SHOTS FIRED: Trudeau Liberals Push Faith Speech Crackdown…

Canada has taken a consequential and alarming step toward the criminalization of faith-based speech. On March 25, 2026, the Canadian House of Commons passed Bill C-9, the so-called Combatting Hate Act, on a third reading, with support from the Liberal government and the Bloc Québécois, and over the opposition of both the Conservatives and the NDP.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where passage is widely expected. And when it becomes law, the most significant casualty may be the freedom of Canadian Christians, Muslims, and people of all faiths to speak openly about the tenets of their religion without fear of criminal prosecution.

The heart of the controversy is not what Bill C-9 adds to the law. It is what it removes.

For decades, Section 319(3)(b) of the Canadian Criminal Code has contained a religious liberty protection: a person could not be convicted on a hate speech charge if they were “in good faith” expressing or arguing an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.

That protection, sometimes called the “religious exemption,” served as a critical safeguard ensuring that pastors, priests, imams, rabbis, and ordinary believers could cite Scripture and religious doctrine without being dragged into criminal court for it.

Bill C-9 repeals that exemption. Full stop.

When the bill becomes law, the firewall between faithful religious expression and criminal hate speech prosecution will have been demolished.

In its place, the legislation offers what its proponents describe as a clarification provision, language stating that religious statements made in discussion, publication, or debate are not prohibited “unless they willfully promote hatred against an identifiable group.”

The problem, as critics have noted exhaustively, is that the determination of whether a religious statement “willfully promotes hatred” will ultimately be made by courts, prosecutors, and an ever-shifting cultural consensus, not by the believer who spoke.

Josh Dehaas, Interim Litigation Director of the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, acknowledged the danger explicitly.

He suggested that citing the Bible passage Leviticus 20:13, which characterizes homosexual relations in terms that would be considered deeply offensive by LGBT advocacy groups, could potentially lead to criminal charges in certain contexts under the new law.

Dehaas hedged that the citation alone is “unlikely to constitute an offense” in most cases, but that is precisely the problem. Believers are now required to calculate the legal risk of quoting their own scripture in public.

That is not religious freedom. That is chilling effect by another name.

Conservative Senator Yonah Martin, who voted against the bill, articulated the danger with clarity. Removing the statutory defense risks criminalizing good-faith religious practice.

Senator Martin maintained that the government’s so-called clarification provision fails to draw a meaningful distinction between the willful promotion of hatred and good-faith expressions of sincere religious belief.

Those are not the same thing, and a law that collapses the distinction between them is a law that will be wielded against believers.

History offers no shortage of examples of expansive hate speech laws being used not against genuine incitement but against unpopular religious and moral expression.

Andrew Lawton, a Canadian Conservative Member of Parliament who opposed the bill, said the legislation leaves faith communities vulnerable to prosecution for sharing their beliefs or quoting Scripture.

Fox News reported that Christian and Muslim groups have both raised concerns, warning that the change could chill sermons, religious debate, and other faith-based expression.

The LCMS Reporter, published by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, described the bill as “proposed legislation that marks the Bible as hate speech,” a characterization that the bill’s framers would dispute but that accurately reflects the practical risk created by eliminating the only legal protection believers had against prosecution for scriptural citation.

The stated motivation for Bill C-9’s introduction was the rise of antisemitism in Canada, including a protest at which a Muslim activist called for God to “exterminate” what he called “Zionist aggressors.”

That genuine and serious threat of antisemitic incitement is a legitimate concern.

But the legislation as written uses a sledgehammer where a scalpel was needed.

Rather than targeting specific incitement to violence, it has removed a broad religious liberty protection that applied equally to every faith tradition in Canada, and it has done so without any meaningful substitute protection that would give ordinary believers confidence that their sincere faith expression is beyond legal reach.

Canadian Justice Minister Sean Fraser has repeatedly insisted that ordinary religious practices can never constitute a hate crime and therefore require no statutory defense.

But that reassurance rings hollow for a simple reason. If there is no risk of prosecution, there is no cost to retaining the religious exemption.

The fact that the Liberal government insisted on removing it, rather than preserving it alongside whatever new provisions were needed to address genuine antisemitism, strongly suggests that the exemption’s removal serves an agenda beyond combating hate.

What that agenda is, people of faith in Canada are right to wonder.

Civil liberties groups in Canada have raised broader concerns about the bill beyond the religious speech question.

A joint letter published in October 2025 warned that the new obstruction and intimidation offenses included in the legislation were “overly broad” and could undesirably impact marginalized communities through disproportionate surveillance and racial profiling.

The same letter suggested the bill might inadvertently ban members of an identifiable group from protesting outside of their own institutions.

Conservative lawmaker Roman Baber successfully passed an amendment requiring a provincial Attorney General’s approval before any prosecution under the new provisions, a modest safeguard that acknowledges the risk of abuse without eliminating it.

The implications for American Christians watching this development unfold north of the border should not be minimized.

Canada is not a distant foreign country with no cultural connection to the United States. It is a neighbor, a close ally, and a nation that shares the same Anglo-Protestant legal and cultural heritage from which American religious liberty was born.

What happens to religious freedom in Canada today is a preview of what activist legal and political forces in the United States are actively working toward.

The removal of a religious exemption from hate speech law, accomplished quietly through a bill framed as anti-antisemitism legislation, is a playbook that has been noted and will be studied by the American left.

The bill passed the House with Liberal and Bloc Québécois support.

Both Conservatives and the NDP voted against it, an unusual coalition that reflects the genuine cross-ideological concern about the bill’s implications for free expression.

The NDP’s opposition, rooted in civil liberties concerns rather than religious liberty ones, is a reminder that the threat posed by overbroad hate speech legislation cuts across political lines.

The question is whether the Canadian Senate will apply meaningful scrutiny before passing what could become one of the most significant restrictions on religious expression in Canadian history.

American conservative commentators and Christian legal advocacy groups have sounded the alarm.

The bill’s passage through the House prompted significant coverage from Fox News, which reported that critics warned it could “chill religious speech and expose some people to prosecution for quoting the Bible.”