The Combatting Hate Act Is building the machine it claims to fight
Bill C-9 criminalizes emotion, not conduct. Every state that has claimed the authority to police the emotional character of speech has produced the same outcome: expanding scope, selective enforcement, and the targeting of vulnerable populations. There are no counterexamples.
Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, passed concurrence at report stage in the House of Commons on March 23, 2026 by a vote of 188 to 144. It is expected to pass third reading this week and advance to the Senate. The government limited committee debate, forced clause-by-clause consideration to a close, and allocated a maximum of two days for report stage and third reading combined. A bill that amends the Criminal Code around speech and expression was given less Parliamentary scrutiny than most budget appropriations.
It is worth understanding what this bill actually does before evaluating what it means.
What the Bill Does
C-9 creates four new criminal offences. The first criminalizes conduct intended to intimidate someone out of accessing a religious or cultural building. The second criminalizes intentionally obstructing someone's lawful access to such a building. The third is a standalone hate crime offence that attaches to any existing Criminal Code or federal offence if the court determines the offence was "motivated by hatred," with escalating maximum sentences that can reach life imprisonment. The fourth criminalizes the display of certain symbols in public, including those associated with listed terrorist entities, the Nazi swastika, and the SS bolts, along with any symbol that "so nearly resembles" a banned symbol that it could be confused with one.
The bill adds a statutory definition of "hatred" to the Criminal Code: "the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike." It removes Section 319(3)(b), a defence that has been in the Criminal Code since 1970, which protected good-faith expression of opinions on religious subjects or opinions based on belief in a religious text. The replacement is a vague "clause of greater certainty" stating that nothing in the relevant sections should be construed as prohibiting communication on a matter of public interest, a provision that both the Canadian Catholic Civil Rights League and Christian Legal Fellowship have called inadequate.
The committee version did reinstate the requirement for Attorney General consent before prosecutions for promoting genocide or hatred, a safeguard the original bill sought to remove. That concession, extracted by public pressure, is the only meaningful check that survived the legislative process.
The Definition Problem
Every other criminal offence in the Criminal Code is defined by reference to conduct. Assault requires physical contact or the threat of it. Fraud requires deception causing deprivation. Theft requires taking property. These are observable, verifiable acts that a court can assess against an objective standard.
The definition of hatred in C-9 is not like these. It defines a criminal threshold in terms of an emotional state: "the emotion that involves detestation or vilification." The word "detestation" means intense dislike. The bill is therefore drawing a line on a spectrum of feeling, somewhere between "dislike" and "intense dislike," and declaring that one side of that line is a crime. There is no objective marker for where dislike becomes detestation. There is no measurable threshold. The determination is entirely subjective, which means it will be made by police officers deciding whether to investigate, Crown prosecutors deciding whether to charge, and judges deciding whether to convict, all of them subject to political and institutional pressure.
The bill includes a clarification that speech does not constitute hatred "solely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends." On paper this sounds like a safeguard. In practice it simply moves the subjective determination one step back: the question becomes whether the speech went beyond mere offence and into detestation, a distinction that exists nowhere outside the mind of whoever is making the call.
Police themselves have acknowledged the problem. In submissions to the Justice Committee, police reported difficulty distinguishing hate speech from freedom of expression and identified persistent training gaps, with most officers having limited experience investigating hate crime cases. The people who would enforce this law are telling Parliament they cannot reliably draw the line the law requires them to draw.
The Religious Defence
The removal of Section 319(3)(b) deserves particular attention because it illustrates how the bill's framing obscures its function.
For 56 years, Canadian law has recognized that a person who expresses, in good faith, an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion grounded in a religious text should not face criminal prosecution for hate propaganda, even if the expression is controversial or offensive. This defence did not protect bad-faith weaponization of religion. It protected sincere belief.
The government replaced this specific, tested, well-understood provision with a general statement that the hate propaganda sections should not be construed as prohibiting communication on a matter of public interest. This is weaker in every dimension that matters. It is not specific to religious expression. It has no jurisprudence behind it. It does not define "public interest." And it shifts the burden from a clear affirmative defence, where the accused can point to the text and say "I was expressing a sincere religious belief," to an interpretive exercise where a court must decide whether the speech qualifies as a matter of public interest, a determination that is itself politically contingent.
