Last updated on July 20th, 2026 at 02:23 am

The Combatting Hate Act came into force on July 18. Within hours, the Prime Minister framed it as protection: stronger penalties for hate-motivated crimes, a ban on public displays of hate symbols, new tools to arrest anyone who intimidates people or blocks access to community spaces. Within hours of that, Independent Jewish Voices framed it as decline: legislation that expands state powers over protest and public assembly under the guise of combating hate. Both posts circulated widely. Both were written by people who had read the same statute.

It is fair to say we increasingly exist in an environment of hate. Police-reported hate crimes in Canada more than doubled between 2018 and 2024. In 2024, most religiously motivated hate crimes targeted Jewish and Muslim communities, and Black Canadians have been the most frequent targets of race-based hate crimes since 2020. Anyone who has spent time on X over the past few years has watched the ambient hostility become the water we swim in, and most of us have complained about it, loudly, from every political position. That is the context this law arrives into, and it shapes how each of us reads it. When the environment is saturated with hostility, it becomes tempting to read any new government power as a weapon that will be handed to the side we oppose. The pro-Palestinian activist reads it and sees a tool for shutting down marches. The synagogue congregant reads it and sees protection that arrived years late. The temptation is understandable. It is also a poor substitute for reading the law.

What the Act Actually Does

The Combatting Hate Act amends the Criminal Code in four main ways.

It creates a standalone hate crime offence. Committing any federal offence motivated by hatred based on protected characteristics is now itself a crime, with penalties reaching life imprisonment for the underlying offence. Previously, hate motivation lived mainly in sentencing. Now it is an offence in its own right.

It criminalizes the wilful promotion of hatred through public display of certain symbols: the Nazi hakenkreuz, symbols of listed terrorist entities, and symbols that nearly resemble them. The operative phrase is wilful promotion of hatred. Display alone, absent that intent, falls outside the offence as written.

It creates two new offences around community spaces: intimidating a person to impede their access to places of worship, schools, and other sites primarily used by identifiable groups, and intentionally obstructing lawful access to those places. Intimidation is defined as conduct intended to provoke a state of fear.

It repeals the defence for good-faith expression of opinions on religious subjects or texts, previously available against hate propaganda charges. This was the most contested change through the entire legislative process, and the government’s position is that ordinary religious practice can never meet the threshold for wilful promotion of hatred, making the defence redundant rather than protective.

What the Act Leaves Out

The law contains no bubble zones. The government explicitly declined to create protest-free perimeters around designated buildings, a measure several advocacy groups had requested.

It creates no new speech offence below the existing threshold. Wilful promotion of hatred remains the standard, and the Supreme Court has defined hatred as the most extreme forms of detestation and vilification. Criticism, mockery, offence, and heated political rhetoric sit below that line, as they did before.

It includes an express clarification that statements on matters of public interest, including educational, religious, political, and scientific statements made in the course of discussion or debate, are protected so long as they do not wilfully promote hatred. Parliament wrote the protection for political speech directly into the statute.

Where the Concerns Have Substance

The serious objections to this law are about application rather than text.

The intimidation and obstruction offences are elastic. Almost any picket line, blockade, or mass demonstration obstructs someone’s access to something, incidentally if not intentionally. Whether these provisions get charged against a mob outside a mosque or against Indigenous land defenders blocking a road, or a Palestinian solidarity march near a Jewish community centre, is a matter of police and prosecutorial discretion. Canada’s track record on discretionary protest powers gives civil liberties groups legitimate grounds for wariness.

The symbols provision is viewpoint-neutral on paper and asymmetric in practice. Hamas and Hezbollah are listed terrorist entities in Canada. Their flags and insignia now sit alongside the hakenkreuz in the statute, which means the provision will land more heavily on some protest movements than others, whatever the drafters intended.

The religious defence repeal removes a statutory safeguard and replaces it with a ministerial assurance. Assurances are not law. The clarification clause offers some protection, and the constitutional threshold for hatred remains high, but people charged under these provisions will now argue context rather than invoke a defence Parliament deliberately deleted.

And all of it is untested. The Supreme Court upheld the wilful promotion offence in 1990. Every new provision in this Act awaits its first prosecution and its first Charter challenge, and the Canadian Constitution Foundation has already signalled it is watching for one.

What to Watch

The first charges will tell us more than the text has. Watch who gets arrested under the intimidation and obstruction provisions in the first year, and at which sites. Watch whether the symbols offence produces charges for flags at demonstrations or stays reserved for unambiguous hate displays. Watch whether prosecutors treat the public-interest clarification as a meaningful screen or a formality. Watch the first Charter challenge, because the elastic definitions in the intimidation offence are the likeliest target.

A law’s meaning settles in courtrooms and police decisions, over years. Right now the Combatting Hate Act is one day old. The people telling you with certainty that it is protection, and the people telling you with certainty that it is repression, are both ahead of the evidence. The statute is protection-shaped. The risk is enforcement-shaped. The honest position, uncomfortable as it is in an environment that rewards verdicts, is that we are all about to find out.

Everything cuts both ways. I have spent many months being stalked online and off by a group of people in Toronto, initially for defending unhoused folks against slander, including Adam Lee Wasserman, recently on trial for multiple charges including assault, and Michelle Hancock, who recently pled guilty to assault. It got so bad that I filed a police report against an associated Oakville entrepreneur who continues to harass me online to this day. I am far, far from alone in this harassment from these three people, who also target several other people they do not know for seemingly no reason. A Niagara based lawyer on medical leave has targeted me and others with months of vitriol because we would not participate in her campaign of hatred against another one of her targets, setting the former federal special envoy against Islamophobia and a principled human rights activist (who spent months in prison pre-trial for her activism) as “chum for the far right”.

Whatever malignant narcissistic dysfunction is causing this behaviour needs a legal remedy. The legal system has been used repeatedly to enable this behaviour and intimidate activists. Do I welcome legislation that will improve people’s ability to protect themselves? Yes. Should that come at the expense of individual freedom? Does the legislation is currently written allow for both? Yes. What remains to be seen is how it is applied and interpreted.