will communicate to minority religious communities (which orthodox Christians in Canada certainly are) that their beliefs are subject to prosecution. It will further marginalize these groups, whose “beliefs on marriage, sexuality and gender are increasingly marginalized and frequently described as hateful.”

However, five Jewish groups, including particularly the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), moved by the rise in antisemitism since 2023, have supported C-9. In a joint statement they called for legislators to advance the bill, which they said is needed, citing a “level of hate and intimidation unlike anything in recent memory … There is a vital need for concerted action coming out of Parliament to strengthen the response of police and prosecutors and to send a clear and unequivocal message that hateful extremism has no place in Canada,” said Noah Shack, CEO of CIJA.

On the other hand, Muslims seem generally opposed to C-9, particularly in view of the threat to their religious activities in Quebec. “I think all Canadians can recognize that this is an issue that affects all of them, including religious and non-religious Canadians,” said Haseeb Hassaan, spokesperson for the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

Significance C-9 and Prospects for Preserving Religious Freedom  

The real significance of bill C-9 and the controversy over it seems to be symbolic. Yet symbols matter a great deal to the public, the police, and the courts. Prosecutions for hate speech against homosexuality or transgenderism are not common in Canada, and convictions even rarer, although if C-9 passes they may become more common, because prosecutors will not be deterred by the religious defense or the requirement of attorney general approval. EFC’s observation that repeal of language protecting religious belief will communicate to minority religious communities that their beliefs are not worthy of respect or legal protection (which will also be the message to the general public) is the most important reason that the religious exemption to hate speech law in Canada should not be removed. Religious belief touches ultimate matters, which a secular state is not competent to address.        

In these situations, Christians must resolve that regardless of the outcome, their first duty is to God. Canadian Christians should be wise and prudent if C-9 passes with the religious exemption removed, but obey God rather than men (Act 5:27-29) and declare the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:24-27).

More from IRD:

Banning Public Prayer in Quebec

Continuing Attacks on Religious Freedom in the West

Canada’s Suicidal Prayer