Hon. Andrew Cardozo: Honourable senators, I rise briefly to speak in favour of this amendment.

I come to this after a lifetime of having worked in various ways to advance human rights and equality, and I know very well that the advancements we make are not always solid, that sometimes they are fragile. All it takes is a change of government to wipe out advances. To me, the most important thing is building a broad societal consensus about combatting hate.

I want to thank the Minister of Justice for introducing this bill. It has been a long time coming. It was badly needed. I want to thank my colleague — my seatmate — Senator Kristopher Wells for being the sponsor. I want to thank Senator Paulette Senior and all the members of the Human Rights Committee for their role.

I want to indicate my strong support for this bill. It is badly needed, and it has been a long time coming, but I want to speak to one part of it. The bill deletes section 319 of the Criminal Code, and this has caused considerable controversy. Let me just paint for you the steps that took place.

The House of Commons committee went through the hearings, and, at the very last minute, in order for it to pass, the government was prepared to accept an amendment by an opposition party member to add this clause that would delete section 319, the “good faith” clause.

Seeing the controversies that it generated, they then added a clarification to say, “That clause doesn’t really mean anything; don’t worry about it.” But at that point, a whole lot of people were very upset about that clause. So I ask the question: Why have a clause and then have a clarification saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s not a problem”? Why don’t we just get rid of the clause that’s causing the consternation to begin with?

I want to say quite clearly that I am less influenced by some of the political initiatives or machinations that have gone on about this bill. I am really concerned about the views of ordinary Canadians that we’ve heard.

In the report from the committee and their observations, they note that they heard from people who were concerned about this defence being removed. They then talked about the legal experts who said, “Don’t worry about it.”

So really, with the greatest of respect to the committee and to the government, they are saying:

We’ve heard from thousands and thousands of Canadians who are concerned about this clause. So ordinary Canadians: we’ve heard from you. We hear that you are concerned about it, but listen to these experts. They are saying your worries are unfounded.

I don’t think that’s a good way of doing politics when we hear from the people and then tell the ordinary people, “You don’t really understand it.”

The report calls on the government to have clear engagement on this matter and to continue explaining it to the population.

Basically, you are saying:

The experts understand it. Thousands of ordinary people don’t understand it. So, experts in government, keep explaining this thing to ordinary Canadians who have written to us in the thousands, and at some point, they’ll gain our level of intelligence and expertise, and they’ll come on board.

Sorry if I’m being a little dramatic, but for a lot of people, that’s the way it comes off, and I caution you against this.

My guiding objective here is to build a consensus about the scourge of hate crimes. We need to strongly oppose the bad actors, the purveyors of hate. Those are the ones whom we should all be working against. There is a large number of people of goodwill who agree with that objective, that there is something rotten about hate crimes and hate harassment that we have to confront and oppose. However, instead, people of goodwill have been divided into two: people who are prepared to support this and people who are concerned that their religious rights are being undermined.

So who is laughing? The purveyors of hate because they’re happy to see that people of goodwill are divided by this.

I want to say this to colleagues: Let’s put a little bit of water in the wine, but for those of you who don’t drink, a little bit of wine in the water. I ask you to compromise a bit and understand that what is more important than getting this through the House of Commons with a narrow vote is to build a consensus about the need for us, as broadly as possible, to unite against the scourge of hatred that is growing in this country and many other countries.

We must, and we can, have a bill that has a broad consensus to combat hate. Thank you.