Commentary

Don’t tread on me – Bill C-9

December 11, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

The early astronauts were one tough and brave bunch of guys.

Those guys have a reputation as being fearless, but they were still human.

I read a quote recently from one of the early astronauts, where he explained his true feelings during a launch, years after the event.

“The altimeter said 90,000 feet. I was going straight up and accelerating, and I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing?’”

At that point in his flight, he had no control of the situation at all. He couldn’t turn around, he couldn’t call it off, and he couldn’t decide to leap from the craft and hope his parachute worked.

He was committed to the experience, and there was no way out.

That must have been a feeling of being out of control.

I believe this is how many Canadians feel about the federal government.

The men and women in Ottawa seem to have no desire to represent their constituents, the job they were elected to do.

Instead, they form an agenda and carry it out with no regard to the will of the people, even when the people tell them this isn’t what we want.

This new nonsense called Bill C-9 is just another example of the government trying to shove through yet more legislation to control the population.

That bill is now becoming a convoluted mess as the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois, who were teaming up to pass this bill, can’t come to an agreement.

Bill C-9 calls for the prosecution and possible imprisonment of anyone who uses symbols or speech that someone else finds offensive. This includes certain organizations’ symbols, like a swastika.

However, the plan is for it to go even further by claiming certain religious scriptures should be included as hate speech.

The Criminal Code currently prescribes jail terms of up to two years for ‘wilful promotion of hatred’; however, there is an exemption if that statement is in a ‘good faith’ opinion based on a belief in a religious text.

Legislators are trying to remove religious protections from this Bill, meaning the pastor in your church could be arrested for quoting the bible.

Marc Miller, the newly appointed minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, opened this mess by stating parts of the bible should be censored.

We don’t need more and more and more laws, especially laws designed to govern behaviour.

Years ago, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s 1967 Omnibus Bill in the House of Commons made several reforms to the Criminal Code of Canada. One of those reforms was to decriminalize ‘homosexual acts’ performed in private.

Trudeau famously said, ‘There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

He was quite right on that. There is no reason for a democratically elected government to peek into people’s bedrooms to determine if they are living a certain way.

On a side note, Trudeau never actually said that quote – it was penned by a newspaper reporter – and Trudeau actually thanked him later for it.

But here we are, years later, where the state wants to dictate what we can say, do, or fly on a private flag pole, or face jail time.

I don’t care if my neighbour wants to fly a Nazi flag in front of his house if it’s on his private property.

I wouldn’t like it, that’s for sure, and I certainly wouldn’t salute it when I drove by.

Most likely, that guy wouldn’t be very popular in the neighbourhood and would be asked by the people next door to remove it. More likely, a neighbour might do it for him late at night by tearing it down or using a hacksaw to cut down the flagpole.

If that happened, he shouldn’t be surprised.

But don’t forget, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought for the right for that guy to fly whatever flag he chooses.

There are protests being planned in January to voice opposition to this bill. These groups are normal citizens who are fed up with the constant attack on the people by their own government.

If this bill passes, I guess someone could take it to the tenth degree and find a way into the parliamentary cafeteria, or whatever it’s called on Parliament Hill, and clandestinely listen to the conversations among the MPs.

The first person that makes an off-colour joke, or criticizes another group, and yes, they are human, it happens,  just yell ‘hate speech!’ and point.

That would make a great front-page story and a fiasco for the unfortunate government official who made the mistake of telling a joke or story that didn’t fit the extreme narrative of Bill C-9.

Readers Comments (0)