Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, advanced to the Senate tonight. The House of Commons adopted it with a 186-137 vote at third reading.

Every member of the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois, the two parties that agreed to approve an amendment that repealed the good faith religious speech defence from Canada’s hate speech laws, voted yes. The Conservatives, NDP and Green Party MP Elizabeth May dissented.

The Conservatives were only joined by May in voting for their amendment to stop third reading and send the bill back to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights so that the revocation could be reversed. The proposition was defeated 188-125.

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The core elements of this legislation, tabled last September by Minister of Justice and Attorney General Sean Fraser, if it becomes the law of the land, will criminalize intimidation and obstruction outside of establishments used by faith-based groups bans the intentional flaunting of “certain terrorism or hate symbols in public.”

However, these principal components have been overshadowed since early December when it became public knowledge that the Liberal MPs who sit on the justice committee intended to approve an amendment from Rhéal Fortin, the lone Bloc member of the working group. He called for the expungement of paragraphs 3(b) and 3.1(b) from Section 319of the Criminal Code, safeguards that have stood since 1970.  

The clauses, respectively applying to wilful promotion of hatred and antisemitism declares “no one should be convicted of an offence “if, in good faith, the person 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.”

Fortin’s amendment was approved on Dec. 9. Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet made this amendment a non-negotiable condition for his party’s support of the overall bill at third reading in the currently minority Parliament.

A coalition of religious communities, citizens, civil liberty organizations and legal experts concerned about the removal of these narrow defences has continued to grow ever since the committee signed off on this revision. Over 350 Muslim organizations, leaders of the Orthodox Jewish community, Christian organizations of various denominations and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) all issued statements urging the government to abandon this course of action.

Bishop Pierre Goudreault of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière, Que., the CCCB president since September 2025, wrote in a letter that the bishops “recognize and unequivocally affirm the importance of condemning hatred, protecting vulnerable people and communities, and fostering a society in which every Canadian can live free from discrimination, intimidation, and violence.”

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But Goudreault warned that the elimination of the religious-text defence “raises significant concerns” as “it has served for many years as an essential safeguard to ensure that Canadians are not criminally prosecuted for their sincere, truth-seeking expression of beliefs made without animus and grounded in long-standing religious traditions.” He also warned of the potential “chilling effect on religious expression, even if prosecutions remain unlikely in practice.”

Cardinal Frank Leo’s personal letter largely echoed the sentiments expressed by Goudreault. The Archbishop of Toronto, installed exactly three years ago on March 25, 2023, also warned that repealing the safeguard “risks creating uncertainty for clergy, educators, and all people of faith who seek to pass on the teachings of the Church with charity and integrity.”

The National Council of Canadian Muslims’ (NCCM) letter featuring over 350 signatories was unveiled on March 10, the date the majority of MPs voted in favour of a motion to end committee debate on C-9. In that missive, the NCCM expressed “we have worked with optimism that the text could be amended to assuage our concerns,” but “while we have heard a number of commitments to that end, in our view, the final text of the amendments does not match what was committed to.”

An attempt to pacify concerns of religious groups came in the form of a “for greater certainty” clause - included in the bill passed at third reading - tabled by Parliamentary Secretary Patricia Lattanzio. It read that “nothing in subsection 319(2) or (2.2) shall be construed as prohibiting a person from communicating a statement on a matter of public interest, including an educational, religious, political or scientific statement made in the course of a discussion, publication or debate, if they do not willfully promote hatred, hatred against an identifiable group by communicating the statement.”

Conservative MP Andrew Lawton critiqued this clause for containing “circular reasoning.”

Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL) President Phil Horgan concurred that protections for good faith religious expression are still not communicated unambiguously enough within the text of the amendment. Horgan suggested the door remains open to “the possibility of a charge if the Crown is of the view that a discussion of certain religious texts is not in the public interest, and in the absence of the good faith religious defence, a pastor or faith leader would be at the peril of a charge.”

Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), the political arm of the Canadian pro-life movement, was one of many groups that mobilized Canadians opposed to the amended C-9 by executing a petition campaign and by hosting a press conference on Parliament Hill on Feb. 13 alongside 4 My Canada, CitizenGo and Campaign Québec-Vie.

David Cooke, a Christian pastor and CLC’s campaigns manager, warned that “with the passage of Bill C-9 in the House, Christians and pro-life advocates will almost certainly face an entirely new level of hostility, as the door swings open to actual persecution under a cloak of supposed legality.”

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Regarding the path ahead in the Senate, Jack Fonseca, CLC’s director of political operations, calls on “all people of goodwill to flood senators with phone calls, emails, social media comments, and, if possible, personal visits. For those who are Christian, we also encourage these efforts to be reinforced spiritually through extra prayer and fasting between now and the final third reading vote in the Senate. God answers those who ask for help.”

April 14, the first sitting day for the Senate following the Easter recess, is expected to be the occasion when the Upper Chamber begins its work to study Bill C-9.