A coalition of over 350 Muslim organizations, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Christian Legal Fellowship, the Canadian Catholic Civil Rights League, and organizations across the Jewish and Sikh communities have all opposed this change. When every major faith community in the country is telling you that your bill threatens religious expression, the responsible thing to do is listen. The government's response was to shut down debate.
The Pattern
Supporters of C-9 often point to other Western democracies with hate speech laws as evidence that such legislation can coexist with liberal democracy. Germany is the example most frequently cited. Germany's Volksverhetzung, Section 130 of its Criminal Code, was enacted in its modern form specifically to prevent a recurrence of the incitement that preceded the Holocaust. If any hate speech law had a legitimate origin and a clear purpose, it was this one.
Germany's law is also more carefully constructed than C-9. It requires that speech be "qualified for disturbing public peace," an external, consequence-based threshold that at least attempts to anchor the offence to something beyond the emotional character of the words themselves. C-9 has no such anchor.
And even with that higher threshold, the trajectory in Germany has been exactly what critics of hate speech legislation predict. The law was used to suppress Polish nationalist expression in the early twentieth century, sparing German racist speech against Poles even when it called for violence. Today it is being used to criminalize Palestinian slogans, flags, protest imagery, and the wearing of the keffiyeh. A Palestinian resident of Munich was banned from walking through the city for 24 hours because of what he was wearing. The German state funds and politically supports the military campaign against Gaza while using Volksverhetzung to silence Germans who object to it. The tool built to prevent fascism is being used to suppress a minority population whose homeland is being destroyed.
The United Kingdom offers an even starker illustration. British police were arresting an estimated nine people per day for online speech as of 2017, with roughly half leading to convictions. A 19-year-old woman was convicted and given an ankle monitoring bracelet for posting rap lyrics on Instagram as a tribute to a dead friend. A man was sentenced to two months in jail for posting memes. A woman received 31 months for a post on X calling for deportation of illegal immigrants, a policy position that is now government policy in the United States. A British army veteran was arrested for silently praying near an abortion clinic. The scope expands, the enforcement becomes more arbitrary, and the targets are increasingly ordinary people expressing ordinary opinions.
There is no jurisdiction that has adopted hate speech legislation and avoided this pattern. The variation is in degree and speed, not in direction.
The Mechanism
It is important to understand why this pattern is so consistent, because it is not a coincidence and it is not a slippery slope fallacy. It is a structural inevitability that flows from the nature of the power being claimed.
When you criminalize conduct, enforcement is constrained by the observable world. Either someone committed the act or they did not. When you criminalize emotion, enforcement is constrained only by the judgment of whoever holds the power to investigate and prosecute. The tool works exactly the same way regardless of who wields it and regardless of which emotions or opinions are targeted. The only variable is the political orientation of the people in charge.
Every population that has handed this power to its government believed it was being used against genuinely bad people. The Germans who supported the Nuremberg Laws believed they were protecting the nation from a genuine threat. The Soviets who supported Article 58, which criminalized "counter-revolutionary agitation," believed they were protecting the revolution. The people who support C-9 believe they are protecting vulnerable communities from hatred. The emotional experience of the supporter is identical in every case: we are the good people using the power of the state to stop the bad people from causing harm.
The question is never whether the current government will abuse the power. The question is whether every future government, operating under every future political pressure, with every future definition of what constitutes "hatred," will exercise the same restraint you are imagining right now. History answers that question clearly, and the answer is no.
What We Already Have
Canada does not need C-9 to address violence, threats, or incitement. Uttering threats is criminal under Section 264.1 of the Criminal Code. Criminal harassment is addressed under Section 264. Incitement to violence is covered. Mischief to religious property is covered. Assault, intimidation, and conspiracy are all covered. The existing legal toolkit addresses every form of harmful conduct that C-9 claims to target.
What C-9 adds is not a tool for addressing conduct. It is a tool for addressing opinion and emotion. It gives the state the authority to assess the emotional character of speech and to impose criminal penalties, up to and including life imprisonment, based on that assessment. That is the only novel contribution of this bill, and it is precisely the contribution that has produced authoritarian outcomes in every jurisdiction that has adopted it.
The bill is called the Combatting Hate Act. It bans the display of Nazi symbols. And in doing so, it adopts one of the foundational principles of every totalitarian regime in modern history: that the state is competent to determine which of its citizens' thoughts and emotions are acceptable, and to punish the rest. The irony is not subtle. It is, however, apparently invisible to the 188 members of Parliament who voted for it.