Pastor Derek Reimer is not liberal Canada’s favourite free-speech champion. The Bible-bashing leader of Calgary’s Mission 7 ministry has waged a one-man war on his government’s progressive, LGBTQ-friendly agenda – especially its promotion of transgender rights.
In 2023, he was arrested three times after protesting against “family-friendly” storytime events at Calgary’s public libraries, in which local drag queens read to children. He denounced it all as “pervert grooming sessions”, and told a librarian that if she carried on “corrupting kids”, he would post her details online. He also quoted from Deuteronomy 22:5, which states: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak.”
So far, his protests have earned him a conviction for harassment, more than 100 days in jail, and limited sympathy from the wider public – who, whatever their views on transgender issues, often see his methods as extreme.
Yet in recent months, his name has frequently been cited in a growing row over freedom of speech – centred around a planned new law that would remove the right of religious activists to quote scripture as a defence against hate crime charges.
Introduced by prime minister Mark Carney’s ruling Liberal Party, the “Combatting Hate Act” will remove a provision that shields speakers from prosecution for such crimes if they say it was a “good faith” interpretation of a religious text.
But, it doesn’t end there. Also known as Bill C-9, the Act is a wide-ranging piece of legislation aimed at targeting what Carney’s government claims is “rising anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia”.
Critics argue that its proposals for new offences of intimidation and obstruction are so broadly defined that they could be used to criminalise peaceful protest, with police given wide discretionary powers. The bill also increases potential sentences for hate crimes from a current maximum of two years in jail to up to 10 years. Carney insists it is “a huge step forward in our mission to build a stronger, safer country”.
But the bill has drawn objections from more than 40 civil and faith groups, who fear it may be used to suppress criticism of the Liberal Party’s wider progressive agenda, especially on religious grounds. Many were alarmed by comments made last year by Marc Miller, the minister of Canadian identity and culture, who said that sections of the Bible promoted “clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals”. He added that he didn’t understand how the concept of good faith could be invoked in quoting such passages and argued for greater discretion for prosecutors to pursue charges for hate speech.
As a man who sees himself on a divine mission, Reimer is sanguine at the prospect of further prison time, which he sees as an occupational hazard of his calling.
“If I end up back in jail, and that’s what God tells me to do, then fine,” he says.
But even he is worried about C-9, which he claims will embolden prosecutors to press stiffer charges in future, and to curb the Church’s influence in wider public life.
“If the Bible can’t be used as a defence any longer, then a lot of churches should be concerned. I believe that this transgender issue needs to be talked about, and people living that lifestyle should have a chance to know that it’s wrong, and to repent. We can’t allow the government to dictate what we say and how we live as Christians.”
Indeed, it is not just lone preachers such as Reimer who worry about the bill’s consequences – intended or otherwise. While the legislation is envisaged primarily for situations where a speaker might breach the peace, some religious groups fear it could be applied to any scriptural teachings at odds with a liberal, secular outlook – be they Christian, Muslim or otherwise.
David Cooke, of the Campaign Life Coalition, a Christian anti-abortion group, fears that progressive activists could make “ideologically driven” complaints against those opposing abortion and homosexuality on faith grounds.
“We already have laws against hate speech, but I sense another agenda here, that the Liberal Party sees an opportunity to strike at their ideological opponents’ ability to express views opposed to their worldview,” he says.
“There is a long-standing exemption in our criminal code that allows people to express opinions based on sincere beliefs in sacred texts – for example that God made men male and women female. That in itself has been called hate speech by some activists. The exemption exists precisely because the law recognises that without it, potentially vast swathes of religious literature would be criminalised.”
Cooke’s comments echo wider concerns among many conservative-minded Canadians about the direction of travel the country has taken during a decade of Liberal Party rule. Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who took office in 2015, the country became a petri-dish for socially radical policies. Cannabis has been decriminalised nationwide and hard drugs were decriminalised as part of a three-year pilot scheme in British Columbia, which ended in January this year.
In 2017, a bill outlawed discrimination on the grounds of gender identity, and made it a crime to promote hatred against transgender people. Unease at the legislation helped make a star of the Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who said that students’ requests to be addressed by alternative pronouns infringed his own freedom of speech. He warned at the time that “authoritarianism” often began with “attempts to control ideological and linguistic territory”.
