Canadian totalitarianism does not arrive in boots. It arrives in bills. Each time, the same pretext: protecting children, minorities, “our communities”. Each time, the same result: shrinking what a Quebecer is allowed to say about mass migration, Islamisation, sex, the nation.

Here is the pile. Not a slogan. A sequence.

The pile, these past ten years

C-16 (2016) wrote gender identity into the Canadian Human Rights Act. Those who predicted compelled pronouns and trials of opinion were mocked. The trials arrived.

C-11, the Online Streaming Act, gave the CRTC a lever over what platforms put forward. Books are no longer burned. They are pushed down the feed.

Criminal Code, sections 318 and 319 — hate propaganda — already existed. The threshold, set by the Supreme Court, was high: an “intense and extreme” emotion, associated with vilification and detestation. That was already wide enough to silence. It was not enough for Ottawa.

C-63: the model, even dead

Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, introduced on 26 February 2024, died on the Order Paper in January 2025 with prorogation. It was not an accident. It was the instruction manual.

It created a duty of care for platforms. It stiffened hate-propaganda penalties. It invented a peace bond before a crime was even committed. It reopened the door to “hate speech” complaints before the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The justice minister herself, in the Charter statement, admitted that freedom of expression (section 2(b)) was engaged.

The Liberal Party, under Mark Carney, promised to reintroduce an online-harms bill in the first hundred days, and to “strengthen” the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. C-63 is dead. The software is alive.

C-9: it is no longer a bill. It is the law.

On 18 June 2026, bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, received royal assent. In force 18 July 2026.

What the law actually does:

- It creates a distinct offence of a hate-motivated crime.
- It creates an offence of promoting hatred by publicly displaying certain symbols (listed terrorist entities, Nazi symbols, a noose).
- It creates an offence of intimidation or obstruction of access to places of worship, schools, community centres and places “primarily used by an identifiable group”.
- It repeals the defence of good-faith religious opinion that existed in section 319(3) of the Criminal Code.

Ottawa swears one may still preach, protest, criticise. Lawyers at the Canadian Constitution Foundation and religious-liberty observers answer the opposite: the definition of hatred has been loosened, a safeguard removed, and the Crown given a charging tool too wide — wide enough to force pleas.

The government says: “we are not criminalising opinion”. Then it decides, by regulation and by list, which symbols, which words, which gatherings fall. That is how speech is criminalised: it is not banned in the preamble. It is made too expensive in the operative clauses.

Who will be muzzled

Not the networks that preach jihad in a basement. Those have lawyers, “contexts”, accommodations.

Those who will be muzzled: the parent who refuses a child be transitioned; the columnist who names Islamisation; the Quebec woman who says mass migration is not a wealth; the pastor who reads a verse. The word “hate” will be the gag. The word “community” will be the pretext.

An independent people writes its speech laws. A people under trusteeship has them written by those it disturbs.

This is not safety. It is a muzzling. The crime, now, is to see.

Let us bring back common sense.