Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, many of us know the quiet satisfaction of spending a weekend puttering around fixing things: repairing a broken window sash, resetting a shifting stone in the garden, repainting a door or securing fresh glass. However, when the paint covers graffiti on a mosque or gurdwara, when the stones being reset are headstones knocked over in a churchyard or when the door being repaired is the one set fire to at a synagogue and the glass has bullet holes in it, there is nothing quiet and nothing satisfying about it. Churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, mandirs, kingdom halls, shrines, temples and meeting houses, for people of faith, are places to pray, but they are also where our communities go for weddings, funerals, Scouts, craft sales, concerts, recovery groups, community meetings, food banks, pancake breakfasts and commemorations of all kinds. When these places are damaged for any reason, our community lives are interrupted and many people feel a great sense of anxiety and unease. Right now, the Criminal Code has a specific offence for mischief against religious property, but only when the Crown can prove that the mischief was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate. If the police know that somebody smashed the windows of a synagogue or deliberately damaged or disrupted the use of a church but they cannot prove why that person did it, the case generally falls back into the category of ordinary mischief and often escapes prosecution entirely, which is the answer to my hon. colleague’s question about why appeals are not the answer and discretion for judges is not sufficient for this kind of incident. This is the gap. Motive can be very difficult to prove. A person can smash every window in a mosque and say nothing. They can damage a church during a break-in or make a synagogue unusable without leaving a manifesto or shouting a slur. However, it is not ordinary mischief when that place of worship is used for the community writ large. It is extraordinary mischief, and in proposing this bill, my colleague is seeking to close that gap for communities such as mine where there is simply a shortage of places where large crowds can gather. Bill C-255 says that the place itself deserves special protection. If a person deliberately commits mischief against a place of worship, the Crown would not also have to prove that what was going on inside that person’s head was hatred towards the specific group that runs the place, before the special penalty regime proposed by the bill would apply, because the harm to these places is not purely the dollar value of the damage. If someone breaks a $1,500 window in an ordinary commercial building, “ordinary mischief” may describe the outcome perfectly well. However, if somebody breaks the same window in a place of worship on a Saturday night, the congregation cannot hold services Sunday morning, a bake sale cannot happen that afternoon and the AA group cannot meet in the evening. The consequences of damage to these buildings extend well beyond that pane of glass. Bill C-255 would fill the space between ordinary vandalism and a provable hate crime by saying that deliberately attacking a certain kind of building deserves special treatment in the Criminal Code even when prosecutors cannot prove the offender’s motive. Now, listening to my colleagues, despite support from the Canadian Police Association for the objectives of the bill, the government’s answer to all this appears to be that Bill C-255 is redundant. I do not think that is an adequate answer. The various offences passed by the Carney Liberals this session deal inadequately with intimidation and obstruction. Blocking a door is not breaking a window, and intimidating worshippers is not burning down a hall. Bill C-9 created a general hate crime offence, but that offence still requires proof of hate motivation. None of these provisions does what Bill C-255 would do: create a specific property mischief offence for buildings used widely in our communities for so much more than religious services, which would not depend on proving motive. As for the comments by my colleagues about mandatory minimum penalties, the government claims to have removed that issue as an obstacle through its constitutional safety valve in Bill C-16. Since 2014, the Criminal Code has treated mischief against a war memorial, cenotaph or cemetery as its own offence, with penalties that are very similar, identical in fact, to those being proposed by my colleagues. Nobody has to prove that the vandal hated veterans, or the people buried there, if they desecrate a cenotaph. Parliament decided that the character of the property itself justified special treatment. Bill C-255 takes essentially the same approach to buildings used as places of worship. The Liberals’ current approach to stopping damage to these buildings is not working. Churches continue to burn, synagogues continue to be vandalized, and mosques and gurdwaras continue to be defaced, all at an alarming rate. According to Statistics Canada’s March 30 release, police reported that hate crimes targeting religion rose 154% between 2020 and 2023, from 530 incidents to a jaw-dropping 1,345 incidents, and remained essentially unchanged through 2024. Mischief accounted for 59% of them, but those are police-reported hate crime statistics. Cases that are not identified by police as hate-motivated are not captured by those numbers, so the very cases that Bill C-255 is trying to reach, where the damage is obvious but there is no evidence establishing a hate motive, are difficult to see in the statistics. In their speeches today, my colleagues have raised some technical issues with Bill C-255 that deserve to be addressed. Whether compensation floors should apply where the damage is minor is a fair question for committee. So are questions about mandatory penalties and how they would operate across the full range of conduct caught by the offence. However, I would remind the government members that they have argued that Bill C-16’s safety valve addresses this problem. They cannot have it both ways. The member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek brought this bill forward because she wants to protect these places for religious and secular Canadians alike. In communities like mine, where places to gather are in short supply, this is a worthy objective. If the government members are truly interested in the collaboration they so often tell the House is necessary at this time, there is an obvious opportunity here for them to work with her to make this bill satisfactory to all parties. I was at a wonderful little community craft market just this weekend in the hall of St. Andrew’s church, run by Volunteer Nanaimo. This craft market is totally secular and provides a terrific benefit to our community. There is a tea vendor and soaps, crafts, knitted baby clothes and tea towels, Halloween and Christmas decorations, kids’ crafts and one business with two budding entrepreneurs selling their 3D-printed wares: a little boy, who is six, overseen by his sister, who is seven. There is even homemade nail polish. Every year, I get my husband a new winter hat from this particular market, and this weekend was no exception. I got him a soft forest green knitted cap that will keep him warm this winter. We should remember who we are protecting when we protect these buildings. Certainly, we are protecting people of faith, their prayers, weddings and funerals, but we are also protecting AA meetings on Tuesday nights and food banks on Wednesday mornings. A mosque may run a youth program or collect food for families who have never set foot in its prayer hall. Gurdwaras feed people regardless of faith. We do not have to believe in what happens at the altar, the bimah or the prayer mat to have an interest in protecting these buildings. When someone deliberately attacks these places, the law should look at what was done and where, not require prosecutors to prove motive before an offence with meaningful consequences applies. The current approach has not filled the gap. We see ample evidence of that on the news on a regular basis, but what we do not see often enough are convictions. That is the reason to examine Bill C-255 seriously, amend what needs amending and see whether Parliament can produce something stronger together for the benefit of all our communities.
