TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMITTEE ON JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
RE: BILL C-9 , THE COMBATTING HATE ACT
SUBMISSION OF THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION INC.
TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMITTEE ON JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
RE: BILL C-9 , THE COMBATTING HATE ACT
The Canadian Association for Free Expression Inc. (CAFE) was formed in 1983 and is incorporated by Letters Patent as a non-profit organization under the laws of the Province of Ontario. CAFE has intervened in many court cases and human rights cases, especially Canadian Human Rights Commission prosecutions under the old and now repealed Sec. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. CAFE stands for the maximizing of freedom of speech within Canadian society. We believe that bad speech can be counteracted by good speech, not suppression.
CAFE is utterly opposed to Bill C-9 as an outrageous infringement on free speech.
“ I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.” These inspiring words of former PrimeMinister John Diefenbaker form the opening of the Canadian Bill of Rights (1960). What an inspiring vision of a free and constructive society! The trade off for being able to freely express one’s own thoughts and beliefs is to tolerate the same freedom in expression from others.
However, that is not the Canada of the last decade. Canada has descended into a cancel culture, where certain views are deplatformed. Last summer U.S. Gospel country singer Sam Feucht had numerous municipal venues cancelled because officials did not approve of his conservative religious views. “
“Cities across Canada have canceled tour performances from Sean Feucht, a right-wing Christian musician with ties to the Trump administration and the Republican Party.
The cancellations include Quebec City, where the city said it pulled a contract for Feucht’s planned free Friday show at the ExpoCité venue due to “new elements.” (The Independent, July 25, 2025)
Under the Emergencies Act, now ruled by the Federal Court of Appeal as having been unjustifiably invoked by the Government, protests were declared illegal and people who had supported the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy had their bank accounts seized.
Several years ago, Parliament plunged into the world of history and declared that holocaust denial was a form of hate punishable by two years in prison. Emboldened, others have tried to declare one view of history to be ensconced in law. NDP MP Leah Gazan has three times introduced a private member’s bill which would make it illegal to question or deny accounts of death and abuse at residential schools.
Increasingly, there is only one correct progressive view on controversial social issues. Contrary views are to be silenced or suppressed. Many of the provisions of C-9 follow this pattern of thought control
Writing in the National Post (January 23, 2026), Terry Newman captures this atmosphere of suppressed and forbidden speech: “In 2016, Jordan Peterson, who was a University of Toronto psychology professor at the time, expressed his concern that proposed federal human rights legislation would treat his refusal to use alternate pronouns like “they” “ze” and “zir” as hate speech. This led to protests, a loss of funding and an endless stream of hit pieces.The following year at Wilfrid Laurier University, Lindsay Shepherd, who was a teaching assistant at the time, showed a short clip of Peterson debating gender-neutral pronouns in front of her communications class.Shortly afterwards, she was brought into a closed-door meeting, where she was accused of a number of ridiculous things, including “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler,” and was told that even showing the clip and asking the students to discuss it was legitimizing Peterson’s views.
These are all high-profile events, which might lead you to believe that, if this is all that’s happening on university campuses, things aren’t really that bad. But several campus surveys have suggested otherwise. A 2025 survey found that more than half of students were reluctant to discuss transgenderism and the Israel-Hamas conflict. Almost half wouldn’t even talk about politics, and a majority were in favour of limiting free expression on campuses.This kind of thinking isn’t limited to universities. A 2023 Angus Reid survey found that 58 per cent Canadians believed it was acceptable for universities to ban speakers who promote offensive views on race and gender.”
In a recent article, John Carpay, Director of the Centre for Justice and Constitutional Freedoms highlighted censorship on campus: “Since the 1990s, the cancer of censorship has been tolerated and coddled by university officials across Canada. Predictably, this cancer has spread. It is no longer limited only to pro-life groups.
Today, the vast majority of Canadian universities have a strong commitment to “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” in their mission, vision, and values statements. They impose woke ideology on all students and faculty. They have a very limited willingness to uphold free expression, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth.
