Canada’s contentious hate crime legislation took another significant step forward this week and then an unexpected step sideways as the Senate passed Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, only to send it back to the House of Commons after senators voted to add the noose to the bill’s list of prohibited symbols. The amendment means the Liberal-majority House will now have the final say before the legislation can receive royal assent and become law.
The amendment was championed by Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard, who made her case with uncomfortable personal force. She recounted being told to “go back to Africa” by young men in a passing pickup truck a truck with a noose dangling from the back. It was a firsthand account that gave the chamber pause and ultimately carried the vote.
Senator Kristopher Wells threw his support behind the motion and revealed that the government’s own representative in the Senate had privately confirmed the Liberals were on board with the change. The noose now joins the Nazi swastika and the SS bolts also known as the Nazi double Sig-Rune as symbols whose public display in promotion of hatred against an identifiable group would constitute a criminal offence under the bill.
Bill C-9 completed third reading on June 4. The final tally was 45 in favour, 13 against, and two abstentions. Among those who voted no were Conservative senators Denise Batters and Leo Housakos.
Not every proposed change made it through. Senators on the human rights committee had pushed to go further, proposing to make it an indictable offence punishable by up to two years in prison to wilfully promote hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying, or justifying the Indian residential school system. The Senate voted the amendment down 41 to 32, with the government’s own representative, Sen. Pierre Moreau, voting against it. The outcome will disappoint many Indigenous advocates, who had hoped Canada would join a growing number of countries that treat genocide denial as a distinct criminal act.
Since its introduction under the previous Liberal minority government, Bill C-9 has attracted fierce opposition, much of it centred on a single clause. The Bloc Québécois agreed to back the bill in exchange for an amendment stripping out the so-called religious defence to hate speech a provision that had allowed individuals to point to religious texts as justification for statements targeting certain groups. Conservatives have argued this change amounts to the backdoor criminalisation of scripture itself and have voted against the bill in the House, joined by the NDP and the Green Party.
That opposition has translated into an extraordinary volume of public correspondence over 200,000 protest postcards sent by Canadians to the Senate. In a strange bureaucratic twist, the letters never reached the senators they were addressed to. The postcards sat untouched in a warehouse in Gatineau until June 3, were moved to a Senate room the following day, and had still not been distributed to individual senators as of the bill’s passage. Conservative MP Andrew Lawton, an outspoken critic of the legislation, said the sheer scale of the mail campaign illustrated how deeply Canadians disapprove of what he called the bill’s “fundamental implications” for freedom of religion and expression.
The Liberals have shown no sign of backing down. Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at an anti-Semitism event in Toronto on June 1, placed Bill C-9 at the top of his government’s public safety agenda, calling it “foremost” among measures designed to address growing hate in Canada. For the government, the legislation is not a marginal policy tweak it is a response to a measurable and alarming trend. The bill now returns to the House, where the Liberal majority will decide whether to accept the Senate’s noose amendment and send the legislation on to royal assent, or to push back and restart the clock.
