“I do not want this bill to pass. It removes protections for religious speech and will make people afraid to share their faith. Attacking places of worship is already illegal, so police should just enforce the laws we already have.”

“Madam Speaker, today I rise on a topic of great concern to people in my community and to many Canadians from coast to coast. Perhaps no piece of legislation in this place has drawn as much public interest as Bill C-9. Combined, our offices have received tens of thousands of emails from concerned citizens opposed to the bill. The bill is about trust: who we trust with our beliefs, who we trust with our words and whether we can still trust that the government will protect our right to hold both. That trust is challenged when 240,000 postcards to MPs and senators remain in boxes at the Senate, undelivered. I have personally sponsored and presented petitions that have received signatures from people who value free speech and civil liberties. In my community of Cambridge, whether it is at events or just in the parking lot of a grocery store, I have had people come up to me to say that I should not let this one pass without a fight. It is no secret that religious freedom across this nation is under threat. We have seen churches burned, people threatened in the streets, synagogues vandalized and violence amongst different groups of people. This is not what life was like in Canada just a few years ago. Conservatives unequivocally condemn this hatred, and we want the chaos in our streets to come to an end. The government would have people believe that the response, Bill C-9, is some innocent bill. It calls it the combatting hate act. Nobody here is opposed to combatting hate. Nobody wants their church, temple or mosque to be attacked, but that is not what the debate is about. The debate is about whether the tool the government has chosen to use to address hatred is one that respects the very liberties that make Canada the best country on earth. It is about whether the legislation would actually protect religious freedom or just restrict it further. When people from across the political spectrum, from the Canadian Labour Congress to Catholic bishops, Muslim imams, rabbis, academics, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and more, come out in opposition to the bill, I think we know what the answer is. Their main concern centres around the removal of the religious text defence under section 319 of the Criminal Code. I would also like to recognize that I would like to split my time. For years, Canadians who expressed a sincere, honest religious belief have had a legal defence available to them when they expressed views on moral and social questions. That defence existed to protect freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and freedom of expression, which are enshrined in our charter. That was not a loophole. It was a deliberate choice by Parliament to recognize that sincere religious expression deserves protection, even when others find it uncomfortable. The Liberals, with help and encouragement from the Bloc Québécois, agreed to strip that defence out of the Criminal Code. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops warned that this would create a chilling effect on religious expression. One wrote that Canadians should not be criminally prosecuted for sincere, truth-seeking expression made without malice and based in centuries of religious tradition. He is right. The people in my community, from all faiths and backgrounds, wrote to me to say the same thing. They are afraid, not because they want to spread hatred, but because they are now uncertain whether what they believe and how they speak about it could one day be used against them in a court of law. Members can think about what that chilling effect looks like in practice: a pastor who self-censors a sermon because he is not sure where the line is anymore; a mother or father who is uncertain whether what they say around the dinner table could one day be characterized as something it was never intended to be; and the person who fought their way out of addiction through faith, who credits their belief with saving their life and who now wants to share that story openly, to tell others there is another way. That person now has to wonder whether speaking from their own lived experience, drawing on the very thing that pulled them back from the edge, could one day be used against them in a court of law. I have heard from all of them, people who picked up the phone or sat down to write to me because they genuinely do not know what the bill would mean for their lives. The government itself has mused about this. The Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, one of the people in charge of writing, introducing and implementing the bill, named specific parts of the Bible he found hateful. There is little in the bill to stop him from acting on those beliefs once it is passed. Let us talk about what the bill would not do. It would not actually address the root causes of hatred or offer the tools many people in our communities are asking for as they deal with this new wave of hatred. Burning a church, attacking a synagogue or calling for the death of someone in a particular religious group is already illegal. Bill C-9 would not have stopped any of the heinous offences we have seen in the news over the past months and years. We already have laws against obstruction, against threats and against the incitement of violence. If those laws are not being enforced consistently, the answer is not to add new vague offences. The answer is to resource law enforcement and the courts to apply existing law with consistency and fairness. The answer is also to not ram a divisive, threatening bill through the House of Commons under the guise of unity and freedom. The government introduced this bill only a few months ago. It has silenced the opposition and made backroom deals to move it forward. It has ignored organizations of all stripes and the tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of Canadians from communities like mine who took the time to write, call and petition. This is not how we stop hatred. This is how we build resentment. This bill would amend the Criminal Code. It is not a minor administrative matter. Changes to the Criminal Code affect every Canadian in every province and every courthouse in the country. They affect what can be prosecuted, what defences are available and what the state can do to a citizen who says the wrong thing at the wrong moment. This deserves more than a rushed timeline brokered with the Bloc Québécois, while the official opposition was left on the outside. The tens of thousands of Canadians who wrote to MPs like me deserve a full debate. The Catholic bishops deserve a full debate. The Muslim imams deserve a full debate. Even the rabbis and civil liberty advocates who raised the alarm bells deserve a full debate. The pastors, teachers and parents who contacted my office deserve a full debate. I want to close by bringing this back to the people who sent me here. There is a woman in my neighbourhood, someone who has given decades to our community, who wrote me a letter about the bill. She is a woman of faith. She told me she is not a hateful person. She would never want anyone to be targeted, threatened or made to feel unsafe. She asked me in plain and honest language if the bill would mean that what she believes about the world, drawn from her faith, could one day be used against her in a courtroom. She asked if this bill means her grandchildren will live in a country where sincere belief is a liability. I did not have a reassuring answer for her, and that is precisely the problem. When a law aimed at combatting hate creates fear in the hearts of law-abiding, community-minded, faithful Canadians, when it drives them to petition their MP and write letters by hand, something has gone wrong in the drafting, in the process and in the government’s willingness to listen. Our party, at its core, is about protecting what is worth protecting: the freedom to speak, to believe, to gather and to live according to our conscience without the state breathing down our neck. It is about trusting Canadians rather than managing them. It is about building policies that are durable, fair and based in common sense, not laws that are stitched together in backroom deals and rushed through a House that was not given adequate time to examine its implications. When people in my community hand me petitions and write to me by the thousands to oppose Bill C-9, they expect me to be their voice in Ottawa. They trust me to stand here to say clearly that this bill, in its current form, goes too far. The government has consulted too little and sacrificed the freedoms of too many Canadians in the name of a goal that could have been achieved more carefully, more fairly and more honestly. I am proud to be their voice in a Parliament that needs to hear it, because that trust, the trust Canadians place in Parliament to get it right, is worth protecting. I will never stop fighting for it.”