The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Institutional Capacity-Building Grants of the federal government also undermines free speech and the pursuit of truth. In order to qualify for these grants, universities must impose mandatory training for students, faculty, and staff on “anti-oppression” and “unconscious bias” strategies. However, the biggest funders of public universities are Canada’s provincial governments, not the federal government.
It would take not just a book, but a large encyclopedia set, to document all the cases of Canadian universities and student unions censoring speech on campus in the past 30 years. The following are just a few examples.
In 2017, McMaster University in Hamilton allowed a loud, angry mob to shout down Jordan Peterson, then a professor at the University of Toronto, and prevent him from speaking. The university’s president has not apologized.
Mount Royal University, in addition to firing Widdowson because of her public disagreement with woke ideology, also cancelled its instructor Mark Hecht, in response to people claiming to be offended by his 2019 Vancouver Sun column that criticized diversity.
In 2019, Simon Fraser University cowered to extremists by cancelling a panel discussion titled “How Media Bias Shapes the Gender Identity Debate.” The panelists included Meghan Murphy and Jonathan Kay, and moderator Lindsay Shepherd. In violation of the Criminal Code, trans activists threatened to physically disrupt the event by engaging in property destruction and false fire alarm activation. SFU, like so many other universities, practiced cancel culture under the guise of “safety and security.” (Real Women of Canada Newsletter, January 30, 2026)
The Hate Law
It must be clearly understood that the “hate law”, Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code, which became law in 1971 was never about suppressing hate — a human emotion, but about suppressing certain political or religious points of view.
Its very origins were steeped in politics. The Canadian Jewish Congress had been lobbying for several decades for anti-free speech legislation to suppress expressions highly critical of Jews. Accordingly, the fix was in, when the Royal Commission on Hate Propaganda consisted of two former presidents of the Canadian Jews Congress,including its Chairman Dean Maxwell Cohen. Not surprisingly, the Royal Commission proposed serious restrictions on freedom of opinion, which became the “hate law”, passed by Parliament in 1971.
Also, the Canadian elite, especially the Liberal Party were in the process of fundamentally changing Canada’s immigration policy with the long range view to replace the European founding/settler people. Massive Third World immigration would predictably generate resistance as it had in Britain; for instance, Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech of 1968. A “hate” law would help mute strong opposition. Indeed, that’s what happened. The first convictions under the hate law were Don Andrews and Robert Smith of the Western Guard for publishing strident anti-immigrant views in a newsletter which, it was indicated at trial, had all of 106 subscribers. Both were sentenced to six months in prison.
A survey of the application of the “hate law” demonstrates how intensely political it has been. No person on the left has ever been charged under this law. The victims have been exclusively Whites and people with views that might be seen as “right wing.” Only two non-Whites have ever been charged under the “hate law.” None has been convicted.
In 2025 Ron Banerjee of Toronto, a vocal Hindu nationalist and associate of the Jewish Defence League, was charged for inflammatory statements he made during a confrontation at a Sikh Gurdwara in Brampton. Mayor Patrick Brown had demanded that Banerjee be charged. Late in 2025, the charges were quietly dropped.
The only other non-European ever charged was Chief David Ahenakew of Saskatchewan. He was a founder of the Assembly of First Nations and a Cree chief. In 2002, he made controversial statements about Jews, based on things he’d heard while serving with the Canadian Armed forces in post-war Germany. On appeal, he was acquitted.
There are plenty of virulent anti-American statements but no proponent of this form of hatred has ever been charged. There are numerous defamatory statements about Christianity and, in the wake of the discovery of anomalies in the soil near the old Kamloops Residential School, over 150 Christian churches have been the victims of serious vandalism or arson. There have been few charges and none for hate.Scandalously, then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau all but excused the hatred and the arsons directed against Christian churches: ” Trudeau on July 2, 202 stated: “I understand the anger that’s out there against the federal government, against institutions like the Catholic Church. It is real and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of and engaging ourselves to do better as Canadians.”[The Catholic Register, January 13, 2024]
In many of its publications, the Government of Canada, especially Heritage Canada defames Canada’s founding/settler European people as racists and occupiers who all but stole Native land.
