Justice Minister Sean Fraser tabled new legislation Friday introducing four Criminal Code offences, including one that would make it a crime to intentionally promote hatred against identifiable groups in public using certain hate- or terrorism-related symbols.
The full text of the bill won’t be available until later today.
If passed, the legislation would target symbols used to attack Jews during the Holocaust or associated with the government’s list of terrorist entities, which includes the Proud Boys, Hamas and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
It would, for instance, make it a crime to promote hatred against Jewish people using Hamas flags or swastika signs outside a synagogue.
It would also crack down on people willfully intimidating and obstructing places of worship and other sensitive institutions.
Fraser said the legislation adds two further measures that would make it easier to prosecute individuals found to have wilfully promoted hatred: adding a definition of “hatred” to the Criminal Code; and removing a requirement for the consent of the provincial attorney general to prosecute a hate crime.
“This behaviour is not just morally culpable, the impact has reverberations through the entirety of the community. And, I would argue, tears at the seams of the social fabric of the nation,” Fraser said in a Friday afternoon news conference.
The government has promised to address a recent rise in hate incidents in Canada, including acts of antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The total number of police-reported hate crimes across the country increased to 4,882 incidents last year, up from 2,646 in 2020, according to Statistics Canada.
The Conservatives, who have hammered the Liberals on crime early in the fall parliamentary sitting, have criticized the government for taking too long to act on the issue.
Jewish and Muslim groups say a federal response to acts of violence, vandalism and hate is long overdue.
