00:00:00.000I think that I don't think religious scripture should be used as a defense for a hate crime.
00:00:09.280If someone publicly says that they want to kill all the gays and that they are relying on a passage in Leviticus,
00:00:15.420they should be prosecuted. Hard stop. And I'm a Christian. I believe firmly that that person should be prosecuted.
00:00:21.600And that would not be a good faith usage of scripture.
00:00:25.100That's your debate, but sometimes prosecutors may be prevented from laying charges because there's some hesitation.
00:00:30.680I think it needs to be clear in the law, and I think you would agree with it, and any reasonable person would as well.
00:00:35.180I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:37.540Today is Thursday, March 12, 2026, and as you saw, that was our friend, Andrew Lawton,
00:00:42.960Member of Parliament for Elgin St. Thomas London South, in an exchange about a month ago
00:00:47.660with Heritage Minister Mark Miller going back and forth over religious exemptions.
00:00:52.840Well, I bring this up today because I'm very pleased to be joined by my friend,
00:00:58.240former colleague and member of the running for conservative,
00:01:00.780to discuss the latest liberal attempt to censor the internet and censor your free speech.
00:01:07.380And now they're even censoring the actual debate on the censorship bill.
00:01:11.120So, Andrew, welcome to the show. Great to see you, my friend.
00:01:13.660It is always good to be back. Thanks so much for having me on.
00:01:16.520Well, I know the audience loves to see you back, Andrew.
00:01:19.060And they also love to see you in Ottawa doing the role of a parliamentarian, really, you know, why you're so powerful and so important to the Conservatives, because you're able to articulate so many of the problems that we have with liberal government overreach.
00:01:32.980And perfect example was debate on this bill, C9, the Combating Hate Act. And I mean, I just find this so ironic, so perfect in Canada that the government wants to shut down debate on this bill that puts a chilling impact on free speech across the country.
00:01:50.120So can you walk us through what happened in committee this week?
00:01:53.700Yeah, well, for starters, I tried to rename the bill. I wasn't optimistic, but they call it the Combating Hate Act.
00:01:59.320i tried to rename it the combating freedom of expression act and uh the liberals did not uh
00:02:03.880did not accept my amendment but well well just just because you mentioned i do want to let you
00:02:07.320speak andrew but i do have a clip so i want to show the audience i do want to show the audience
00:02:11.320this is a clip of andrew lawton attempting to rename the bill as he just said and you'll see
00:02:15.480how they uh respond to that let's play that clip we are clearly unable to debate you've made that
00:02:20.440clear but we are also the house of commons made that clear trying we are trying to follow through
00:02:24.680can the motions be read or can the amendments be read to ensure that we are aware of what
00:02:29.400we're voting on given the the fact that we all seem to have inconsistent packages no okay so
00:02:34.040you don't even want to hear that understood it's not my decision it's already been made so sorry
00:02:38.440andrew your your motion well larry brock liked my suggestion at least so i got i got one enthusiastic
00:02:43.880vote on it but uh but anyway my my title was a far more accurate uh depiction of what the bill
00:02:50.440does. This is a bill that, again, is rooted in an idea that on the surface sounds good. No one likes
00:02:55.620to see hate in society. We've seen the Jewish community targeted in absolutely heinous ways
00:03:00.900in recent years. We've seen Christian churches burned and vandalized, I think 123. I always
00:03:06.440check the Juno News map anytime I talk about that issue in the last five years. But real hate is
00:03:14.000already illegal when we are talking about people that are vandalizing, that are obstructing, that
00:03:18.680are harassing and that are threatening. What this bill does is seep into that other territory
00:03:24.520that we've seen with human rights commissions that we saw in BC with Barry Neufeld recently,
00:03:29.340which is hate that is really going after speech. And we have had a definition that the Supreme
00:03:35.820Court has used for many years on what constitutes hate, and it maintains a very high bar, especially
00:03:40.760for criminal prosecution. And Bill C-9, one of our biggest issues was that it lowers the bar,
00:03:45.720It changes the definition of hate. Now, we were finally able this week to amend that part of the
