On Jan. 15, the Ligue des droits et libertés hosted a webinar titled, “Bill C-9: A threat to our liberties.” Bill C-9, also known as the Combatting Hate Act, was first proposed by Minister of Justice Sean Fraser in September in the House of Commons. The proposed legislation would amend the Canadian Criminal Code, primarily by criminalizing hate-motivated conduct with the aim of protecting access to religious sites, schools, community centres, and other spaces used by identifiable groups. Under this proposal, it would be a crime to willfully intimidate and obstruct people from accessing such places or to promote hatred by displaying certain terrorist or hate symbols in public.

While this act was introduced amid a rise in hate crimes in Canada, many civil societies across the country have criticized its anti-constitutional nature, questioning whether it would risk criminalizing Canadians’ rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. Lynda Khelil, the webinar’s host, began by highlighting how presentations like this one inform the general public of legislative proposals that often go unnoticed.

“We have found that very few people are aware of the content of this bill,” Khelil said. “Bills are not issues that the general population pay attention to often […] but it concerns society as a whole because obviously, in many cases, it contains provisions that affect our rights and freedoms.”

The first panelist to speak was Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, director of the Fundamental Freedoms Program. She explained that many Canadians question the purpose of Bill C-9, as there are existing provisions in the Canadian Criminal Code that prohibit intimidation, harassment, and death threats.

“If someone has reasonable grounds to fear for their own security, it constitutes criminal harassment,” Bussières McNicoll explained. “What does the federal government want to further criminalize through Bill C-9? What effect could this have on peaceful protestors?”

Bussières McNicoll then highlighted how the bill’s content is loosely defined, granting police and security forces disproportionate power.

“Protests have created dissatisfaction among certain groups, and this is a provision that could easily be interpreted by police, targeting protests that are peaceful but disruptive, or offensive for some,” she said. 

Bussières McNicoll continued to emphasize the general public’s role in upholding Canadian constitutional rights.

“We are talking about a provision that will open the gate to police officers having great discretion to act in a prejudiced way without clear guidelines, leading to the criminalization of groups who already experience excessive police surveillance and inappropriate racial profiling,” she said. “We must be capable of tolerating discourse that is seemingly unpopular, that may seem unjustified or often outside of certain limits [….] We must say no to the criminalization of behaviour that is non-violent or non-threatening, simply because it displeases certain people.”  

The second panelist was criminal and immigration lawyer Lucia Flores Echaiz, who explained that the current Criminal Code already targets the incitement of hateful propaganda and hate speech. Bill C-9 aims to broaden what constitutes a hateful symbol. Under the proposed legislation, a symbol principally associated with a terrorist entity listed by Public Safety Canada would not be allowed in public spaces, including in the virtual world. She highlighted the unreliability of this list.

“The process for listing an organization [as a terrorist entity] is opaque and arbitrary,” Flores Echaiz said. “It is the result of a discretionary decision by the Minister of Public Security [.…] The government of Canada even recognizes that a listed entity does not necessarily mean that they committed a crime [….] It is almost impossible to be removed from the list.”

Flores Echaiz continued to argue that while courts have the power to push back against the bill, it nonetheless poses a threat to freedom of expression and the distribution of power.

“Even with the adoption of this bill, I hope the judges will be able to say no [in Court],” she said. “The police are the ones applying the law, and even if a person is acquitted at the end […] they would have experienced an arrest, potentially deprived of their liberty for a certain period of time […] the bill allows a great discretionary power to the police, and this is what concerns us here.”

*All quotes were translated from French.