Compos mentis Canadians will intellectually and instinctively agree that efforts to counter willful promotion of hatred – though outright elimination might prove impossible – deserve country-wide support.

Fresh in memories, after all, are the disgraceful antics of hate-swollen hooligans who turned democratic protests about the Hamas-Israel war into vile, and all too often violent, orgies of anti-Semitism.

But applauding counterbalancing of such evils with purposeful action does not automatically correlate to huzzahs for the  jumped up “anti-hate” legislation the federal Liberal government is set to foist on us with support from the Bloc Quebecois.

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As Christopher Nardi and Stephanie Taylor report in the National Post this week, the Liberals and Bloc have reached a deal to ensure the end of protected speech for citing religious texts. Such protections will be stripped from  the Criminal Code by amendments to Bill C-9 at the parliamentary justice committee, according to Nardi and Taylor’s “senior government” sources. 

Also falling by the wayside in the rush to pass the legislation is the need for a provincial attorney-general to sign off on prosecution of hate propaganda.

Both actions should deeply concern people of  all religious faiths who’ve watched in recent years as the scuttling of Charter guarantees of free speech has morphed into the persistent undermining of Canadians’ freedom to believe.

While the scrapping of provincial sign off might sound like eliminating unnecessary bureaucratic penmanship, it is an important brake on the appearance of ideology influencing prosecutorial  definition of what constitutes propaganda, hateful or otherwise. Additionally problematic is that while our Criminal Code is a federal responsibility, the administration of justice is provincial. 

Beyond nerdish infatuation with arguments about Constitutional separation of powers, good citizenship justifies suspicion of the separatist Bloc’s sudden willingness to hand over one of Quebec’s powers to Ottawa. Who, as someone wise once said, benefits?

At a more foundational level, it is hard to see how any people of faith benefit from the removal of legal protections for religiously informed expressions of their faith. As Ottawa constitutional lawyer Don Hutchinson quickly pointed out on social media in the wake of the National Post story, that defence was, in fact, explicitly upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Whatcott decision a dozen years ago.

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In that 2013 decision, the Court set clear boundaries to protect religious beliefs that constitute open and vigorous statements of disapproval, including calls for moral condemnation and conversion, whether or not the words used are unpopular or even offensive. 

What such commentary cannot do, the SCOC said, is expose identifiable groups to outright detestation, vilification and dehumanization. William Whatcott, it ruled had breached Saskatchewan’s human rights law by passing out pamphlets referring to gays and lesbians as vermin and worse.

Contrary to certain ideological carney barkers’ cries of “hatred” every time something is said that they disapprove of, the Whatcott boundaries are the bright yellow lines that now establish legally defined hatred in Canada. In other words, they are the reassurance that we already have settled law about what qualifies as hate speech.  

The provisions that are about to be removed from  the Criminal Code thanks to the legislative buddy-pact of the federal Liberals and their BQ allies safeguard the counterpoint. They offer express Criminal Code language about what does not qualify as hate speech at least as far as religious expression and belief are concerned.   

Those uncertain why this matters need only look at what has transpired since an earlier legislative assault on religious freedom: the so-called Federal Conversion Therapy Ban passed in 2022 by the Trudeau government.

Accept, if only for argument’s sake, that Bill C-4 was originally motivated entirely out of humane intention to protect members of sexual minority groups from unethical, oft-times cruel, attempts to “convert” their sexuality by practitioners ranging from misguided to maniacal. 

The broad net cast by the legislation has led in three short years to exactly the ethical and pastoral quicksand the bill’s critics warned against.

To counsel any parishioner, congregant, temple member or committed believer struggling with dissonance between the demands of their faith and living out their sexual identity demands having legal counsel on speed dial. It’s the only way to prudently ensure the best intentioned conversation doesn’t trigger one of the many trip wires in the conversion therapy ban.

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Will similar hyper overreach affect the ability to even preach a given faith’s scriptures in light of the Liberal and BQ’s Bill C-9? 

Given recent history, why would compos mentis Canadians want to take the risk?