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Blog post by Augustin Hamilton (Quebec Life Coalition) — Photo (edited): AnaPliego/Adobe Stock

Note: Since Bill C-9 was passed by the Senate on June 4th with amendments by a vote of 45 in favor, 13 against, and two abstentions, it must now go back to the House of Commons. If the House of Commons passes the bill as is, it will become law.

The censorship bill C-9 is a strange stew where, at times, ingredients are thrown in, and at other times, they are taken out. As of June 4th the stew is on the stove; senators will vote on it in the third, and final if the vote is positive, reading.

C-9, the bill that condemns “hatred”! But what kind of hatred?

Introduced by the Liberals, it initially defined hatred as follows: “an emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”.

Now “hate” is defined as such in C-9: “emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation”.

Condemn vilification? Absolutely! As for “detestation,” it’s synonymous with “hatred” (so much for clarity…). But what’s absurd here is that an emotion is, by definition, passive and triggered by an external cause; one feels an emotion. And if the emotion is both “intense and extreme,” it must be due to an external cause that is more or less proportional.

The danger of such a vague definition is that it could be exploited by unscrupulous activists and judges.

Furthermore, C-9 imposes new penalties on top of those already applied to hate crimes, thereby creating disproportionate penalties.

Fortunately, the Liberals removed the provision from the bill that would have eliminated the need for the Attorney General’s approval to initiate a prosecution; that provision would have opened the door to many abusive prosecutions by overzealous officials...

And then there was the amendment requested by the Bloc in exchange for its support of the then-minority Liberal government. This amendment removes the good-faith defense that protects religious speech from charges of spreading “hate.” Now that the Liberals have a majority — a few turncoats and a few by-elections later — they seem perfectly comfortable with this amendment.

It is worth recalling that in this regard, Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, stated during a session of the Justice and Human Rights Committee: “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans — there’s other passages — there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals… there should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges… there are clearly passages in religious texts that are clearly hateful.” It is curious that he cited only the Bible as a source of “hatred", but it is evident that for certain high-ranking Liberals, Christians are a priority target.

The icing on the cake! A senator — one of those appointed late in the game by Justin Trudeau — had the Standing Committee on Human Rights add, at the last minute, an amendment condemning the “wilfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying the Indian residential school system”, with a penalty of up to two years in prison.

And what does it mean to deny or downplay the Indian residential school system? Is asking where the so-called “mass graves” of Indigenous children are such a crime? Would asking to see the “unmarked graves” be a sign of denialist skepticism? Was it therefore forbidden to defend the Church’s honor in this matter? Moreover, why assume that it is out of “hatred” for Indigenous people that someone would question certain aspects of the residential schools? This implied that anyone who voiced an objection would be de facto suspected of deliberately spreading hatred. Let us recall that about a hundred churches were vandalized or set on fire across Canada following the media coverage in 2021 of the “discovery” of the “215 graves” in Kamloops. Yet the politicians in power did not bother to strongly condemn such acts; did Justin Trudeau not say that the anger (an intense emotion?) generated by the Kamloops affair was “understandable”? Apparently, some forms of hatred are more reprehensible than others…

This latest amendment will ultimately not be included in the text being voted on today in the Senate.

All that remains is to ask ourselves whether those who accuse others of “hatred” in order to have them condemned are not themselves filled with it to the core.