Home	Our Hope
Bible Study		November 10, 2025
Canada, Christians and Hate Laws

Introduction

In 2000, 25 years ago, I left Canada for the United States. I left for employment reasons, but I could see the changes that were already happening.

Canada had put in place hate laws and was beginning to prosecute people. If you've never heard of hate laws, their stated purpose is to protect identifiable groups from being mistreated. The plan is to enforce tolerance.

identifiable groups: colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability (subsection 318(4) of the Criminal Code of Canada)

Hate laws are really efforts to move toward totalitarian control. By putting in place laws that have no clear definition of their terms and accept the claims of immeasurable injuries, the government can, through its proxies, attack any person or group it does not like.

You might be thinking I can't be correct because these laws include protection for religion. In practice, religion is behind all the other groups. If a homosexual complains against a religious group, the homosexual wins.

In an article from around 2008, the author captures what is happening in Canada.

“Many Americans have a warm, fuzzy view of Canada, and have no idea that a totalitarian nation is taking shape, instigated by gay activists and Muslim pressure groups in the name of ‘tolerance.’ They do not know because America’s mainstream media are refusing to cover it” (Robert Knight, “Media Ignore Gagging Sound from Canada”).

The First Implementation of Hate Laws

The first implementation began late in the 1990s. Because there was no legal process for prosecuting such crimes, the Federal Government created a Human Rights Commission that leads 10 commissions, one in each province. Each province created a tribunal. The idea was that the commissions would investigate these crimes, and the tribunals would prosecute those cases that were found to be valid.

The commissions and tribunals are “quasi-judicial bodies” that have the full power of government behind them, but they operate separately from the court system and do not provide their victims even the basic due process protections that rapists and murderers enjoy in the courts. All an activist must do is file a complaint claiming that his feelings have been hurt and that he is offended by something that a Christian has said or done, and the tribunals bring governmental authority to bear against the “offender.” There is no cost to the complainant, but the accused is forced to pay his own legal costs, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. If found guilty he must pay “damages” to the offended party, plus he must pay his accuser’s legal fees. There is a presumption of guilt and the accused must labor under adverse circumstances to prove his or her innocence. (¹)

These tribunals could only assess fines, and, if memory serves, those fines were limited to $10,000. They went beyond that though, to ordering people to take certain actions.

As Ezra Levant, a lawyer who is defending himself before a human rights tribunal, observes, “Even if we win, we lose - the process has become the punishment. It is procedurally unfair. Unlike real courts, there is no way to apply for a dismissal of nuisance lawsuits. Common law rules of evidence don’t apply. Rules of court don’t apply. It is a system that is part Kafka, and part Stalin.” (²)

All of these identifiable groups started using these courts to beat down groups they didn't like. Christians and aligned groups were targets of many groups because the Bible speaks clearly against them. It became dangerous to preach in the pulpit and even dangerous for Christians in politics to speak.

In 1997 the Ontario Human Rights Commission fined the City of London and its mayor, DIANE HASKETT, $10,000 for refusing to proclaim Gay Pride Day. It also ordered Haskett to make a public statement praising the “valuable contributions of gays and lesbians to her community,” which she refused to do. She said, “I will not bow down to the ruling of the human rights commission and I am willing to bear any consequences of that. If this ruling is left unchallenged, any Canadian can be forced to say what they don’t believe … The implications are so staggering it should be a matter for legal review” (³ quoting from “Gay Pride Fallout,” The Interim, February 1998).

In 2002 in Saskatchewan the StarPhoenix newspaper of Saskatoon and HUGH OWENS were ordered to pay $1,500 to three homosexual activists for publishing an ad in the newspaper in 1997 quoting Bible verses regarding homosexuality. The advertisement displayed references to four Bible passages [and associating that with] two males holding hands with the universal sign of a red circle with a diagonal bar superimposed over the top. The Human Rights Commission’s ruling was appealed to the courts. In February 2003 the Court of Queen’s Bench in Saskatchewan refused to overturn it, with Justice J. Barclay saying the advertisement was an incitement to hatred. But in April 2006 the ruling was overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals (“Court Reverses Ruling,” WorldNetDaily, April 14, 2006). (⁴)

Early on, people realized that the decisions of these commissions / tribunals could be appealed to the real court system. Therefore if you had the money to do it, you could appeal it high enough that you would win. As was quoted earlier, "the process has become the punishment"

