The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) said on July 21, 2026 — three days after Canada's Combatting Hate Act took effect — that it was fielding reports of Canadians being visited at home by government officials over social media posts "made months or even years ago." The group's advice was blunt: if officials show up, record the interaction. Two days after that, Toronto police boarded a Rebel News digital billboard truck advertising a women's-sports rights group, reviewed its content on site, and released it without charges, concluding the material was political expression rather than a crime. No arrests, charges, or convictions under the new law had been publicly confirmed as of this writing.
That combination — anecdotal home visits plus a police review of a truck-mounted ad, with zero formal C-9 prosecutions to date — is exactly what you'd expect from a law whose central legislative fight was fought and won in the wrong place.
What Parliament Actually Fought Over
Bill C-9, which received royal assent on June 18, 2026 and came into force 30 days later on July 18, amends the Criminal Code in three ways: it strips the "good faith" religious-expression defence from the existing hate propaganda offence in section 319; it creates a new offence for publicly displaying Nazi symbols, nooses, or terrorist-group flags with intent to promote hatred; and it creates a new offence for intimidating or obstructing access to a place of worship, school, or community centre, carrying up to 10 years.
The fight over prosecutorial gatekeeping was real. Liberal MP Anthony Housefather initially proposed scrapping the requirement that provincial Attorneys General personally consent before hate propaganda charges proceed — first for all cases, then as a compromise only for police-initiated ones. Both the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois refused to go along, and Conservative MP Roman Baber warned the change would invite "weaponized" prosecutions by "zealous or vexatious litigants," as reported by the Canadian Jewish News. The final bill text, confirmed on Parliament's own bill tracker, keeps that gate: "No proceeding for an offence under subsection (2), (2.1) or (2.2) shall be instituted without the consent of the Attorney General," and extends it to the new symbol-display offence for good measure.
That is a real, hard-won safeguard, and the MPs who fought for it deserve credit for taking free-expression risk seriously rather than waving it through.
The Gate That Was Never Extended
Here is the part that didn't get the same scrutiny. The consent requirement, by its own text, applies only to prosecutions under section 319 — the pre-existing hate propaganda offence and its antisemitism and symbol-display variants. The bill's other major addition, a freestanding "hate crime" offence at section 320.1001 that attaches to any Criminal Code violation found to be "motivated by hatred" and carries penalties from two years up to life depending on the underlying offence (per the Department of Justice's own Charter Statement), sits in a different part of the Code entirely. It isn't a subsection of 319(2), (2.1), or (2.2), so the consent gate legislators fought to preserve doesn't reach it. Neither does it reach the new intimidation and obstruction offence. Crown prosecutors can lay both without an Attorney General's sign-off.
In other words, Parliament spent its political capital defending a safeguard that covers a shrinking share of what the bill actually created. The hate-motivation add-on — the provision most likely to sweep in expressive conduct that a jury or judge later decides wasn't genuinely hate-motivated — is precisely the one built without the extra layer of review.
Why This Matters More Than the Consent Debate Suggests
There's a further wrinkle the whole consent debate sidesteps: Attorney General consent is a pre-charge filter. It has never applied to the investigative stage — the doorstep visit, the phone call, the records review — that happens before anyone decides whether to charge at all. The JCCF's home-visit reports, whatever their eventual legal outcome, are downstream of a step the consent requirement was never designed to touch. A safeguard aimed at prosecutorial overreach does nothing about investigatory chilling effects, and expanding hate-motivation liability into a new, ungated offence widens the population of people police might reasonably want to interview about old posts.
The case for C-9 is not frivolous. Hate-motivated vandalism, threats against synagogues and mosques, and organized intimidation at community spaces are real harms that a Criminal Code sentencing enhancement can proportionately address without touching a word of protected speech — that's what the intimidation and hate-crime-enhancement provisions are actually built for. But a law that preserves careful gatekeeping for the offence Parliament argued about, while quietly building an ungated parallel one, hasn't resolved the free-expression risk that debate was meant to manage — it has relocated it. If Ottawa wants Canadians to trust that the consent fight meant something, the fix is straightforward: extend the section 6.1 consent requirement to section 320.1001 and the new intimidation offence, and have the Department of Justice publish guidance on what investigatory contact — home visits included — is and isn't appropriate before any charge is ever contemplated.