00:03:51.540bill. We at least salvaged a little bit of sanity. We restored the definition to the one that's used
00:03:57.680by the Supreme Court. But what we're left with is still a bill that bans the display of hate symbols
00:04:03.760with the government able to really redefine what those symbols are. It also bans things that look
00:04:10.020like hate symbols or could be mistaken as hate symbols. And that is a huge area of ambiguity
00:04:15.780that will now infringe on political protests, on what people say and do online. We also have
00:04:21.840a standalone hate offense that can be tacked onto any federal law in Canada. And simply put,
00:04:27.820this means that you could now be criminally charged with a hate offense if you have violated
00:04:33.240a non-criminal federal law, like, for example, the Canadian Human Rights Act. That's a big
00:04:38.980concern we have with this. But the most egregious thing that this bill has done was the amendment
00:04:43.560that the Liberal and Bloc members pushed forward in December, removing longstanding protections
00:04:48.880for religious speech, what's often called the religious defense. And this means that you will
00:04:53.860now be subject to potentially being charged under willful promotion of hatred for quoting a verse
00:05:01.020of scripture that the government deems as hateful, as evidenced by Mark Miller's comments that
00:05:06.140certain verses, and he mentioned three of them, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Romans,
00:05:11.920that these books of the Bible, or two of which are in the Torah, have some verses that are
00:05:16.680inherently hateful, and prosecutors should be able to quote you for citing. And that is where
00:05:22.300the removal of the religious defense, if you listen to the liberals and take them at their word,
00:05:26.700is hugely, hugely concerning for people of faith in this country, and all people who value freedom
00:05:31.740of expression. Well, it's really, it really is scary. You know, the liberals, it seems like
00:05:36.080they've been trying to push forward these sorts of laws for years and years and years. Andrew,
00:05:39.780it just seems so misplaced and so misguided. I mean, we watch the news professionally around
00:05:43.960here at Juno News, and it seems to me that there is a lot of intimidation and violence happening.
00:05:49.480Just look at what's happening on the streets in Toronto with synagogues getting shot up,
00:05:52.540and the latest was the U.S. embassy being shot up, presumably by people who have very radical,
00:05:58.540perhaps even religious extreme views. And somehow these people never really managed to trip these
00:06:04.180wires. And yet the thing that I'm concerned about is, you know, the sort of more like political
00:06:08.820activists or someone who's just like letting off steam and ranting on their Facebook page,
00:06:12.980or even, I mean, the idea of hate symbols, right? It's such a matter of opinion. I know that like,
00:06:19.600you know, many people, myself included, love the old red ensign flag. It's a flag that my
00:06:23.880grandparents, great grandparents fought under in the wars, right? And that was their flag. And it
00:06:28.940means a lot to my family. It means a lot to me. And yet, you know, it's also sometimes used by
00:06:33.580maybe more extremist white nationalist groups, white supremacist groups. And I'm worried that
00:06:37.220they're going to take something like a flag that used to, you know, unify the country or religious
00:06:42.080verse that we can learn from and obviously has been used as wisdom to teach our society for
00:06:47.080thousands of years and turn that into something that you could literally, you know, get fined or
00:06:52.580go to jail for. It's really, it's really sort of terrifying. And again, misguided. What do you
00:06:56.680think? Yeah, I think you're right about that. And I think in general, we have far too many people
00:07:01.660that want to focus on where to draw the line on free speech rather than protecting that first
00:07:06.620principle, which is that freedom of speech is important. And we are going to, in a free society,
00:07:10.900be exposed to viewpoints that we may find hurtful or emotionally harmful, but aren't actually
00:07:15.980infringing on our rights. And this is where I often draw the point when people get up there
00:07:21.960and say, no, you need the religious defense gone
00:07:24.520because religion shouldn't be a cover for criminality.
00:07:28.840It's a misrepresentation of what the religious defense is.
00:07:31.980You can't rob a bank and as you're like running away
00:07:34.540from the bank, yell out, God is good and you're fine.
