Those who insist Canada courts no danger by removing long-standing Criminal Code protections for religious speech should turn their attention to Finland, of all places.

While so-called Bill C-9 awaits sober review when the Senate returns to work April 14 after a 20-day vacation, Helsinki has been a-poppin’.

Just before Holy Week began, the Finnish Supreme Court upheld the conviction and fine of a woman who is a parliamentarian, former cabinet minister, and medical doctor. Her crime? In 2004, she wrote a small book examining the way Christian understanding of sexuality should guide Lutheran thinking about legalizing gay marriage and adoption. 

Advertisement

According to published reports, the Court also ordered that the pamphlet written by Päivi Räsänen and her Lutheran bishop must be banned and public access to it on the Internet effectively prohibited throughout Europe.

Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola were found guilty under a “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity” statute for having “made available to the public and kept available to the public opinions that insult homosexuals as a group on the basis of their sexual orientation.”

The High Court acknowledged that nothing in the booklet contained “incitement to violence or…fomenting of hatred.” Yet it still overturned two previous acquittals by a lower court and the Finnish Court of Appeal.

“What this means is that it is now illegal in Finland for Christians to defend traditional Christian teaching about homosexuality. You can’t write or speak about the matter without risking arrest. This, in Europe, in 2026,” journalist Rod Dreher wrote in The Free Press on April 1. 

Dreher, who does have a reputation for making a beeline to the edge of any number of issues, is probably overstating the wholesale criminalizing of faith. He does acknowledge that Räsänen was acquitted by the Supreme Court of expressing hate speech for a 2019 social media post that quoted Roman’s 1: 24-27 on same sex relations.

Advertisement

He is on solid ground, though, in arguing that when faith is afflicted by legal overreach, freedom overall is grievously endangered.

“One does not have to agree with Räsänen on homosexuality to be outraged by what has happened to her,” he writes. “Whether Räsänen is right or wrong about the moral status of homosexuality and gay marriage is beside the point. She is being punished not for how she spoke of gays and lesbians, but because she stated views incompatible with secular progressive orthodoxy regarding homosexuality.”

Religious freedom advocate Paul Marshall, writing on the Religion Unplugged website,, specifically points to Canada’s Bill C-9 as evidence of the “increasing intolerance in secular Western regimes” underlying the convictions of Räsänen and Pohjola.

“The effects of Finland's curbs on freedom of religion and speech, as well as its Supreme Court's demand to destroy books, reach well beyond its borders. Canada has not yet gone as far as Finland (but) its current Bill C-9, on ‘hate speech,’ removes the existing religious belief defense in…the Criminal Code,” Marshall writes. 

“To get the votes of the strongly secularist (MPs) from Quebec, the governing Liberal Party has removed the defense in the original bill that no one will be convicted ‘if, in good faith, the person expressed … an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text,’” he notes.

The last point is key to understanding the C-9 saga. It correctly frames an unnecessary attack on the security of Canadians of faith as a cynical trade-off by the Carney Liberals to preserve their minority government. The whims of the separatist Bloc Quebecois trump the ancient freedoms of the country’s religious believers. 

Marshall, it must be stressed, is a professor of religious freedom at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, director of the Religious Freedom Institute’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, and author of more than 20 books on religion and politics. 

Advertisement

He is, in other words, a globally respected voice on threats to, and violations of, faith-based freedom. Perhaps someone from Canada’s rested and refreshed Senate will invite him to make his voice heard during Upper House committee hearings on Bill C-9.  Perhaps Senators will even heed his wisdom that passage of the legislation is a dangerous step toward Finland’s odious prosecution of those who dare to express Christian teaching in public.

If they fail to heed his warnings, and refuse to block or amend the Act, the finish line for our religious freedoms will almost certainly be in sight.