“This bill will not make Canadians safer or stop violent crime. We do not need this bill. We need to enforce our current laws and make them stronger.”

“Madam Speaker, the member across the way is the one who has been fighting against mandatory minimums, so I do not see how he is going to want to be strengthening the laws. The Liberals created this problem, and the Conservatives have the solution. Removing the religious defence will not make Canadians safer. It will not stop repeat offenders. It will not stop violent criminals, and it will not stop gang violence. It will not stop extortion. It will not stop human trafficking, and it will not stop criminals who continue to terrorize communities across Canada. What we need is for the laws we currently have to be strengthened and enforced.”

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“The Liberals say anyone who opposes this hate crimes bill is racist. But Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders also oppose big parts of it. We need to study this bill more instead of just insulting the people who disagree with it.”

“Madam Speaker, we listened to the Liberals earlier, especially the member for Winnipeg North, bash and attack anyone who disagrees with Bill C-9, actually in fear that they are all far right, right-wing, crazy white supremacists if they oppose the government on this. However, we have seen the leadership of all the Abrahamic faiths in Canada oppose big parts of Bill C-9. I wonder if my colleague agrees that perhaps there is more to this issue that needs to be studied and that we should not just label everyone who opposes it as being racist, as the Liberals seem to be doing.”

“Our laws already allow people to share their religious beliefs without being charged with spreading hate. That protection does not allow anyone to call for violence or genocide. Inciting hatred and violence is already illegal, even if someone uses religion as an excuse.”