00:07:37.460The religious defense only applies to one set of charges,
00:08:14.480Like, presumably the point of these committees is to have, you know, an exchange of ideas and to allow them to hear the opposing views.
00:08:22.600And yet to have this shut down, I have a clip here where basically you and a fellow MP, Roman Babber, are protesting that the committee is silencing your ability to even like have this discussion.
00:09:58.280Yeah, I mean, technically, the House of Commons is within its right to give what's called an instruction to the committee.
00:10:05.880And the House of Commons passed a motion that Sean Fraser, the Liberal Attorney General, put forward, basically shutting up the Justice Committee, forcing us to go through each clause of the bill without debate, without discussion and voting in rapid succession.
00:10:19.460Our meeting yesterday was 35 minutes because we just literally did not have the ability, the right as members of Parliament elected to speak.
00:10:26.960And the reason the Liberals did this was because they wanted to ram this bill through.
00:10:31.040They also didn't want to hear what we had to say because they didn't want to hear what Canadians had to say.
00:10:35.880We were planning on reading submissions from tens of thousands of Canadians who have emailed, called our office, from faith leaders that I met with when I toured the country holding roundtables and town halls, people from Christian faith, Jewish faith, Muslim faith, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, civil liberties advocates, all of them who say that C9 is an infringement on freedom of expression and freedom of religion.
00:10:59.000And they didn't want those comments on the record.
00:11:01.860The reason the Liberals have been so disingenuous and dishonest about this is because the removal of the religious defense was never part of Bill C-9.
00:11:09.540It was snuck in as an amendment, which means we never had the opportunity to hear witness testimony on it.
00:11:15.020We never had the opportunity to receive briefs from experts.
00:11:18.920We didn't have the opportunity to do that.
00:11:20.900So when they say, oh, well, we've had 30 hours of meetings, they're missing the point that we never had the opportunity to examine the most crucial and dangerous part of this bill.
00:11:30.480And they've now silenced us to ram this through without really having to defend why they're OK taking away the religious freedoms of Canadians.
00:11:38.520It's unbelievable. It just seems like it's obviously part of their agenda.
00:11:41.400I mean, we've had so many bills and it's sometimes hard to keep them all straight.
00:11:44.260we had C10, which became C11. We had C18, the Online Harms Act, and then this is the latest
00:11:50.580amendment to it. Why would the bloc, I mean, this is liberals under a minority situation. Keep in
00:11:55.760mind, we still have a minority. You know, when these by-elections are called and held later in
00:12:00.800April, presumably the liberals will just barely squeak by thanks to four floor crossers and these
00:12:06.560by-elections will be able to have a majority. I just wonder what, like, why was the bloc willing
00:12:11.700to go along with this? Well, I think the answer is very simple. I'll answer both the Liberal and
00:12:17.120the Bloc perspective. The Liberals, I don't think, realized how many people would be prepared to stand
00:12:21.680up against their bill. I think they thought like if they put the nice sounding language in it,
00:12:25.800said it was against hate, people would accept it at face value and wave it through. But every party
00:12:30.820was against Bill C9. The Bloc, the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, sorry, the Green, Elizabeth May,
00:12:37.160every party was against it. You know, the Conservatives, rather, and the Liberals were
00:12:41.120the only ones there. And then they realized if they wanted to salvage this bill, they had to
00:12:45.500play, let's make a deal. So they went to the block and said, okay, the block, which has long wanted
00:12:50.280to purge religion from the public square, let's be perfectly frank, has always wanted the removal
00:12:55.360of this religious defense. They've tried in private members bills and failed. And the liberal
00:12:59.660said, okay, we'll give you this if you vote for the bill. And the block said yes. And that is
00:13:04.360exactly what happened. Now, there are some in the liberal party like Mark Miller, that I think
00:13:08.340clearly support this. Anthony Howe's father as well, liberal MP on the Justice Committee,
00:13:12.320clearly supports this. Others are just going along with it. But they were trying to save face
00:13:17.520and salvage their very harmful bill. And in doing so, they made a deal with people who want to
00:13:23.760eradicate religion from the public square. Interesting. Well, I know this is sort of
00:13:27.800related, but we have seen this really unbelievable response to President Trump's Operation Epic Fury.
