Over 200,000 individual postcards poured into the Senate, begging senators to protect religious freedom and either kill or gut Bill C-9 — the so-called Combating Hate Act. The bill had already been stripped of its long-standing good-faith religious opinion defence in the House, clearing the way to criminalize teaching from sacred texts and expand vague “wilful promotion of hatred” offences. Yet instead of listening, the Senate Human Rights Committee treated that avalanche of public fury as an inconvenience to be locked away in a Gatineau warehouse, and on Monday, June 1, 2026, the committee gave Canadians a procedural middle finger during their clause-by-clause review and rammed through brand-new speech restrictions built on shaky and contradictory testimony, while outright rejecting the one amendment that would have restored basic religious protections.
The Postcard Scandal – Democracy’s Mailbags Locked in a Warehouse
For weeks, the grassroots campaign organized by For My Canada generated hundreds of thousands of individually signed, pre-addressed postcards from parents, pastors, and ordinary citizens, terrified that Bill C-9 would turn Bible studies into potential Criminal Code violations once the religious defence was removed.
Senator Denise Batters forced the issue into the open during Senate Question Period, and the Senate administration admitted that only sample postcards were sent to each senator’s office. The remaining 200,000+ sat in a Gatineau warehouse, where Senators would have had to physically go to the warehouse if they wanted to see the scale of opposition.
This is the most infuriating part: the Senate deliberately silenced the loudest public outcry in recent memory at the exact moment the committee was rewriting the bill and voting to expand hate-propaganda offences. When unelected senators — most of them Trudeau-era appointees sitting in the Independent Senators Group — can warehouse a quarter-million individual messages from angry Canadians, the so-called “sober second thought” chamber becomes nothing more than a totalitarian echo chamber.
The Noose Amendment – Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard and the Rewritten History
Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard successfully moved an amendment that added the noose to the list of prohibited hate symbols under the new offence for wilfully promoting hatred via public display. The original House version already targeted terrorist-entity symbols, the Nazi Hakenkreuz, and SS bolts. Bernard’s push explicitly added what have been recognized as anti-Black symbols of terror by advocates.
Her amendment was rooted in testimony from Craig Wellington of the Black Opportunity Fund, who appeared before the committee. Wellington claimed that in the 1700s enslaved Black people in Canada “escaped to the US for freedom.” Public records and hearing clips show this is a complete reversal of Canadian history. Canada was the destination of the Underground Railroad. Roughly 30,000 Black refugees fled to Canada from the US. Slavery was abolished here progressively, with no record of widespread lynchings or mass escapes southward.
Senator Bernard did not challenge or correct the error. Instead, she accepted the testimony and advanced the amendment. The broader wording she originally sought—“any other symbol that is used or associated with the promotion of ideological violence based on race, ancestry or ethnic origin”—was narrowed by a sub-amendment. But the core addition of the noose passed, and the bill’s structure now leaves the door wide open for future government-designated symbols.
A protester can now slap a noose on a sign – even one that has zero to do with race – and face criminal charges for “wilfully promoting hatred” simply by displaying it in public. This symbolism is regularly used as a raw expression of anger against politicians, but now it has become a potential felony.
Residential School Denialism – Two Years in Prison for Telling the Wrong Truth
In the same sitting, the committee approved an amendment creating a new hate propaganda offence. Anyone who wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian Residential School System, or misrepresenting facts relating to it, now faces up to two years in prison.
This was sold as parallel to Holocaust denial provisions. Indigenous witnesses emphasized “lived experience” and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s documented abuses. Yet those same witnesses acknowledged under questioning that experiences varied. Some Survivors reported education and skills training alongside the harms. The TRC itself records roughly 4,100 deaths among 150,000 children, overwhelmingly from tuberculosis and influenza epidemics common in that era—not deliberate mass extermination. The 2021 “mass graves” radar claims at former school sites remain unverified by exhumation despite millions in federal funding.
The amendment passed anyway, and the result is simple. Indigenous bands or activists get to define the official narrative, and Canadians who cite primary documents, point to disease mortality rates, or question unexcavated claims could now face criminal charges and potential jail time for “downplaying” if prosecutors and judges decide it crosses into “wilful promotion of hatred.” This is not protecting the truth. It is state-enforced orthodoxy on a contested historical record.
Senator Paula Simons – The Activist Gatekeeper Who Wasn’t Supposed to Speak
Throughout the hearings, Senator Paula Simons played an outsized role, chiming in repeatedly, framing issues, and pushing the bill’s direction. Hearing transcripts and clips show her defending the “right” of groups like the Islamic State to fly terror symbols on Canadian soil while expressing openness to criminalizing Canadian heritage symbols like the Red Ensign if deemed hateful. She warned against creating “free speech martyrs” yet sat in the room as the committee did exactly that on residential-school denialism.
She went further. Simons claimed the religious-based defence was only ever used by homophobes, insisting Christians have been “misinterpreting the Bible for thousands of years” and that their outrage over losing the exemption proves they are just bigots. She attacked the Dominion Society for advocating remigration, painting it as dangerous extremism, but completely ignored the StatsCan data showing the sharp rise in hate crimes is driven by imported conflicts from mass immigration—the exact problem the organization is trying to solve. Instead, she claimed Jews and Islamic people should be uniting to fight “white supremacy,” even though white supremacy is not the main driver of hate in Canada. The real surge comes from the very demographic shifts and open-border policies she supports.
Committee rules and decorum exist for a reason. Simons was not a neutral participant. She was an advocate with a clear track record on these cultural issues. Her interventions helped steer the outcome while the public’s 200,000 postcards sat in storage.
The Bottom Line – This Is Not Democracy
The Senate Human Rights Committee—dominated by Trudeau-era appointees—ignored the largest coordinated public submission in recent memory, accepted testimony containing verifiable historical errors, rejected the religious-defence restoration, and expanded criminal speech laws anyway. The amended Bill C-9 now heads to the full Senate. If it passes unchanged, it returns to the House for concurrence.
An unelected body, insulated from voters, used a clause-by-clause process to entrench subjective, expandable speech crimes while sidelining the clearest possible expression of Canadian will. Faith communities, civil liberties groups, and ordinary citizens warned this would happen. The Senate proved them right.
This could be the largest betrayal Canadians have ever seen.