Christians were also angered by the government’s response to the so-called Kamloops scandal, in which the remains of more than 200 indigenous schoolchildren were thought to have been found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia in 2021. Anger at the discovery led to arson attacks on many churches across Canada, despite subsequent excavations at Kamloops site failing to find any human remains. Trudeau was accused of condoning the arsonists after describing their motives as “real and fully understandable”.
Still, even some critics of C-9 concede that it started out with good intentions: it was introduced in the febrile atmosphere that followed Israel’s October 7 attacks, when many Canadian Jewish groups felt at risk of persecution. Three weeks after the attacks, Adil Charkaoui, a Moroccan-born Canadian imam, made a speech at a Palestinian rally in Montreal calling on Allah to “kill the enemies of the people of Gaza and to spare none of them”.
Charkaoui escaped prosecution after claiming that as his remarks were part of a prayer, they were exempt from hate speech laws. That prompted the bill, which aims to close what appeared to be a legal loophole. Other provisions will ban demonstrators waving symbols such as the swastika, and stop hostile gatherings outside places of worship. But while the law has received support for the protection it offers to mainstream Jewish groups, there are concerns that it could be used vexatiously.
Julia Beazley, of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, says she was “supportive of the bill’s intent to address anti-religious hate, and to protect access to religious sites and services”.
But she adds: “The proposal to remove the good-faith religious belief defence is being put on the table at a time when minority religious beliefs on marriage, sexuality and gender are increasingly marginalised and sometimes described as hateful in and of themselves.
“For example, last fall, the legislature in British Columbia (Canada’s westernmost province) voted to condemn the views of a Christian organisation as intolerant because of their statements about marriage and their work to prevent medical gender transitions for minors. In the legislature, many of the provincial representatives called these views ‘hateful’. This isn’t the same as criminal charges, but it was nonetheless very concerning.
“In the context of current public discourse where minority religious beliefs may be described as hateful, removal of the defence will be understood as further marginalisation, at minimum.”
Those concerns are echoed by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, who wrote an open letter to Carney in December calling for C-9’s repeal.
“This narrowly framed exemption has served for many years as an essential safeguard to ensure that Canadians are not criminally prosecuted for their sincere, truth-seeking expression of beliefs made without animus and grounded in long-standing religious traditions,” the letter said.
The bill has also had the unusual effect of uniting both Christians and Muslims in opposition to it – both groups fearing it will affect them disproportionately. Faisal Bhabha, an associate professor at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School, says he believes that those quoting the Bible would be treated more leniently than those quoting the Koran, which would be treated as “literal and absolute, rather than in context”. Cooke, meanwhile, fears Christians will be inhibited from criticising radical Islam.
Supporters of the bill insist that hate speech prosecutions only rarely go ahead, and primarily in circumstances where a speaker’s motivations are clearly intended to cause public disorder. However, Joanna Baron, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, warned it may depend on prosecutors continuing to “exercise restraint”.
“The law remains on the books, a sword of Damocles hanging over every synagogue, mosque and church,” she wrote on The Line, a Canadian cultural discussion forum. “Another darker possibility is that religious Canadians will find themselves…required to make the case to judges whether their interpretation of sacred text was made ‘in good faith,’ whether their beliefs are sincerely held, and whether their expression truly constitutes the ‘wilful promotion of hatred’.”
Judges, she added, were not usually well-qualified to “parse Psalms, dissect Hadith, and evaluate the theological bona fides of congregants and clerics”.
The Liberal Party did not respond to a request from The Telegraph for comment.
Despite the protests, the Bill now seems set to go ahead, with a reading later this month in the Canadian senate that is expected to be a rubber-stamping exercise. Reimer believes that if he carries on his protests, he may now attract a hate speech charge – leading to a heavier sentence than anything he has had so far. Cooke, meanwhile, has given up hopes that the bill may be amended last minute, and is putting his faith in the Almighty.
“With God, anything is possible,” he says. “It’s Easter, so perhaps we’ll get a miracle.”