Under Canada’s ‘hate law” regime Christians and Europeans or Whites can expect no protection. The Supreme Court made it clear in Whatcott 2013 that the anti-hate provisions, at least in terms of Human Rights Commissions do not apply to Whites or Christians as they are not “vulnerable minorities.”
Thus, the “hate law” is not really about fighting hate nor is it about providing equal protection to all Canadians. It functions to limit criticism of certain privileged groups.
We submit that Bill C-9 will make a bad situation even worse.
Specifically,
1. CAFE opposes the proposal to not require the provincial Attorney General’s consent for laying charges under this law. The original “hate law” required the consent of the Attorney-General as a check against hasty police action resulting from the prejudice of senior police officers or public pressure. For two years, for instance, there have been strident demands by Jewish lobby groups that more “hate” charges be laid. The consent of the Attorney-General is by no means a failsafe protection of free speech and dissent but it IS something. That there are demands that this safeguard be done away with illustrates an unhealthy desire to silence dissent.
2. CAFE is vehemently opposed to the banning of the display of certain symbols in public places. It is explained that these would be symbols of various terrorist groups and the swastika. This latter symbol makes our point that this law is entirely political. If the swastika is to be banned why not the flags of such odious regimes as North Korea which has brutalized its people or the hammer and sickle, the emblem of communism, which, in the 20th century piled up over 100-million victims, many time the number of victims attributed to the National Socialists who flew the swastika.
Flags and symbols are important means by which people express their identity and affiliation. Many people in Regina sport the green and yellow of their hometown Roughriders. Canadians travelling abroad often make certain they have a Canadian flag as a lapel pin or badge so that they are not mistaken for Americans. An expression of one’s affiliation may be odious to a person of the opposite affiliation. Israeli flags are offensive to many Palestinians, just as the emblems of Hamas are offensive to fervent Zionists. Curbing the display of certain symbols because they are offensive to some people is an outrageous and discriminatory assault on one’s freedom of belief and expression. As noted, not all offensive symbols would be banned — an impossibility as the capacity to feel offended is unlimited.
The social contract for free expression requires the toleration of the opposite view. Annoyance or offence never justifies violence.
3. Perhaps the most outrageous and totalitarian measure in this bill is that it will “create a hate crime offence of committing an offence under that Act or any other Act of Parliament that is motivated by hatred based on certain factors.” Here clearly it is opinions that are being targetted. A person who commits an offence punishable by 14 years in prison could, if the offence was motivated by hatred of a privileged group, have an additional sentence of up to LIFE IN PRISON, even, if he did not receive the maximum of 14 years. This is criminalizing opinion.
For instance, a man is drunk and exits a bar in a foul mood. He dislikes homeless people. He sees a homeless person, hollers “take this, you bum!” and punches him in the face, breaking his nose and causing injury. He might be sentenced to, say, six months in prison for assault causing bodily harm. Homeless people are not a privileged group under the “hate law.”
Take the same scenario. The drunk, in this case, dislikes homosexuals. On exiting the bar, he sees a homosexual, hollers “that this, you fag!” and punches him in the face, breaking his nose and causing injury. He is sentenced to six months for assault causing bodily harm. However, homosexuals are one of the privileged classes and, under C-9, the sentence could be increased on the basis that the crime was committed because of hatred against a privileged group.
Yet, in both cases the injury is the same — a broken nose and facial injuries. The homeless victim suffers no less pain than the homosexual victim. This provision is offensive to any notion of equality.
We ask that the Committee accept these respectful submissions and those of many other critics of the Bill and urge its defeat. — Paul Fromm, Director
The Canadian Association for Free Expression Inc.,
P.O. Box 332,
Rexdale, ON.,
M9W 5L3,
CANADA.
416-428-5308