Last week in the United Kingdom, Home Secretary and former Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood announced the abolition of “non-crime hate incidents” and told police to “focus on their day jobs.” The decision followed public outrage after Essex police paid a Sunday visit to a journalist’s home to “check the accuracy” of a social media post critical of the Metropolitan Police. It was a moment of belated clarity: a legal regime that authorizes police intervention in the absence of any crime is incompatible with a free society.Which raises an obvious question. Why, as the United Kingdom retreats from the policing of lawful expression after discovering its corrosive effects, is Canada’s Justice Minister pressing forward with Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act? This legislation does exactly what Britain has just repudiated. It invites the criminal law to regulate emotions, intentions, and moral posture rather than acts.Currently, Section 319(2) of the Criminal Code makes it an offence to engage in the wilful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group. Parliament never defined “hatred” in the statute itself. That task fell to the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Keegstra (1990), which imposed stringent limits to ensure that criminal liability did not swallow protected expression. The Court held that hatred is a most extreme emotion — one that belies reason and implies that members of an identifiable group are to be despised, scorned, denied respect, and made subject to ill-treatment on the basis of group affiliation. This threshold was not a rhetorical flourish. It was the constitutional price of criminalizing speech at all.Bill C-9 discards that architecture. Under the proposed Combating Hate Act, hatred is redefined as any emotion “that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike.” With a few strokes of the Justice Minister’s pen, the Supreme Court’s carefully constructed definition is amputated. What remains bears little resemblance to the original concept. Hatred is no longer an extreme, reason-destroying disposition oriented toward destruction; it is reduced to something banal — an emotion involving detestation or vilification.Vilification, according to the Oxford dictionary, means saying or writing unpleasant, disparaging, or defamatory things about someone or something. Under Bill C-9, then, criminal liability may hinge on whether speech is unpleasant and emotionally charged. Vilification, standing alone, is not a criminal offence anywhere else in the Western world. Canada would be a legal outlier, and a reckless one..The incoherence deepens when the Minister “clarifies” that an offence is not motivated by hatred solely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts, or offends. Hatred thus includes vilification, which consists in saying unpleasant things, while simultaneously excluding conduct that discredits or offends. Or, as the absurdist tyrant Père Ubu would say: everything is forbidden, especially what is permitted.Supporters of the bill insist that safeguards remain. Liberal MP Anthony Housefather has reassured Canadians that prosecutions require the consent of the Attorney General, providing an additional layer of protection. That claim is true under the current law. Section 319(6) now requires Attorney General consent before proceedings may be instituted. Bill C-9 repeals that safeguard entirely. It does not add protections; it removes them. The definition of hatred is broadened, the threshold lowered, and prosecutorial restraint weakened — all at once.Jeremy Bentham had a name for laws of this sort. He called them “dog laws.” You do not tell the dog the rule in advance. The dog does something. Then you beat the dog. Under the Combating Hate Act, Canadians will not know what crosses the line until the blow falls. The concept of hatred is left vague, emotionally malleable, and retroactively enforced. One learns one has committed an offence only after the fact.There is no doubt that many proponents of this legislation feel genuine moral revulsion when confronted with attacks on Jewish or Christian places of worship. That response is human and justified. But laws written for today’s moral certainties rarely remain confined to them. Under Bill C-9, tomorrow’s prosecutor may decide that what was once called moral outrage is merely another form of vilification. The next Anthony Housefather may find himself monitored or charged for expressing the wrong kind of indignation.Hatred should not be a stand-alone offence severed from clear, objective, and narrowly defined legal criteria. Criminal statutes, above all others, must be precise, restrained, and intelligible in advance. Canadians often comfort themselves by pointing south of the border when discussing the erosion of the rule of law. Couldn’t happen here? Don’t be so sure. The Combating Hate Act is a dog law and a bad one.
