The Senate made one change to Bill C-9 and passed it on June 4, 2026. The Senate did not pass any amendments to help clarify and protect religious expression. The bill has been sent back to the House of Commons for a vote on the change. Bill C-9 has passed in the Senate. What’s next? The Senate amended Bill C-9 by adding the noose to the list of symbols in the offence of promoting hatred through the use of symbols. The bill was then passed by the Senate. A bill has to pass wi

Many Christians are concerned about the impact of a proposed hate crimes bill on religious expression. Bill C-9 has passed in the House of Commons and is moving through the Senate. A Senate committee is now studying the bill and hearing from witnesses. Would you pray for us? The EFC is slated to appear before the Senate committee on Thursday afternoon. Please pray for wisdom, discernment and peace for the EFC director of public policy Julia Beazley. Pray the senators will be

Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, is now in the Senate. What’s different about the Senate and how can we engage? Just to recap, the Jewish community has been asking for changes to criminal law in the face of an alarming rise in antisemitism. Bill C-9 defines hatred and creates new criminal offences to protect access to religious and cultural sites and services. While Bill C-9 was being reviewed by the House of Commons Justice Committee, a change was passed to remove the reli

The Justice Committee’s changes to Bill C-9 were tabled in the House of Commons today. The next step will be one day of debate and votes on the committee’s changes on Monday, March 23. This is the second last step the bill goes through in the House of Commons. New changes to the bill can be proposed and voted on at this stage, although the time to do so will be very short. We’d like to focus on three points about the Justice Committee’s changes. 1. The committee tightened the

[Note: the motion to limit debate on Bill C-9 was passed on March 10, 2026] The government has given notice of a motion to close the debate on Bill C-9, the hate crimes bill. (See the full text of the motion, below.) On Monday, March 9, the House of Commons will debate and vote on a motion that would stop further debate on changes to Bill C-9. The motion directs the Justice Committee to vote on changes that have already been proposed without further debate. According to the m

Bill C-9 was introduced in the House of Commons on September 19, 2025. It has now passed in the Senate and will become law. The bill defines hatred and creates four new offences in the Criminal Code. It also removes the requirement that the Attorney General consent to laying charges for hate propaganda offences. Recent history On December 9, 2025, the Justice Committee voted to amend Bill C-9 so that it removes the religious belief defence from the hate speech provisions in

The EFC submitted a brief to the Heritage Committee in its study of online illegal sexually explicit material. The EFC called attention to the need to protect Canadians, particularly children and youth, from the range of harms associated with illegal content online. Our brief discussed how these images can have significant and harmful impacts on Canadian victims and viewers. There are devastating, lifelong consequences for those whose images are uploaded and distributed. Ill

The government introduced Bill C-63 on February 26, 2024. The bill has three main sections. The first enacts the Online Harms Act, setting up a new regulatory framework with responsibilities for online platforms and creating a new Digital Safety Commission and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson. This framework is focused on seven categories of online harm: intimate content communicated without consent and content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, bullies

Bill C-311 would make the abuse and harm of a pregnant woman a factor for judges to consider in sentencing. It would signal that harming a pregnant woman is a serious crime and may mean a longer sentence for those who commit violence against a pregnant woman. MP Cathay Wagantall introduced Bill C-311 in the House of Commons on January 31, 2023. It would specify that, in sentencing decisions, courts should consider whether offenders abused women they knew to be pregnant or cau

A private member’s bill would change references to “child pornography” in the Criminal Code to the more accurate term “child sexual abuse material.” MP Mel Arnold introduced Bill C-291 in the House of Commons on June 17, 2022. The term “child pornography” is inaccurate and harmful. Sexually explicit images and videos depicting children are child sexual exploitation, assault and abuse. Terms like “child pornography” risk normalizing, trivializing and legitimizing the sexual

UPDATE: The new bill to ban conversion therapy, Bill C-4, received royal assent Dec. 8 and passed into law January 7, 2022. It was rushed through both the House of Commons and Senate in just over a week, a process that usually takes months. The EFC is preparing an analysis of the bill’s impact. This bill is similar to the previous ban, proposed in former Bill C-6, which died at the election call. Bill C-4 extends beyond the previous ban by, among other changes, proposing a ba

Commercial pornography sites that knowingly profit from sexual abuse and exploitation, like Pornhub, must be held accountable. An EFC submission to the Parliamentary Ethics Committee. Download the pdf of the EFC’s nine-page submission. Related resources Bill S-203: Restricting online pornography Bill C-219: Sexual exploitation penalty

Bill C-219 is a private member’s bill that would increase the penalty for sexual exploitation of a young person in a relationship of dependency or a person with a disability. It would also amend the Criminal Code to consider it an aggravating circumstance at sentencing if a victim of sexual exploitation had a mental or physical disability. Bill C-219 was introduced by MP John Nater on February 25, 2020. It was reintroduced in 2021 and made it to second reading in April. It wa