The government just forced a gag order through Parliament to finish the job, and they did it because they were losing the argument in broad daylight. On June 15, 2026, the Liberals used a time allocation motion to ram the final stage of Bill C-9—the so-called Combatting Hate Act—past Conservative opposition in the House of Commons. For months, they have been telling Canadians that this legislation is simply about keeping communities safe from violent extremists and preventing actual hate crimes.
That is a fiction. If you read the actual text of the bill, you realize very quickly that Minister of Justice Sean Fraser and the Carney government have effectively laid the groundwork to criminalize quoting the Bible, the Quran, or the Torah in public, provided someone with a political agenda decides it offended them. They know exactly how unpopular this is, which is why they bypassed final parliamentary scrutiny to get it passed before Canadians could figure out what was buried in the fine print.
The Procedural Hammer
Time allocation is a bureaucratic term for a very simple, brute-force tactic: shutting down the people who were elected to stop you from making bad laws. When a government knows its legislation cannot survive prolonged public scrutiny, it pulls the plug on the debate. It is a tool of cowardice, deployed when ministers cannot defend their own drafting in front of the cameras. After the Senate sent the bill back to the House in early June, the Liberals used time allocation to bypass a final debate on the amendments, ensuring the legislation was rammed into law. They needed to bury the details before the public woke up to what was happening.
Conservative Members of Parliament Andrew Lawton, Larry Brock, and Roman Baber spent weeks at the Justice and Human Rights Committee earlier this spring aggressively opposing the specific clauses in this bill that target religious speech. They demanded answers. They introduced expert witnesses. They forced the government to explain why a bill purportedly designed to stop terrorism and hate crimes needed to strip away long-standing protections for pastors, rabbis, and imams.
The official justification for rushing this through is entirely predictable. The government claims these sweeping new powers are necessary to protect vulnerable people from a rising tide of intolerance. In notes prepared for a Canadian Heritage committee appearance in February 2026, the government laid out its case: "Hate has no place in Canada. Hate divides us, incites violence, and puts our collective safety at risk... Canada's official data shows that hate crimes have increased dramatically over the past six years."
No one disagrees with stopping violent incitement. But if this legislation were truly about stopping violent incitement, the government would not be tampering with the sections of the Criminal Code that protect peaceful religious expression. They would focus the justice system entirely on the people throwing bricks, burning buildings, and issuing physical threats, not the people quoting scripture in a pulpit or on a street corner. Instead, they took a sledgehammer to the very legal mechanisms that separate a theological debate from a hate crime.
Stripping the Shield
Before the Carney government introduced Bill C-9, the Criminal Code contained a clear, categorical defense for religious speech. Section 319(3)(b) stated plainly that no person shall be convicted of promoting hatred if they "in good faith, 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."
It was a simple, necessary shield. It meant that a pastor preaching on the traditional definition of marriage, or an imam teaching orthodox theology, could not be dragged into a criminal trial simply because an activist group found their ancient texts deeply offensive. The law recognized that sincerely held religious beliefs, even those that run completely counter to modern cultural sensitivities, are not hate speech.
Bill C-9 repeals that paragraph completely. The government erased it from the books.
In its place, they allowed a minor interpretive amendment at committee, brought forward by Parliamentary Secretary Patricia Lattanzio. They now point to this "Lattanzio Clause," embedded within the Section 319 framework, and claim that religious speech is still perfectly safe.
But a "clause for greater certainty" about public interest discussions is not a categorical exemption. It fundamentally lacks the hard statutory shield of the repealed defense. It translates to this: the government took away your body armor and handed you a sticky note that says "please don't shoot," and they expect you to thank them for it.
Legal experts see right through this maneuver. Armando L. I. de Miranda, in a formal brief submitted to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in December 2025, laid out the reality of what the government is doing. He argued that eliminating the exemption "removes statutory recognition that sincere religious expression constitutes a category distinct from hate speech."
