Is Canada About to Criminalize the Bible?

Bill C-9 Faces Critical Vote in the House of Commons

Bill C-9 has passed the Senate with an amendment and has been sent back to the House of Commons for consideration.

The bill, which seeks to address hate in Canada, is controversial for many reasons, especially because of its censorship elements.

But one of the most concerning aspects is the removal of religion as a defence against hate-related charges, which some fear could lead to the criminalization of scripture on sensitive topics like homosexuality.

One of the people fighting this bill is Faytene Grasseschi, a Christian conservative advocate and founder of 4 My Canada, and I spoke to her about the stakes.

Below is our interview. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity:

Elie Cantin-Nantel: My first question for you, Faytene, for the people who aren’t you and me and maybe aren’t following this as closely as we do: where are we at right now when it comes to Bill C-9?

Faytene Grasseschi: Well, Bill C-9 just passed through the Senate with one amendment, and it was sent back to the House of Commons for that amendment to be debated. That amendment was regarding adding the symbol of the noose to the list of symbols that would be considered hate speech or a hate crime. You could be charged with a hate crime if you in any way featured this symbol.

But in an interesting turn of events, right around this time, MP Andrew Lawton, who has been an ardent champion for freedom of speech and faith and conscience freedoms, stood in the House of Commons and put forward a motion to bring an end to C-9 in totality.

The reason for this is, though all parties and every member of Parliament or senator who has spoken to this are in agreement that we need to curb acts of hate, which are actually criminal acts of hate in our nation, and that we need to strengthen protection for vulnerable communities, there was broad concern specifically about the insertion of the amendment to remove sincerely held faith beliefs.

This was really the aspect of the bill that drew the most criticism.

Through our network, 4 My Canada, we’ve now logged over 180,000 phone calls to members’ offices. And the facilitation of mail, this is postcards and letters that people have ordered through our movement, is now up to 260,000 letters and postcards.

Elie Cantin-Nantel: Tell me a bit more about what 4 My Canada has been up to in regard to this.

Faytene Grasseschi: The phone calls, first of all, are Canadians making phone calls on their own phones, from their own homes. This is not a call centre. This is not our staff or volunteers doing this. This is Canadians doing it themselves.

How it works is they can go to our website, they can get a list of phone numbers to call, at our recommendation. There are some talking points because people always ask us to help them and to help them be more effective. Then they come back and report to us how many phone calls they’ve made, and so that’s where we get our stats from.

So it’s not a call centre. These are authentic Canadians, grassroots Canadians raising their voices.

Same thing with the letters and the postcards. They can go to our website, they can order a postcard or a letter that represents their viewpoint. When they order it, all we do is print it and mail it out for them as a service. But it’s their message, their address, and their name on the signature. This is not a mass mailing of brochures or a mass mailing of flyers. These are individual letters from individual Canadians, and as I already said, we’re up to just under 260,000 of those that have been ordered and sent.

Elie Cantin-Nantel: I remember when this amendment on religion came forward, it was supposed to be a way to appease the Bloc Québécois when we were in a minority Parliament situation. The Liberals now have a majority government, so why are they still going ahead with the criminalization of scripture?

Faytene Grasseschi: Nobody really knows.

And this is also the silver lining in this, because we do know, Elie, that there were many Liberal members of Parliament who were deeply uncomfortable with the removal of protection for sincerely held faith beliefs.

We do not understand or know why the justice minister is digging in so deeply. We don’t know why the prime minister hasn’t intervened. These are really good questions.

This will be an election issue. This will be a ballot-box issue for a lot of Canadians, and we know that there are many ridings across our nation, between 30 and 40, that would be considered swing ridings. So it’s very politically unwise for the Liberals to be doing this right now.

We don’t really know why they’ve dug in. It might just be to save face. But they can do the right thing. They can point out the obvious, and that’s that Canadians, there has been literally, if not an unprecedented outcry in recent history, possibly a historic outcry surrounding this bill.

As a matter of fact, members of Parliament and Senate offices both have said to us that they have never received as much mail or as many phone calls as they have for C-9. On any other issue like this issue, it has peaked in terms of the outcry from Canadians. There has never been anything like it.

Elie Cantin-Nantel: To someone who may not be Christian or Muslim or Jewish or religious, why should they care about this?

Faytene Grasseschi: Well, because I think freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, all these things are fundamental to a healthy democracy.

And let’s put it straight: most of us are here in Canada because either ourselves or our ancestors came here for freedom.

I’ve heard people often say, “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I’m going to defend your right to be able to say it.” And I think this is one of those situations.

So you don’t have to be a person of faith or a person of a certain cultural or ideological persuasion to be concerned about the trajectory here.

At the end of it all, this is really about freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

To learn more about Faytene and her work, visit her website: www.4mycanada.com