Canada’s Liberal government just rammed Bill C-9 — the hilariously named “Combatting Hate Act” — through the House of Commons, and the single most important thing it does is strip out a decades-old legal protection that said you couldn’t be prosecuted for expressing a sincerely held religious belief. Gone. Deleted. Tossed in the recycling bin like a Tim Hortons cup. The bill now heads to the Canadian Senate on April 14th, where it will receive all the rigorous independent scrutiny of a rubber stamp at a DMV.
So just to be clear: in 2026, in a Western democracy that shares the world’s longest undefended border with us, a pastor who reads Romans 1 from the pulpit could now theoretically be hauled before a judge. But sure, tell me more about how *we’re* the ones sliding into authoritarianism because Pete Hegseth changed the seating chart at the Pentagon.
Here’s what happened. The Canadian Criminal Code has contained, for years, a provision that specifically protected religious expression. It said — and I’m paraphrasing only slightly — that you cannot be convicted of hate speech if you were expressing or attempting to establish an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text. It was the legal equivalent of “look, we know the Bible says some stuff that makes progressives uncomfortable, but we’re not going to arrest people for believing it.”
The Liberals, led by Justice Minister Sean Fraser, decided that protection had to go. And to get it across the finish line, they cut a deal with the Bloc Québécois — Quebec’s separatist party, because nothing says “national unity” like teaming up with the people who literally want to leave the country — to remove the religious exemption entirely.
Conservative MP Andrew Lawton put it plainly: “Bill C-9 makes it easier for people of faith and others to be criminally charged because of views that other people take offense to.” He added that the legislation “weakens protections for freedom of expression and freedom of religion, especially with the removal of the longstanding religious defense.”
Now, Justice Minister Fraser — who apparently thinks we’re all idiots — went on record claiming that “Canadians will always be able to pray, preach, teach, interpret scripture, and express religious belief in good faith, without fear of criminal sanction.” Which is a lovely sentence. It’s also completely meaningless when you’ve just removed the specific legal mechanism that *guaranteed* that protection. That’s like removing the locks from your front door and then assuring your family that burglary is still illegal. Technically true. Practically useless.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association — not exactly a right-wing outfit — has come out against the bill, warning it was “rushed through Parliament and threatens the rights of every Canadian.” Catholic bishops across the country have urged senators to amend it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Canada area presidency put out a statement. Multiple faith organizations are sounding the alarm. And the Liberal government’s response has been, essentially, “trust us.”
We’ve seen this movie before, folks. We watched Britain ban Kanye West from entering the country because his *thoughts* were deemed too dangerous. We watched European countries prosecute grandmothers for sharing Bible verses on social media. And every single time, the same people who scream about “democracy” and “human rights” at every international summit are the ones quietly dismantling the legal scaffolding that protects the most fundamental right any free person has: the right to believe something the government doesn’t like and say it out loud.
The bill doesn’t just gut religious protections, by the way. It also creates new criminal offenses for displaying “hate or terrorism-related symbols” — language so vague that a first-year law student could drive a truck through it. Who decides what qualifies as a hate symbol? The same government that just decided the Bible might be hate speech? Fantastic. What could possibly go wrong.
The Canadian Senate is expected to take up Bill C-9 on April 14th, right after Easter recess. Which is poetic, when you think about it — they’ll come back from celebrating the resurrection of Christ and immediately get to work making it harder to talk about Him in public.
And before anyone says “well, that’s Canada, it can’t happen here” — wake up. Every bad idea that starts in Ottawa or London or Brussels eventually shows up in a bill on some state legislator’s desk in Sacramento or Albany. Canada is the test kitchen. They try the recipe up there, and if nobody riots, the same activists push it down here. We’ve watched it happen with speech codes, with gender ideology in schools, with government-funded media. The pattern is not subtle.
The good news? We still have a First Amendment. We still have a Supreme Court that, at least for now, takes religious liberty seriously. And we still have enough Americans who understand that the right to say unpopular things isn’t a bug in the system — it’s the entire point of the system.
But we’d better pay attention to what’s happening ninety miles north of Buffalo. Because when a Western democracy decides that quoting a religious text is a prosecutable offense, that’s not “combatting hate.” That *is* hate — aimed directly at every person of faith who dares to believe that God’s word outranks the government’s.
The Canadians who built that country — who established freedom of religion as a foundational principle — would be horrified. But they can’t say so. That might be a hate crime now.
