Three of Canada's leading civil liberties organizations recently walked into a Liberal-dominated Senate committee room and made the case against Bill C-9 — together.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the Democracy Fund, and the Free Speech Union of Canada appeared side by side before the Senate's human rights committee, each offering testimony on the Carney government's proposed amendments to the criminal code.

On a Tuesday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra spoke with James Manson of the JCCF about what happened in that hearing room.

Ezra framed the appearance as a generational shift, suggesting many “civil liberties groups turned off the lights during COVID” and arguing organizations like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association abandoned their mandate when it mattered most.

The three groups now filling that void, he said, represent something new.

Interestingly, Manson said the Senate experience, despite being dominated by Liberals, was less adversarial than he had anticipated.

“I was kind of expecting to be in the belly of the beast,” he said, “but it wasn't that experience.”

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The JCCF lawyer acknowledged the senators asked substantive questions and showed some attempt at the sober second thought the Senate is meant to provide.

The crux of the JCCF's argument centred on the religious defence currently embedded in section 319(3) of the Criminal Code.

Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, proposes to remove it. Manson warned that doing so could be deeply counterproductive — not just for religious Canadians, but for the legal integrity of the hate speech provisions themselves.

“Why remove it anyway if it's too high to get to in most cases?” Manson asked the committee. “Where's the need to remove it?”

The concern traces back to the Supreme Court's 1990 decision in R v. Keegstra, in which the court upheld the constitutionality of Canada's hate promotion offence in part because of the defences available to the accused.

Ezra summarized the argument plainly: if you believe in hate speech law, you need this defence to keep it constitutionally balanced. Take it away, and you may have handed future challengers the very tool they need to strike the whole thing down.

Manson argued that stripping the religious defence now could invite a future constitutional challenge that unravels the entire provision.

“Removing this religious defence — now it's no longer clear whether a minister in a pulpit on Sunday morning is able to quote religious texts from the Bible without getting into trouble,” Manson said. “And that is a problem.”