Hon. Andrew Cardozo: Minister, thank you for being here. For my question, I want to come back to Bill C-9 and the amendments regarding good faith expressions.

The way I see it, this amendment was added by the committee. Then, because there was a lot of controversy, they added a clarification that said not to worry about the amendment; it doesn’t really mean too much.

To my thinking, why don’t we just get rid of the amendment that caused the original controversy? To me, the most important thing is that you’ve got a pretty good bill the way you introduced it. I really think it needs a wide range of public support. Combatting hate has to be something that everybody is in agreement with, rather than having a whole lot of people not being in agreement with it.

What do you think of that?

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Justice, Attorney General of Canada and Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency: I sincerely appreciate your perspective.

Of course, we started with a bill that I advanced in Parliament. The committee, independent of my office at the time, in a minority set of circumstances, made a decision to make an amendment. Without that amendment’s very important protections, I sincerely believe the bill might have been defeated. It was clear the Conservative members of the committee were in opposition, and it seemed as though the bill was at significant risk, since the Bloc representation on the committee would have voted against the bill altogether. I didn’t want to see the protections that we had committed to Canadians during the election evaporate because I kept seeing news stories about how these protections were needed.

When I actually saw the initial amendment and heard the response from some political actors from communities of faith, I thought that if the committee could figure out a way to address this, they should. On their own, they actually came up with a proposal through engagement with different actors in the non-profit sector and communities of faith, which was a provision that made clear that the practice of your faith would not constitute a hate crime.

Philosophically, I do have a slight preference for the strategy the committee chose because, instead of suggesting that practising your faith is a hate crime that demands the protection of a defence, it recognizes that, by definition, the ordinary practice of faith is not a hate crime to begin with. In my view, that is a more reflection of what the law should be in this country.

Senator Cardozo: If the bill passes in its current form, I hope you think of some kind of PR strategy to explain the importance of it.

My supplementary question is to ask you what your plans are in the next 12 months in terms of legislation or policy on various issues. What are the major pieces you’re looking at?

Mr. Fraser: Certainly.

I don’t want to make assumptions. We are very close on three very important legislative commitments, with Bill C-9, Bill C-14 and Bill C-16, which I want to see through before I start looking at what’s next. If you’re playing golf and you look at the green before you make contact, you won’t succeed.

We have an opportunity to push these forward. At the same time, however, there are other issues that we are working on. The implementation of the Canada Black Justice Strategy and the Indigenous Justice Strategy are front of mind for me. We obviously have significant pieces of legislation across government that need to be informed by the Justice Department’s advice, including major projects in this country. We can do more to advance the rights of people living with disabilities in this country. Finally, delivering on the upstream supports across government that will help prevent violent crime in the long term has to be a priority for my office, for my department and for our government if we want to end violent crime in this country.