In January 2006, Catholic city councilman JOHN DECICCO of Kamloops, British Columbia, was fined $1,000 and required to apologize for saying that homosexuality is “not normal or natural” (LifeSiteNews, Jan. 19, 2007). DeCicco was also forced to issue a public statement that his comments were “inappropriate and hurtful to some.” DeCiccco told LifeSiteNews, “I’m not against lesbian and gay people, but I don’t agree that I should have to endorse it.” (⁵)

In January 2002 the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal levied a fine of $7500 against the VANCOUVER RAPE RELIEF SOCIETY for its refusal to allow a male-to-female “transsexual” named Kimberly Dawn to train as a rape and abuse hotline counsellor. In an article at its web site dated April 16, 2000, the society argued that it operates as a women-only society and that it is not wrong to exclude an individual who has grown up as a man and who its clients might not accept as a woman. (⁶)

In June 2008 STEPHEN BOISSON, an evangelical youth pastor, was banned from expressing opposition to homosexuality in any public forum and ordered to pay $7,000 “damages for pain and suffering” to the homosexual activist who complained against him. (⁷)

There are many more examples in the article I'm quoting from.

In the end, the federal government clamped down on the commissions, and they became much more selective about the kind of cases they would prosecute.

The Second Implementation

The new attempt to prosecute Christians is an attempt to remove the exemption clause for religious groups (i.e., Christians) from the hate crimes law, Section 319(3)(b) of the Criminal Code. "This clause currently protects individuals from conviction for hate speech if they express opinions on religious subjects in good faith based on religious texts." (some AI)

Liberals lie in the same ways whether they are in Canada or elsewhere. So, we're going to analyze how the Canadian Justice Minister justifies this change.

Justice Minister Sean Fraser defended the change, stating that the amendment would not prevent religious leaders from reading religious texts or criminalize faith, emphasizing that the focus remains on prosecuting the wilful promotion of hate, which he argues is not aligned with major religious values. He also noted that the government is unaware of any case where the religious exemption has been used to acquit someone accused of hate speech, calling it redundant.

• the amendment would not prevent religious leaders from reading religious texts
  • Strange, don't you think, that he would limit their use of religious texts to only reading. He means that they won't be allowed to preach anything that offends anyone, particularly anyone in liberal protected classes.
  • Another oddity is his use of "leader." How is he defining that? Could a leader be anyone who speaks what the religious texts say?
• the amendment would not criminalize faith
  • His meaning is a bit unclear here. It depends on how he defines "faith". He probably means that anyone can believe whatever they want. Coupled with the previous clause, that means you can believe whatever you want, you just can't talk about it if it offends someone.
• the focus remains on prosecuting the wilful promotion of hate
  • His definition of hate is clear: doing anything that offends someone, and the complainants get to define when they have been offended. So, "the wilful promotion of hate" means "intentionally doing something that you should have known in advance would offend someone." This boils down to needing to accurately predict the future, or if that's not possible, don't say anything.
• hate is not aligned with major religious values
  • He is saying that he, or people like him, will define what the major religious values of each religion are. Espousing ones that they define as minor can result in prosecution. So Christians would be OK if they only ever talked about love
• the government is unaware of any case where the religious exemption has been used to acquit someone accused of hate speech, calling it redundant.
  • He is saying that the exemption has never been used, so you don't need it. They did the same thing with their 200% tariff on US milk products over a certain level. No one ever got hit by that tariff.
    The reason is that the producers were careful to stay away from that limit because it would turn their load of dairy products into a serious net loss. It is a fact that some truckers dumped their loads in the ditch, rather than pay the tariff.
    In the same way here, no prosecutor would prosecute a case where it was likely the exemption would be invoked. The exemption is keeping the prosecutions from happening.
  • There is another way to view this. If the exemption has never been used and is redundant, why is it so important to the government to get rid of it?

At the current time, it appears the government has the votes needed to pass this legislation.

The Christian Response

Jesus said to give to Caesar what is Caesar's; give to God what is God's. His point is that normally those two worlds don't overlap. You can act in a way that pleases both God and Caesar.

So the first question is whether there is a conflicting overlap. There is. Jesus gave us the Great Commission to spread the Gospel. The government is saying it isn't lawful to say some of the things written in the Bible.

When there is a conflict, we do what God says.

¹ Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html

² Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html

³ Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html

⁴ Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html

⁵ Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html

⁶ Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html

⁷ Hate Crimes Laws Used Against Christians in Canada, June 23, 2008, David Cloud https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/hate_crimes_laws_against_christians_canada.html