With the passage of Bill C-9 at Third Reading in Parliament on Wednesday, religious freedom in Canada feels incredibly fragile.
Since the Liberal Party took power under Justin Trudeau in 2015, progressive politicians and their LGBT allies have more or less free reign to implement their agenda, and they have taken full advantage of it. Conservatives tend to steward the status quo; revolutionaries run with the ball when they get it. Over the past decade, they have covered a lot of ground.
Before we get to Bill C-9, which is now heading to the Senate – which is stacked with Trudeau-appointed, anti-Christian extremists such as Kristopher Wells – let’s back up for a moment and summarize what has unfolded over the past several years:
In 2014, Justin Trudeau stated that all Liberal MPs must vote pro-abortion in order to remain part of caucus and cannot vote their conscience. This was a radical change in policy and ensured that the party that has governed Canada for about 70 percent of the last century must support the killing of preborn children in the womb, throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Mark Carney, despite his alleged Catholicism, has not rescinded this policy.
In a move that seems even more ominous in retrospect, Trudeau closed the Office of Religious Freedom – set up by his predecessor Stephen Harper – in 2016.
In 2018, the Trudeau government introduced an “abortion attestation,” requiring that those applying for the Canada Summer Jobs program indicate their support for both abortion and the LGBT agenda. After a massive backlash from religious leaders of all kinds, the government walked it back the following year prior to the 2019 election – sort of. Instead, each application is vetted internally, presumably through the same ideological framework.
In 2021, the Trudeau government – with Conservative support – passed the “conversion therapy ban,” a bill so far-reaching that it could criminalize some conversations between parents and children and pastors and parishioners. The chilling effect of this legislation has been enormous, as has its immediate effect of banning talk therapy for those struggling with identity confusion. Many pastors simply do not know what they can or cannot legally say from the pulpit or in personal meetings.
When now-debunked press reports of a mass grave at a former residential school were published in 2021, a large-scale attack on churches began. Over the past five years, over 120 churches have been attacked, vandalized, or burned to the ground. Trudeau responded to these attacks by announcing new measures against Islamophobia and referred to the violence as unacceptable but “fully understandable.”
That’s not even to mention a nonstop conveyor belt of judicial rulings delivered from benches stacked by the Liberal government curtailing religious freedom; the Trudeau government’s freezing of bank accounts and declaration of the Emergency Measures Act (now declared unconstitutional by two courts); lower-level attacks on Canadians such as the $750,000 HRT ruling against former school trustee Barry Neufeld; the colonization of the public school system by LGBT ideologues; and the Standing Committee on Finance’s recommendation that tax-exempt status for religious institutions be removed.
With that context in mind, the Liberal government’s feeble attempts to assure outraged religious leaders across Canada that Bill C-9 – which removes the special exemption for sincerely held religious beliefs – come off as not only untrustworthy, but laughable. Indeed, Carney cabinet minister Marc Miller specifically cited passages of Scripture when making the case for permitting the prosecution of “hate speech” and removing the religious exemption. A government with a track record this relentlessly consistent is deliberately tightening the noose around the necks of Christian communities, and it is doing so because they believe that traditional Christianity is hateful.
Bill C-9 passed on March 26, 186 votes to 137. The prime minister voted for it, as did his entire caucus. Hundreds of religious groups called on the government to amend or abandon it, including Christian leaders of every denomination, and Jewish, Muslim, and Mormon leaders. Not since the 2018 “abortion attestation” fight have religious leaders in Canada spoken so unanimously and forcefully; thousands of calls were made to Members of Parliament. Assurances by the Liberals that the bill would not impact sermons or religious statements were recognized as wildly insufficient.
In case you are tempted to think that concerns about this bill are merely the hyperbolic fears of the religious, the law was also opposed by the Black Legal Action Centre, Association des juristes progressistes du Québec, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Labour Congress, the Centre for Free Expression, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, the Coalition for Charter Rights and Freedoms, Democracy Watch, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, and hundreds of other organizations.
Over the past decade, the Liberal Party of Canada has waged an all-out assault on religious freedom and civil liberties. On Wednesday, the assault was renewed again – and despite heroic opposition from Christian parliamentarians and a massive effort from civil society to halt Bill C-9, the Carney government pushed forward. If the Liberals receive another ten years in power – and polls indicate that this is a real possibility – we may soon pass the point of no return. We may have done so already.
