The Canadian Senate’s Human Rights Committee voted Monday night to amend an anti-Christian “hate speech” bill to criminalize “residential school denialism.”
Only one senator on the committee voted against the change to Bill C-9, according to a report. The bill has not yet been voted on by the Senate body itself.
The sponsor of the amendment, Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell (Nunavut), claimed that residential school attendees such as herself faced harms.
“Every survivor experienced it in a different way,” she said. “We lost a lot of family time. We lost a chance to grow up in our culture, in our language. Yes, I did get education, but I also lost out on a parallel education that I would have gotten if I had been able to stay home.”
The new proposed amendment would change Canada’s Criminal Code to say that any person who willfully promotes hatred against indigenous peoples by “condoning, denying or downplaying” Canada’s residential school system outside of a private conversation could face prosecution or even a summary conviction, which could then lead to potential jail time.
The new amendment to Bill C-9 needs a House of Commons ratification, if the bill as it stands is passed by the Senate in the third reading.
Bill C-9 would criminalize religious expression and belief when quoting parts of the Bible, including passages about homosexuality and gender. Specifically, it would remove Section 319(3)(b) of Canada’s Criminal Code, which provides protection to good-faith expression of a person’s religious views based on texts such as the Bible.
The bill has been constitutional experts for empowering the police and government to those deemed to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way. The bill was introduced by Justice Minister Sean Fraser last year.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is that after four years there have been at residential schools.
However, as the claims went unfounded, over 120 churches in Canada, most of them Catholic and many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, to the ground, , or defiled.
Hellbound and Down 