00:13:33.640we've seen pro-Iranian freedom rallies, you know, people even with like Israel flags and Lebanese
00:13:40.300flags in support with people who had the old Iranian flag like pre-Ayatollah and just like
00:13:47.140huge outpouring of love and support for what's happening and sort of hopeful optimism that
00:13:51.900whatever comes next will be better than what we have seen under the Ayatollah over the last 45
00:13:56.440years and the Islamic Republic. And yeah, at the same time, we've seen sort of like a concerning
00:14:01.520happening rise in what I would call terrorism. I mean, shooting up five different synagogues
00:14:07.100overnight, no one's harmed, but still terrifying to go to your place of worship and see bullet
00:14:11.560holes. We also saw shots fired into the U.S. consulate building. I mean, that could be
00:14:16.880perceived as an act of war. We had your boss, Pierre Polyev, come out and give, I thought was
00:14:23.620a great video here. I'm going to just play a short clip from it, talking about the IRGC,
00:14:28.760the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Court, sorry, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Court of Iran,
00:14:32.600talking about how they have operatives in Canada, which is just mind-blowing to me,
00:14:35.440that these people were ever allowed into our country and that they're allowed to stay.
00:14:39.180But basically, just saying, you know, we've always had wars,
00:14:42.560and we've always had people from around the world living in Canada,
00:14:45.040but never have we seen those wars spill over onto our streets the way that we have seen them.
00:14:51.060So let's play this clip, and then I'll get you to react to it, Andrew.
00:14:53.180Ten years of liberal immigration, weak liberal borders, catch and release liberal crime policies and divisive liberal governance has led to that violence spilling onto our streets.
00:15:07.700We now have synagogues that are being shot, Jewish places of worship and community centers firebombed, children's schools having bullets fly through the window in the middle of the night.
00:15:16.940This is not the Canada that we knew and the Canada that we want.
00:15:20.600We want a country that is safe and secure, and we need the government to crack down on this political violence, to identify anyone visiting this country that is not a citizen or a permanent resident who is engaging in it, and immediately have them referred for charges, for criminal penalty, and ultimately deportation.
00:15:40.100It's really, again, unbelievable that you have the government so focused on cracking down on mean speech on the internet, and then at the same time allowing this stuff to happen. What do you think?
00:15:48.460Yeah. And by the way, yesterday, liberal ministers were unequivocal in and just absolutely shameless in trying to tie the need to pass Bill C-9 with synagogues being shot up and have yet to point to a single line in the bill that would have prevented that.
00:16:04.440It's just absolutely craven, despicable, cynical politics, if ever there was it.
00:16:09.280But on the Iranian regime issue, I mean, the government finally listened to what the conservatives and I know you have been advocating for for many years, Candace, which was listing the IRGC as a terror organization.
00:16:19.000But now we have to deal with the consequences of that.
00:16:21.840There have been investigations that have revealed more than 700 IRGC officials.
00:18:16.880Obviously, your point here was to create a panel that was full of diversity, not just in skin color or ethnicity or religious background, perhaps.
00:18:27.520Were you given the journalistic freedom then to move forward and do that for the sake of the Canadian public?
00:18:34.760No, I mean, the issue became with the panelists, we had a list of 43 people or 45 people that Power and Politics gave us that said, do not go near these people, right?
00:18:50.300And some of these folks were like reporters, like Robert Benzie.
00:18:53.100There's a story breaking at Queen's Park and we're on at seven o'clock. We should be able to call, you know, somebody who covers Queen's Park and talk to them.
00:19:02.500But there were these continued hurdles and roadblocks that were set up to really have a certain group of folks in Ottawa in control of who was allowed on programs.
