Canada’s new Combatting Hate Act, which has just come into force, says many of the right things. The question is whether anyone in the justice system will act on them.
The passage of Bill C-9 into law creates a distinct hate-motivated crime offence, defines hatred in the Criminal Code and prohibits intentionally intimidating or obstructing people trying to enter places of worship, schools, community centres, cultural facilities and other spaces used by identifiable groups. It also makes it an offence to wilfully promote hatred through the public display of symbols principally associated with listed terrorist organizations, as well as specified Nazi symbols. The legislation removes the former defence based on good-faith expression of a religious opinion in certain hate-propaganda cases.
The law does not ban peaceful protest, political advocacy, religious teaching, disagreement or criticism. Its threshold remains high: expression must amount to the wilful promotion of hatred, which the Criminal Code now defines as an intense and extreme emotion associated with vilification and detestation. Merely offending, humiliating or discrediting someone is not enough.
Despite claims of threats to free expression, Canadians remain free to criticize governments, religions, ideologies and political movements. The law will (theoretically) intervene when protest becomes intimidation or when access to a synagogue or community centre is deliberately obstructed.
Of course, Canada already had laws against assault, threats, arson, vandalism, criminal harassment, intimidation and hate propaganda. Hatred was already an aggravating factor at sentencing. Yet, Jewish Canadians have watched an alarming procession of apparently serious incidents produce no charges, no convictions, no outcomes that reflect the gravity of the conduct.
In October 2023, in Montreal, Adil Charkaoui led a public prayer asking God to count the “enemies of the people of Gaza,” exterminate them and spare none. Prosecutors concluded that the evidence could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the words constituted incitement to hatred against an identifiable group. No charges were laid.
In Ontario, Waisuddin Akbari was convicted after threatening to plant bombs in every Toronto synagogue and kill as many Jews as possible. In July 2025, he received 60 days of house arrest, followed by probation and a weapons prohibition. The judge rejected a discharge, but a sentence served at home for threats of mass murder against Jewish worshippers hardly communicates the full force of public denunciation.
Here in Vancouver, more than two years ago, an unidentified attacker poured accelerant at the entrance of Vancouver’s Schara Tzedeck Synagogue and set it on fire. Police released surveillance footage, but no suspect has publicly been identified or charged. The inability to identify an offender is not the same as prosecutorial reluctance, of course, but, for the targeted community, the practical result is identical: an attack occurred and nobody was held accountable.
These cases reveal different failures at different stages. Police may not recognize the significance of antisemitic language or symbolism. Investigators may lack the resources or specialized knowledge required to build a case. Prosecutors may decide that the high legal threshold or limited prospect of conviction makes proceeding unwise. Courts may convict but impose nominal sentences.
As we have said before in this space, passing a law does not close any of these gaps.
Police officers need training in the legislation and more broadly in the contemporary forms antisemitism (and its sister scourge antizionism) takes, including violence-inciting slogans like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.” Crown prosecutors need the expertise and institutional will and support to bring difficult cases forward. Attorneys general must provide timely consent where the Criminal Code requires it. Judges must apply the law in ways that recognize not only harm to an individual victim, but the broader intimidation inflicted on an entire community.
The Combatting Hate Act may help. A distinct hate-crime offence could make motivation central to a prosecution rather than an afterthought at sentencing. The access provisions respond directly to the intimidation that has increasingly surrounded synagogues, Jewish schools and community gatherings, and neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of Jewish residents. Clearer statutory language may also give police and prosecutors more confidence about where lawful protest ends and criminal conduct begins.
Still, legislation is mere paper until institutions give it life.
That said, laws do have a purpose beyond prosecution. They express the moral judgment of society. At a time when antisemitism and antizionism have become louder, more extreme, more brazen and more socially tolerated, Parliament has drawn a line.
That imprimatur is significant in itself. Enforcement will determine whether the Combatting Hate Act becomes an effective instrument or another unfulfilled promise. But, even before the first prosecution, the law sends a necessary message: hatred is not acceptable, intimidation is not activism and Canadians should not have to run a gauntlet of hostility and danger to worship, study, gather or just go about daily life in this country.