Marco Navarro-Génie

When governments turn offence into law, liberty collapses into sentiment. Canada risks importing Britain’s mistakes, just as J.D. Vance warned Europe in Munich.

On February 14th of this year (coincidentally, the anniversary of Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act against protestors), in the grand hall of the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance startled Europe’s elites by saying what few of them expected to hear. The greatest threat to their democracy, he argued, was not Moscow. It was their own governments that turned on their citizens in the name of fighting misinformation and hate. Vance catalogued the evidence with blunt precision: British citizens arrested for jokes on Twitter, preachers detained for quoting scripture, elections tampered with under the smiling banner of progress. The room bristled with discomfort, yet the truth could not be mistaken. Western democracies are abandoning the free expression that once sustained them, and they are doing so under the new morality of emotion.

Canada now finds itself in that same trajectory with Bill C-9, Ottawa’s latest legislative foray into the culture war. It is being sold as the Combatting Hate Act, a law meant to protect vulnerable minorities and to defend sacred spaces from intimidation.

Peel back the packaging and its essence appears at once: the codification of subjective feelings into the Criminal Code. What the United Kingdom has lived through for the last decade, police investigating citizens for limericks and memes, Canada now risks importing as law.

The mechanics of the bill are deceptively technical. Until now, prosecutions for so-called hate propaganda required the Attorney General’s approval. That safeguard was in place to ensure that prosecutions were filtered through political accountability and not simply triggered by an activist’s complaint. Bill C-9 abolishes that filter, placing the discretion squarely with police officers who will be pressed to act on every allegation. Remember how the cops acted during COVID.

The bill then goes further by creating new offences for the “willful promotion of hatred” through words, symbols, or representations, a category so broad it could ensnare a placard at a school board protest or a verse from scripture. It also introduces a stand-alone “hate crime” category in which the motive itself becomes the crime. In short, it criminalizes thought. Finally, it expands criminal liability to anyone who obstructs or intimidates access to religious or cultural sites. In the last five years, the law in Canada has not been exceptionally diligent in prosecuting church arson and gunfire attacks on synagogues, despite existing laws. The C-9 wording is so loose that a prayer vigil outside an abortion clinic or a parents’ protest at a school could easily fall within its net.

Why does this matter? Because it moves the law away from objective acts of violence or harassment and into the murky realm of motive. It is one thing to punish a man for assault; it is quite another to punish him more severely because a cop or judge claims to know the intention behind his act. It is one thing to outlaw threats; it is quite another to treat blunt disagreement as hate. The result is predictable. Citizens will censor themselves on questions of immigration, gender ideology, or religious teaching because the cost of speaking plainly will be too high. The process itself, arrest, seizure of devices, and the humiliating headline will become the punishment.

The British experience shows us the road ahead. Harry Miller, a former policeman, was investigated in 2019 for retweeting a limerick that mocked gender identity theory. Police recorded a “non-crime hate incident” in his file and told him they needed to “check his thinking.” Paul Chambers, in 2010, made a sarcastic joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport after his flight was cancelled. He was arrested, fined, and lost his job, but was acquitted only years later, by which time the damage had already been done.

In 2020, Kate Scottow was detained and held for questioning because she “misgendered” someone online; her children were left alone as police seized her devices. British street preachers have been hauled away for reading biblical verses aloud. Even football fans have been arrested for chants and tweets. In a single year, British police recorded 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” and arrested roughly 3,000 people for “grossly offensive” posts.

The phrase in Britain is “grossly offensive.” The phrase in Canada will be “wilfully promoting hatred.” Both are so elastic that they depend solely on the complainant’s feelings. In effect, the state outsources its standards to the most sensitive or malevolent among us, empowering activists to wield the criminal law as a bludgeon against their opponents.

Here, J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich is especially relevant. He noted that Western elites have become adept at justifying repression under the guise of safety. They claim to fight disinformation, but in practice, they suppress opposition. They claim to defend minorities, but in practice, they silence majorities. They claim to defend democracy, yet in Europe, they annul elections. In Canada, there is now a push to criminalize dissent.

What emerges is a selective enforcement regime in which elites are exempt and ordinary citizens are vulnerable. A tweet from a farmer in Red Deer will be treated as criminal, while a prime minister declaring that parents who question gender ideology are extremists goes unpunished.

Beneath all of this lies a deeper cultural drift. Bill C-9 is not merely bad law. It is bad philosophy. Modern governments have learned to glorify emotivism, to elevate feelings over objective reason because emotions win elections. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor clearly saw this trend in his Massey lectures, later published as The Malaise of Modernity. Allan Bloom did the same in his Closing of the American Mind.

Taylor warned that when cultures replace shared standards of truth with the subjectivity of self-expression, they hollow out the ground beneath their toes. Bill C-9 is the juridical form of that malaise, the victory of the subjective over the rational, the enthronement of offence as a legal standard. When reason is abandoned, politics slides into tyranny, for then only force remains to adjudicate among clashing feelings.

The antidote against those who want to curtail your speech is not silence but more speech. Resistance begins with refusing to be cowed. State the obvious, again and again: men are not women, women are not men, for example. The categories of nature are not dissolved by individual whim.

Hannah Arendt, who more than anyone decoded the mechanisms of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, insisted that the greatest threat to power was not always open rebellion but ridicule. Mock the absurdities of their ideology, not in cruelty but in charity. Expose them as unserious, as unscientific, as laughable. Power that relies on emotion and feeling cannot withstand laughter. The rule of sentiment is brittle, which is why it demands coercion to sustain itself.

John Stuart Mill remains the strongest guide here. In On Liberty, he reminded us that the suppression of any opinion, however offensive, robs society of the chance to test truth. If an opinion is wrong, it sharpens truth by contest; if it is right, then silencing it robs us of truth itself. Mill’s harm principle is stark in its relevance. The state may act only to prevent real harm, not to shield citizens from chafed feelings. Hurt feelings are the price of liberty, and liberty is the most valuable condition for reason to flourish. When governments claim the right to protect citizens from offence, they do not protect minorities; they infantilize everyone.

So who loses under Bill C-9? Faith communities, whose doctrine can be branded hateful. Parents who risk charges for questioning curricula. Feminists who fight to preserve sex-based protections. Protesters, from truckers to farmers to pro-life advocates. And ordinary Canadians online, whose memes and jokes can be turned into evidence of “hate propaganda.”

Bill C-9 is not a shield for the vulnerable. It is a sword for the boundlessly powerful. It is the law’s surrender to the tyranny of feeling, the enthronement of emotion as authority. Vance’s warning in Munich was not only for Europe. It was for Canadians too. If disagreement is hate, liberty itself is outlawed. Canada now faces a choice: do we defend and protect our freedom, or do we accept a government that punishes thought?

The antidote remains the same: resist, speak, mock, and laugh. Proclaim the truth plainly but respectfully. Refuse to bow to the cult of feeling. The rule of reason is fragile but essential. It must be preserved. Without it, Canada will follow Britain into the swamp of self-censorship and state-enforced sentiment. With it, liberty might yet endure.

I wrote this post based on a few notes that I made for this conversation in Leaders on the Frontier.

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