When you remove that statutory distinction, you are legally declaring that reading from the Book of Romans or the Book of Leviticus can be prosecuted the exact same way as spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue. You are flattening the legal landscape so that a theological debate on a university campus or a sermon delivered in a rural church is treated with the same criminal severity as malicious vandalism. The people who drafted this legislation understand the difference between reading a holy book and inciting violence. They simply no longer care.
The Political Gatekeeper
The government’s original draft of this bill revealed exactly how they view religious speech. When Sean Fraser first introduced Bill C-9, he didn't just remove the religious defense—he also stripped out the long-standing requirement for the Attorney General to authorize hate propaganda charges.
Historically, you couldn't just have someone arrested for hate propaganda because you didn't like their sermon. The Criminal Code required the explicit consent of the Attorney General to even authorize prosecutions under Section 319. It was a mandatory check against frivolous, politically motivated witch hunts. The original draft of Bill C-9 stripped that requirement out, shifting charging discretion directly to local police officers.
Legal experts sounded the alarm immediately. Shanaz Joan Parsan highlighted the structural danger in her 2026 brief, From Bill C-63 to Bill C-9: Charter Limits on Canada's Emerging Hate and Online-Speech Regulation. She warned that removing the Attorney General's consent "lowers a procedural gate in hate prosecutions" and raises severe Charter questions regarding religious liberty.
The backlash from civil liberties groups and legal scholars was so intense that the Liberals were forced to retreat. At the Justice Committee, they adopted amendments to reinstate the Attorney General's oversight, dropping it back into the final text under subsection 319(6.1).
But no one should confuse a tactical retreat with a victory for free expression. Apply the government’s own logic to this sequence of events. If their stated goal was simply to protect the public from surging, violent hate crimes, they never would have tried to remove the specialized prosecutor in the first place. Their initial instinct was to hand charging discretion directly to local police, turning beat cops into theological enforcers who could arrest a street preacher just to defuse a loud crowd. They didn't reinstate the Attorney General because they believe in protecting religious speech; they reinstated it because they were caught overreaching.
Now, look at the trap they have built. By permanently erasing the Section 319(3)(b) religious exemption while retaining the Attorney General's consent, they have replaced a legal shield with a political one.
Until now, a malicious complaint against a church or a mosque would fail because the law itself protected the sermon. Now, the law offers no protection. Reading a controversial scripture is legally indistinguishable from the wilful promotion of hatred under Section 319(2). The only thing standing between a pastor and a criminal charge is the political discretion of the Attorney General—a cabinet minister appointed by the exact same government that just spent months trying to gut religious freedoms.
The Process is the Punishment
When you take away the law that protects religious texts, and you leave citizens at the mercy of a political gatekeeper, the result is an immediate, catastrophic chill on free speech.
The inevitable outcome is that religious leaders will begin to censor themselves. Pastors will skip over the Book of Romans. Imams will alter their Friday prayers. They will do this because a malicious complaint against a church or a mosque will no longer be blocked by a hard statutory defense. Instead, the complaint will land on the desk of an Attorney General who faces massive political pressure from activist groups to authorize the charge.
If that political pressure works, the citizen is dragged into the criminal justice system. And even if the Attorney General eventually declines to prosecute, or a judge throws the case out years later, the damage is already done.
The government knows exactly what happens to a person who is publicly investigated for a hate crime in this country. They lose their job. They lose their bank account. Their family is harassed. Their name is permanently tied to a horrific accusation in every online search. The process itself becomes the punishment. The government knows that most ordinary citizens do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund a multi-year Charter challenge at the Supreme Court of Canada. You won't be protected by the law; you will be bankrupted trying to defend yourself from it.
The Liberals know exactly what they have built. This isn't a sloppy drafting error, and it isn't a well-intentioned oversight. They have erased the line between faith and hate, and they are holding the power to prosecute over the heads of every religious community in the country.
The Hammer will be watching.