00:19:15.540so i mean i honestly it's kind of worse than i even thought the fact that you know you had this
00:19:21.040centrally controlled group of sort of mean girls determining what can happen on other shows
00:19:25.760and they actually keep blacklists of people who are just not welcome on their airways uh anything
00:19:30.840that stuck out in particular to you about that uh testimony well i i think i think it affirms what
00:19:36.140a lot of people suspected and and i think the messenger was very important travis dandraj has
00:19:40.880never been accused of being some, you know, closet right winger. You know, he like I think
00:19:45.920he's written probably unfavorable things about me, like going back to, you know, earlier on when he
00:19:50.080was still at CBC. And I, you know, whatever, I'm not too worried about that. But he's coming at
00:19:54.540this from the perspective of someone that was trying to do his job and was stymied from doing
00:19:59.080that and not for any reason except for territoriality or it sounds like bias. And I mean, I'd love to
00:20:05.760see the blacklist. I don't know. I might be down there, you know, 24, 25, who knows? You know,
00:20:10.560And I remember once I did an interview when my book about Pierre Polyev came out, CBC finally had sort of asked to have me on.
00:20:18.320And David Cochran, his opening question was, I know people are going to wonder why we have some right winger like you on.
00:20:23.520And I'm like, why would ever a Canadian watching a Canadian politics show wonder why you're interviewing someone who represents one particular side of it?
00:20:35.880And when they do bring on their token conservative, if it's always like someone who, you know, knocked on a door in like 1984 for Brian Mulroney, like it's very rarely someone that is in line with where the modern conservative movement is.
00:20:48.600And I think that like, you know, all of that is something that's very important to have the evidence of and the receipts of that CBC does not try to represent the entirety of the country it is supposed to serve.
00:21:00.140Well, that was evidently clear from this. I mean, come on, the conservatives got 40% of the vote in the last election. I think more than 40%. It's clear to say, fair to say that about half the country holds conservative values and conservative views. And the fact that that is treated as verbatim, the state broadcaster, is disqualifying to me. Like, you cannot be the public broadcaster if you exclude half of the country. And that's sort of what they normalize.
00:21:24.560I even had one point that kind of stood out to me that I chuckled at, Andrew, where Travis Danwash was talking about how he tried to have the most amount of diversity of opinion possible.
00:21:34.100And he talked about a panel that he had with Rachel Gilmore and Raheem Mohamed.
00:21:37.760Raheem Mohamed is our former colleague at True North, and he now writes for the National Post.
00:21:41.040He's not exactly like a hardcore right winger, I would say.
00:21:49.320Like, like, like Rachel Gilbert is an extreme far left person, probably further to the left than anybody, do no news is to the right. And yet, you know, even even from this person who was removed from the CBC for being too friendly to conservatives or whatever, even his spectrum, I thought was like a little bit biased towards the left. So, I mean, you know, what is the I know that your boss, Pierre Pauly, have used to talk a lot about defunding the CBC. We don't hear that as much these days.
00:22:18.180Maybe it's just not quite a priority, but what is what is your thinking these days about the CBC and what should be done with it?
00:22:25.660Well, I should say my bosses are the people of Elgin St. Thomas, London South, but I am very proud to serve on Pierre Paulyev's team.
00:22:32.000And I think he's doing a tremendous job in my position on CBC.
00:22:34.800Our position has not changed. And Rachel Thomas has been doing a great job as our shadow minister on this file.
00:22:40.600But like at the very least, the numbers themselves of how much you have to pay as a Canadian taxpayer for how few people watch this is,
00:22:47.780i think absolutely uh astonishing it certainly uh i think that the the you know the the most
00:22:53.700the thing that we could agree on the most is that cbc is a waste of waste of money it's not good
00:22:57.460value for money you could say it does a lot more uh damage to the country but i think we'll just
00:23:01.460leave it at that andrew thank you so much for your time it's always great to have you on the
00:23:04.020show i know the audience thank you everyone all right that's andrew lawton um conservative member
00:23:08.740of parliament that's all the time we have for today folks thanks so much for tuning in i'm
00:23:11.460And Kenneth Malcolm's Kenneth Malcolm Show, thank you and God bless.