Some weeks ago, the Register expressed hope that the Senate would get the message about the dangerous implications of Bill C-9, the so-called Combatting Hate Act.

Last Thursday, Phil Horgan of the Catholic Civil Rights league made sure Parliament’s Upper Chamber received that warning loud and clear. The question is whether it will fall on utterly deaf ears, which would be a national injustice.

“You don’t know the unintended consequences of this bill,” the CCRL president and general counsel told the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights at the May 28 meeting.

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As the Register’s Quinton Amundson reports, the reply responded to Independent Senator Dawn Arnold asking for “tangible examples” of harms from Bill C-9. No doubt Senator Arnold’s request was in good faith, but it’s equivalent to asking for the logical impossibility of proving a negative.

The legislation after all, strips out a clause from the Criminal Code that for decades has protected expression of legitimate religious speech, e.g., quoting scriptural passages, teaching dogma, and critiquing secular cultural change deemed to violate divine will. The excision granted a last-minute demand from Quebec’s Bloc Québecois. The separatist-secularist party made removing the religious speech protection a non-negotiable basis for helping the Liberals pass the entirety of C-9 in the House of Commons.

Given that the Combatting Hate Act passed the House on March 25, and Senate clause-by-clause study ended only this week, there can’t possibly be “tangible examples” of real-world damage since C-9 isn’t yet law. Not even Canada’s Parliament can make tangible what doesn’t exist. That prerogative is reserved for God (we hope no activist atheists in our readership will misinterpret that statement of reality as hatred to be combatted.)

What does exist are serious-minded concerns, voiced by credible figures such as Horgan and many others, based on reasonable expectations should the legislation recklessly pass. Among them, Horgan noted in his testimony, is a chilling effect already evident among faith leaders and lay believers alike.

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“Many priests, certainly in my acquaintance, have raised the concern (by asking) is it a situation where I could be subject to a charge for preaching and/or engaging in catechism classes where I preach traditional Christian or Catholic sexual morality and a trans activist or someone takes offense?’” Horgan told the committee.

That question being asked of a high-profile lawyer is not “tangible” proof of inevitable harm. But its potential consequences can credibly be seen. Sensed danger naturally stimulates the seeking of safety – it’s an evolutionary trait – and such precaution can justify internalized silence for a great many people, especially priests and other highly visible religious authority figures. 

The worst aspect is that removal of the religious protection clause is as unnecessary as the addition of it was essential when it was put into the Criminal Code in the 1970s. It was the time when the sexual revolution reached its fever pitch. Activity once deemed verboten was seen first as alternative lifestyle, then as an equal part of our social, cultural and political dynamic. Likewise, racially-based campaigns for civil rights advanced recognition that outdated attitudes and speech were not merely gauche but damaging – wounding – for those on whom they were inflicted. 

Parliament, in its wisdom, sought a just balance between the new secular world rapidly dawning and ancient religious texts and teachings whose literal language fell outside emerging acceptability. In that balance, Parliament agreed, identification and condemnation of sin could not justly be treated as grounds for prosecution. Preaching an understanding of God’s law was not to be inherently equated in secular law with advocating forms of violence.

Since then, as Horgan pointed out, the courts up to and very much including the Supreme Court of Canada, have through cases such as Keegstra, Taylor, Whatcott and others rendered that Parliamentary wisdom into sharply defined and readily comprehensible jurisprudence.

In a perfect world, those decisions could possibly justify removal of the religious exemption clause from the Criminal Code on the basis of redundancy: What the courts have made clear, the Criminal Code need not repeat.

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But as all faithful know, the world is far from perfect. One of its many flaws is the distance between criminal accusation and legal exoneration. A priest charged with a hate crime because a bee-in-the-bonnet activist objects to language in the Catholic Catechism risks being trampled by the very authorities who once safeguarded him.

The Senate has now heard what it needed to hear: Canada has no need for that kind of injustice.