A chill on Christian speech

This winter has been especially cold in southern Ontario. Snow has covered my backyard since the second week of November, and while my young children still delight in the novelty of winter, I find myself wondering how long the cold will last—and how deep it will run. That question, however, is not merely meteorological. There is another kind of chill settling over Canada this season, one that has less to do with the weather and more to do with the public practice of Christian faith.

In September, Canada’s Liberal government introduced Bill C-9, the so-called Combating Hate Act, in response to a documented rise in police-reported hate crimes. Particular attention has been paid to the alarming increase in antisemitic harassment, especially incidents tied to extremist networks in Quebec. The stated aim of the bill is both understandable and laudable: to ensure that genuinely hateful conduct can be investigated and prosecuted more effectively.

Yet the mechanism matters. And in its current form, Bill C-9 threatens to chill not only hateful speech, but also authentic Christian teaching.

The bill proposes amendments to the Criminal Code intended to remove what its proponents describe as “hindrances” to hate-crime prosecutions. Two of those changes are especially concerning for Christians.

First, Bill C-9 would repeal a long-standing “good faith” defense for religious expression. Since 1970, a provision in the Criminal Code has ensured that Canadians cannot be convicted of hate-propaganda offenses simply for expressing opinions, in good faith, rooted in Scripture or other religious texts. This safeguard has always been narrowly framed and carefully interpreted by courts. As the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has noted, it has functioned for decades as “an essential safeguard” preventing criminal prosecution for sincere religious expression made without animus and rooted in historic traditions. Courts have consistently affirmed that only the most extreme forms of speech fall within the scope of hate-propaganda law.

Bill C-9, however, would eliminate that safeguard altogether. Notably, this change was not part of the bill as originally introduced. It emerged during the Justice Committee’s clause-by-clause review in early December, reportedly as part of a political arrangement to secure Bloc Québécois support. The result is that speech previously protected precisely because it was offered without malice would now be exposed to significantly greater legal scrutiny.

Without the good-faith defense, prosecutors would find it easier to pursue charges where religious teaching is deemed to “willfully promote hatred” against protected groups, including those defined by sexual orientation or gender identity. Traditional Christian doctrine is not ambiguous on these questions. Scripture affirms the created distinction between male and female, presents heterosexual marriage as normative, and describes certain sexual behaviors as sinful. These teachings are not expressions of hostility toward persons. They are moral claims embedded in a comprehensive theological vision about God’s good design for our human existence—what some refer to as “natural law” or “creation order.” Yet under Bill C-9’s revised framework, such teaching could invite investigation simply by being publicly articulated.

Second, the bill would remove the requirement that prosecutors obtain the consent of a provincial attorney general before proceeding with hate-speech charges. That requirement has long served as a crucial gatekeeping mechanism, ensuring that cases advance only where there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and a clear public interest. Eliminating it lowers the threshold for investigation and increases the likelihood of complaints initiated by private individuals.

The most likely outcome is not a wave of pastors imprisoned for preaching Romans 1. The more serious danger is more subtle. Churches, ministries, and clergy could find themselves drawn into protracted and costly legal processes, even where convictions are improbable. The mere prospect of investigation—now without attorney general oversight—exerts a chilling effect on Christian witness. Sermons grow cautious. Teaching on contested moral questions is softened or quietly avoided. Conferences are postponed or canceled. Materials go unpublished. All of this can occur without a single guilty verdict.

There is a quiet irony in all of this. These developments are unfolding even as my own city marks “Christian Heritage Month,” formally acknowledging Christianity’s formative role in shaping Canada’s institutions, moral vocabulary, and social norms. Western nations increasingly exhibit an unsustainable schizophrenia: publicly recognizing our Christian heritage, yet, through all sorts of ways, attacking those roots of the values and institutions we hold dear.

To be clear, the problem is not that Canada seeks to combat hatred. The problem is that the law now risks erasing a distinction essential to moral reasoning itself: the difference between hatred of persons and disagreement over ideas and practices—between malice and moral conviction. When that distinction collapses, the public square becomes inhospitable to any tradition that makes substantive truth claims. A society that marginalizes Christian truth in its public life is unlikely to become more humane.

Bill C-9 has passed committee, but it has not yet returned to the House of Commons, cleared the Senate, or become law. Deliberations will resume after the holidays. Christians should therefore pay close attention, speak clearly, and pray earnestly that Canada’s future will be shaped more by the wisdom of its Christian inheritance than by the impulse to manage moral disagreement through legal constraint. That will require lawmakers willing to recover a measure of political and legal sanity—and to allow our public life to warm once again to the public expression of moral truth on which a healthy society ultimately depends.