OPINION: New hate bill and you are the target
Fear and hatred are emotions that fluctuate and are impossible to measure but our Canadian Liberal government plans on measuring them anyway and jailing up to 10 years those who stir them up. Yes, thoughts could become criminal.
Bill C-9 is being debated in the House of Commons although its place is with Alice in Wonderland.
The bill will make it illegal to “to provoke hatred against an identifiable group” using signs and symbols and, therefore, words. Who will determine when the line is crossed to hatred and how can you measure it even if you are inside someone’s head? Who came up with this bill? Was it a group of lawyers with a bag of hammers for brains? Or is there something sinister behind it?
We already have laws on defamation. So, what’s this about?
Here’s the opening line from the Department of Justice press release on the Combatting Hate Act: “Rising anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia have left too many people feeling unsafe in their own communities.”
What nonsense! There is no significant anti-semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia or transphobia in Canada. There are fabricated statistics but these groups are the government’s favourites.
Notice that the opening line did not include Christians.
President and general counsel of the Catholic Civil Rights League, Phil Horgan noticed the absence of Christianity in the bill’s introduction.
“There was no mention of over 300 arsons or acts of vandalism to Christian churches since 2021, of which the majority were Catholic churches,” Horgan wrote in a statement to The Catholic Register. This suggests that “the extensive losses to Christian church properties over the past four years appears to be of little interest to the federal government.”
The Act states that an offence is committed if it “is motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
A “person commits an offence who engages in any conduct with the intent to provoke a state of fear in a person.”
Let’s say a woman writes an inflammatory social media post. Let’s say it was written in a moment of extreme anger and later deleted and was followed by an apology.
Let’s say this woman actually posted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***** hotels full of the b******* for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.”
Let’s say she posted this the day that three local girls were knifed and killed by an immigrant from Rwanda.
Should she be fined or go to jail for her outburst of anger? Well, this was the actual post of Lucy Connolly in England after the murder of three Southport girls by a Rwandan descendent. She deleted the post the same day and apologized.
But the government of England argued that it takes hate crimes seriously and she was arrested, convicted and served 31 months in jail. Many English posted their outrage online that day and more than 700 English were arrested.
Connolly was convicted of breaking the Public Order Act 1986, Section 19 that states: “A person who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, and is intended or, having regard to all the circumstances, is likely to stir up racial hatred, commits an offence.”
You might think the English judge would show a little mercy on a woman who posted one sentence online for four hours after she learned of the horror of one immigrant who swarmed a group of girls and killed three, aged 9, 7 and 6, injured others, tried to decapitate one girl, and showed no remorse.
The case of Lucy Connolly is instructive because measuring hate requires inferring a defendant’s internal state, which is speculative and prone to bias. In Connolly’s case, prosecutors relied on the perceived intent of her words to stir hatred.
Yet, intent to hate is distinct from intent to act, and conflating the two risks punishing thought rather than behavior. This blurs the line between free speech and crime. Are we really going to go down this road of jailing people based on an assessor’s interpretation of emotional tone?
We also know that hate-based laws disproportionately target certain groups, creating a hierarchy of victims, implying some harms are worse than others based on the motive.
Make no mistake. This is a hate crime bill. But it’s you they hate. As the border opens even wider to hundreds of thousands of foreigners, asking for controlled immigration based on what can be reasonably absorbed will be perceived as a hate crime. We know this because this has already happened in England.
They are coming after your ideas and your religion. This is an anti-free speech bill. It’s an anti-Chrtistian bill. If it becomes law, people like you are targets.
Patrick Meagher is editor of Farmers Forum and can be reached at editor@farmersforum.com
OPINION: New hate bill and you are the target
OPINION: New hate bill and you are the target
Fear and hatred are emotions that fluctuate and are impossible to measure but our Canadian Liberal government plans on measuring them anyway and jailing up to 10 years those who stir them up. Yes, thoughts could become criminal.
Bill C-9 is being debated in the House of Commons although its place is with Alice in Wonderland.
We already have laws on defamation. So, what’s this about?
Here’s the opening line from the Department of Justice press release on the Combatting Hate Act: “Rising anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia have left too many people feeling unsafe in their own communities.”
What nonsense! There is no significant anti-semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia or transphobia in Canada. There are fabricated statistics but these groups are the government’s favourites.
Notice that the opening line did not include Christians.
President and general counsel of the Catholic Civil Rights League, Phil Horgan noticed the absence of Christianity in the bill’s introduction.
“There was no mention of over 300 arsons or acts of vandalism to Christian churches since 2021, of which the majority were Catholic churches,” Horgan wrote in a statement to The Catholic Register. This suggests that “the extensive losses to Christian church properties over the past four years appears to be of little interest to the federal government.”
The Act states that an offence is committed if it “is motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
A “person commits an offence who engages in any conduct with the intent to provoke a state of fear in a person.”
Let’s say a woman writes an inflammatory social media post. Let’s say it was written in a moment of extreme anger and later deleted and was followed by an apology.
Let’s say this woman actually posted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***** hotels full of the b******* for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.”
Let’s say she posted this the day that three local girls were knifed and killed by an immigrant from Rwanda.
Should she be fined or go to jail for her outburst of anger? Well, this was the actual post of Lucy Connolly in England after the murder of three Southport girls by a Rwandan descendent. She deleted the post the same day and apologized.
But the government of England argued that it takes hate crimes seriously and she was arrested, convicted and served 31 months in jail. Many English posted their outrage online that day and more than 700 English were arrested.
Connolly was convicted of breaking the Public Order Act 1986, Section 19 that states: “A person who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, and is intended or, having regard to all the circumstances, is likely to stir up racial hatred, commits an offence.”
You might think the English judge would show a little mercy on a woman who posted one sentence online for four hours after she learned of the horror of one immigrant who swarmed a group of girls and killed three, aged 9, 7 and 6, injured others, tried to decapitate one girl, and showed no remorse.
The case of Lucy Connolly is instructive because measuring hate requires inferring a defendant’s internal state, which is speculative and prone to bias. In Connolly’s case, prosecutors relied on the perceived intent of her words to stir hatred.
Yet, intent to hate is distinct from intent to act, and conflating the two risks punishing thought rather than behavior. This blurs the line between free speech and crime. Are we really going to go down this road of jailing people based on an assessor’s interpretation of emotional tone?
We also know that hate-based laws disproportionately target certain groups, creating a hierarchy of victims, implying some harms are worse than others based on the motive.
Make no mistake. This is a hate crime bill. But it’s you they hate. As the border opens even wider to hundreds of thousands of foreigners, asking for controlled immigration based on what can be reasonably absorbed will be perceived as a hate crime. We know this because this has already happened in England.
They are coming after your ideas and your religion. This is an anti-free speech bill. It’s an anti-Chrtistian bill. If it becomes law, people like you are targets.
Patrick Meagher is editor of Farmers Forum and can be reached at editor@farmersforum.com