“Madam Speaker, Canada’s hate speech laws currently provide a defence against prosecutions for the wilful promotion of hatred where a person, in good faith, expresses an argument or opinion on a religious subject based on a belief found in a religious text. The defence applies only to that specific offence. It does not apply to advocating genocide or counselling violence or threats. It does not apply to any other Criminal Code offence. Calls to incite hatred or violence, whether cloaked in religion or not, are already illegal and are not protected by the religious defence.”

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“I do not support this bill or the government's other new laws on internet safety and privacy. This bill will not protect Jewish or Muslim Canadians. Everything it tries to ban, like blocking people from synagogues or threatening people at schools, is already illegal. The government should enforce the laws we already have instead of passing new ones that threaten free speech.”

“Madam Speaker, it is finally sunny in Ottawa, but to me, this is one of the darkest weeks in the history of Canadian democracy. Bill C-9 is back in the House after a brief stint in the Senate that did not make a dent in the problems with the bill. Predicated on false pretenses, the repeal of the religious defence to hate speech remains. The new hatred offence would still criminalize conduct, contrary to a civil statute. Nothing that minority communities are actually worried about in terms of security would be changed by Bill C-9. The Liberals are ramming it through at the end of the summer sitting as the government-subsidized media is already at the cottage. In the same week, the Liberals are ramming through Bill C-22, a bill that would require telecoms and Internet companies to seize all Canadian metadata, including their geographic location and who they called or texted in the last year, without their having committed an offence and without a search warrant. Bill C-22 would allow the Minister of Public Safety to order Internet providers to break encryption, something that has never been done before, even though every security expert is sounding the alarm that the privacy of law-abiding Canadians would be at major risk. In the same week, the Liberals are also introducing Bill C-34, the digital safety act. Of course, we have to protect children, but that does not mean that we have to deny children their charter rights to access media communications, which is an explicit right, or prevent them from communicating with each other through popular apps. It is a plan that failed in Australia and that will fail everywhere else. Unless we are prepared to implement a Beijing-style, authoritarian Internet surveillance regime, this is unenforceable. Are Canadians ready for that? Obviously, they are not. In the same week, which is the last week before the legislature rises, the Liberals are introducing so-called privacy legislation, which would eliminate the Privacy Commissioner in favour of their so-called digital safety czar, who would regulate, enforce and judge all at the same time. This would be a Liberal government appointee reigning over what we do on the Internet, with unlimited powers over how we communicate and how the world’s most innovative companies do business. Surely by coincidence, the same thing is now happening in England this week, and it just happened in Australia. I was trained in the common law. It was the beacon of hope for any modern civilization. Anywhere the common law went, prosperity followed, but now we have these egomaniacs, career technocrats and misguided lefties who think they know better than everyone telling us how to live for our own benefit and how to keep us safe. I want to be safe from them. Bill C-9 would do nothing to protect the Jewish or Muslim communities. It would not protect any community. This entire thing has been a major Liberal failure. The Liberals wanted to eliminate the Attorney General’s ability to consent to prosecutions. They realized how bad an idea it was and rolled it back. They wanted to redefine the term “hatred”. It is a definition that the Supreme Court used for 40 years. I am proud of this. It is one of the greatest accomplishments of my career that the Liberals have accepted my amendment to keep the old definition of hatred and not dilute it. People would not have to go to jail when they offend someone. Just when I thought we were out of the woods, I saw the digital safety bill that attempts to regulate harmful conduct online. Surprise, surprise. Harmful content would include content that foments hatred. The bill states, “content that foments hatred means content that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group”. The Liberals are at it again. We just fixed the definition in Bill C-9, and now they have come back with a digital safety bill to regulate our conduct online and they have a different definition for hatred. Why is it “detestation or vilification”, not “detestation and vilification”, as the Supreme Court says? Where is the extreme or intense emotion that is required by the Supreme Court, like