Bill C-9 is ill-advised and badly formed

The free speech problem is the premise, not the exemption 

The screenshot about Bill C-9 is being framed as a fight over a “religious exemption.” That framing is too narrow. The deeper problem is that once a society accepts the category of illegal “hate speech,” the central question quietly changes from “Does the citizen have the right to speak?” to “Which authorities get to decide which ideas are punishable?” That is the point at which freedom of expression is already in retreat.

The legal issue in Bill C-9 is real. Canada’s current Criminal Code includes a defence for a person who, in good faith, expresses or tries to establish an argument on a religious subject or based on a belief in a religious text (Department of Justice Canada, 2026). Bill C-9, as passed by the House of Commons, expressly repeals that defence for the wilful promotion of hatred and Holocaust-related antisemitism offences (Parliament of Canada, 2026a). The bill also defines “hatred” as “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation” (Parliament of Canada, 2026a). That definition tracks Supreme Court language, but it still leaves the state interpreting an expressive act through a moral-emotional category.

This does not mean the most overheated partisan claims are automatically true. Bill C-9 includes a clarification saying that public-interest discussion, including educational, religious, political, or scientific statements, is not prohibited if the person does not wilfully promote hatred (Parliament of Canada, 2026a). That matters. But it does not solve the core problem. The ordinary citizen is still left asking: will a police officer, prosecutor, court, regulator, employer, platform, or activist campaign later decide that my statement crossed the invisible line?

Canada’s Charter protects “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression” (Department of Justice Canada, 2026a). The federal government’s own Charter materials say freedom of expression supports truth-seeking, democratic participation, and individual self-fulfilment (Department of Justice Canada, 2025). That is exactly why freedom of expression cannot mean only freedom for polite, fashionable, majority-approved speech. The test of free speech is whether we protect speech we despise.

This is where “prior restraint” is not quite the technical legal term, but it points in the right direction. Hate-speech offences are usually subsequent punishment: the state punishes after speech happens. But when the category is vague, morally charged, and career-destroying, subsequent punishment becomes a practical prior restraint. People censor themselves before speaking because they cannot know how the law will be interpreted later. The United Kingdom’s Miller v. College of Policing case shows this dynamic clearly: the Court of Appeal considered the chilling effect of recording “non-crime hate incidents,” including cases where no crime had been committed and records could still affect people through later disclosure (Miller v. College of Policing, 2021).

A Covenant of Core Rights should not begin by asking which opinions deserve punishment. It should begin by protecting the conditions under which sentient beings can think, speak, disagree, learn, and correct one another. Your Covenant already points in that direction. Section 1.2 protects inner life and thought; section 1.5 protects truthful information and epistemic integrity; section 1.8 protects expression, voice, and dissent, including the right to communicate ideas, beliefs, criticism, and dissent without retaliation (Trower, 2025).

The state may properly punish objective harms: violence, threats of violence, targeted harassment, stalking, fraud, defamation, vandalism, intimidation, obstruction, and direct incitement to imminent or likely violence. It may protect people entering a synagogue, mosque, church, school, community centre, or workplace. It may punish assault, conspiracy, threats, and blockades. But criminalizing the expression of an idea because it is hateful, offensive, degrading, blasphemous, insulting, or emotionally harmful crosses into a different category. It makes the state an arbiter of permissible thought.

The better rule is: punish conduct and concrete harm, not viewpoint. Protect people from violence and coercion, not from the existence of beliefs they hate. Bad ideas should be answered, exposed, mocked, debated, documented, and defeated in public. They should not be driven underground by criminal law, where they become martyr narratives and recruitment tools.

This is not a defence of hatred. It is a defence of the only social machinery that can reliably correct hatred without giving ruling powers a permanent censorship weapon. Civil libertarians have made this distinction for decades: one can reject hateful speech while still defending open access to public expression, because the alternative lets whoever holds power decide which unpopular views disappear first (BCCLA, 1998). The CCLA states the same principle plainly: when government actors decide which opinions may be expressed, an open and diverse society breaks down (CCLA, 2026).

Proposed Covenant refinement

Your Covenant does not need a rewrite, but section 1.8 would benefit from a hardening clause:

No authority may restrict, punish, de-prioritize, exclude, criminalize, or economically destroy a being solely because expression is alleged to be hateful, offensive, insulting, disrespectful, blasphemous, disturbing, or emotionally harmful. Restrictions on expression must be limited to objective, demonstrable harms: violence, credible threats, targeted harassment, stalking, fraud, malicious defamation of identifiable persons, unlawful disclosure of protected private information, or direct incitement to imminent or likely violence. Any restriction must be viewpoint-neutral, transparent, contestable, proportionate, and subject to independent review.

Action items

1. Publish a short, non-partisan explainer distinguishing three things: protecting people from violence, protecting access to worship/community spaces, and criminalizing expression. Support the first two; oppose the third.
2. Write MPs and Senators asking them to preserve or restore the good-faith religious/public-interest defence in Criminal Code s. 319, and to require public reporting whenever Attorney General consent is used for speech prosecutions.
3. Support civil liberties litigation and policy work across ideological lines: CCLA, BCCLA, and CCF are all useful here, even when they disagree with each other.
4. Build a Covenant-based “free expression test” for proposed laws: Does this punish conduct or viewpoint? Is the harm objective? Is the rule predictable? Can an ordinary person know what is forbidden? Is there independent review? Does it chill lawful dissent?
5. Defend the speech of people you dislike. That is the credibility test. Free speech defended only for allies is not free speech; it is factional privilege.

References

BCCLA. (1998). Freedom of expression in public spaces.
URL: https://bccla.org/resource/freedom-of-expression-in-public-spaces/
Clickable: https://bccla.org/resource/freedom-of-expression-in-public-spaces/

Canadian Civil Liberties Association. (2026). Freedom of expression.
URL: https://ccla.org/our-work/fundamental-freedoms/freedom-of-expression/
Clickable: https://ccla.org/our-work/fundamental-freedoms/freedom-of-expression/

Department of Justice Canada. (2025). Charterpedia: Section 2(b) – Freedom of expression.
URL: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art2b.html
Clickable: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art2b.html

Department of Justice Canada. (2026a). The Constitution Acts, 1867 to 1982: Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s. 2.
URL: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html
Clickable: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html

Department of Justice Canada. (2026b). Criminal Code, R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46, s. 319.
URL: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-319.html
Clickable: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-319.html

Miller v. College of Policing. (2021). EWCA Civ 1926.
URL: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Miller-v-College-of-Policing-judgment-201221.pdf
Clickable: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Miller-v-College-of-Policing-judgment-201221.pdf

Parliament of Canada. (2026a). Bill C-9, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, third reading version.
URL: https://www.parl.ca/documentviewer/en/45-1/bill/C-9/third-reading
Clickable: https://www.parl.ca/documentviewer/en/45-1/bill/C-9/third-reading

Parliament of Canada. (2026b). C-9 (45-1), LEGISinfo.
URL: https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/45-1/c-9
Clickable: https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/45-1/c-9

Trower, R. S. M. (2025). The Covenant of Core Rights.
URL: https://dapaday.blogspot.com/2025/12/CovenantOfCoreRights.html
Clickable: https://dapaday.blogspot.com/2025/12/CovenantOfCoreRights.html

For traceability, I based this correction on your pasted discussion, especially the point that the issue is not merely defining actionable hate speech but rejecting the premise that objectionable expression should be criminalized at all.