we agreed on in Bill C-9? Where is that in the digital safety act? Why do the Liberals hate freedom of speech so much? The Liberals hate it because they are afraid of the truth. The Senate was asked to fix the new stand-alone motivated offence in Bill C-9, because this new offence that the Liberals dreamt up would not target criminal conduct only. It would target any offence under any act of Parliament. For example, people could violate the digital safety act or the human rights code, and that may attract criminal prosecution. The Liberals are turning our democracy into a banana republic. Earlier, I heard the member for Whitby ask my colleague why she is opposed to a new hate-motivated offence. Does she not want someone to be punished when they engage in hatred? First of all, hatred is already an aggravating circumstance in sentencing, so do not give us that. Second of all, if the Liberals want to introduce another offence, introduce it for criminal offences. Do not penalize civil conduct, thereby putting civil conduct at risk of criminal prosecution. The Liberals tout all of these benefits for the Jewish community, which is my own community. Let me tell the House something about what has transpired here. Everything the Liberals have done to clarify any existing law is already in law. They say they will have to protect people’s ability to enter synagogues and be free from obstruction. We are already free from obstruction in entering a synagogue. Nobody can obstruct me from entering a synagogue. That is called assault. How about intimidation? People should be free from intimidation when entering a school. Of course, that has not stopped the multiple school shootings that have happened in my riding. Nothing is happening about those. It is already a criminal offence to intimidate someone entering a school. It is called intimidation contrary to section 423 of the Criminal Code. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! Roman Baber: Mr. Speaker, they are heckling me because they know I am right. They are heckling me because they cannot handle what they are doing here. I welcome their heckling. I wear it as a badge of honour. The only thing the Liberals would do is eliminate the religious defence to an allegation of hate speech, and it is all because the Bloc says a guy named Charkaoui was not charged for calling for the extermination of the enemies of Gaza. The Montreal police said very clearly he was not charged because “the enemies of the people of Gaza” were not a identifiable group of people so as to attract prosecution under subsection 319(1) of the Criminal Code. It is not because of the religious defence. The religious defence does not apply to incitement to violence. Everyone knows that. The Bloc knows that. The Liberals know that. The religious defence that the Liberals are looking to repeal does not apply. It does not excuse incitement to violence. A religious defence does not apply to statements that are not spoken in good faith. Calling for the extermination of people is not good faith. This is a charade. The main operation of the bill is predicated on a lie. The more lies we get, the more we go down a rabbit hole, like we did with Bill C-9 and Bill C-22, the digital safety act, and as we will now with the changes to the Privacy Act that would eliminate the Privacy Commissioner. Leave us alone and enforce the law. Stop trying to keep us safe. We need to be safe from the Liberal government. I am blessed to represent one of the largest Jewish communities in the country. Every Sunday, thugs come to Sheppard and Bathurst and intimidate local neighbours. They deny us the enjoyment of property. That is mischief. Every Sunday, they try to walk down Sheppard and then make a right into Bathurst Manor or left into Clanton Park. That is intimidation. Every week, we see the arson or firebombing of a Jewish business or a store. Those are called assault or arson. Ryan Turnbull: You do not want to protect them. Roman Baber: Mr. Speaker, the Liberals say I do not want to protect them, but I am pleading for help for my Jewish community. They are telling me that repealing the religious defence would do something about it. It would not, but enforcing existing laws would. That would send a message. We should do that, instead of sending another $100 million to Palestine and instead of hearing the Prime Minister accusing the state of Israel, which is engaged in a lawful, self-defence war, of engaging in genocide in Gaza. That, in fact, fuels hatred against the Jewish community. The Prime Minister fuels violence and hatred against the Jews by engaging in the greatest libel of the 21st century, which is that the state of Israel is engaging in genocide. The Prime Minister recognized the state of Palestine on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. We will never forget that. It was all for electoral politics. We should all be ashamed of the government for the way it is treating the Jewish community and the way it has betrayed all of us. We will never forget it. What the Liberals are doing to usurp Canadian democracy is inexcusable. Shame on all of them.”