The Parliament of Canada has passed Bill C-9 into law, removing the religious text defence from Canadian statute books.

The enactment means that defendants in Canadian criminal proceedings can no longer rely on the defence that had previously allowed reference to religious texts in answering certain charges. Parliament, as the deciding legislative body, approved the bill and it now stands as law following the completion of the legislative process.

The religious text defence had permitted individuals facing prosecution to invoke passages from religious texts in their defence. Its removal marks a shift in the statutory framework, one that legislators debated across the parliamentary calendar before the bill secured final passage.

What the Law Now Provides

With Bill C-9 enacted, the defence is gone. Courts will no longer consider it as an available line of defence in cases where it might previously have been raised. Parliament has spoken through the ordinary legislative channel: both chambers approved the measure, and it has passed into law.

The practical consequence for practitioners is direct. Defence counsel can no longer build a defence strategy around the invocation of religious texts in the manner the former provision allowed. Prosecutors, for their part, need not anticipate or rebut that line of argument. Judges presiding over affected matters will apply the law as it now stands, without the defence in the statutory toolkit.

Cases already in the system present the immediate practical question. Where proceedings were commenced before the change, practitioners on both sides will need to assess how the removal of the defence affects ongoing strategy, charging decisions already made, and any anticipated lines of argument. Counsel advising clients on matters that could previously have engaged the defence should revisit that advice in light of the new statutory position.

A Legislative, Not Judicial, Change

It bears emphasis that this development comes from Parliament, not from a court ruling on appeal. No judicial body struck the defence down. Legislators chose to remove it through the bill-making process, and the resulting change binds the courts as ordinary statute.

That distinction matters for how practitioners read the change. There is no constitutional pronouncement here, no appellate reasoning to parse, and no test articulated by a bench. The law changed because Parliament enacted a bill. The interpretive work now falls to trial courts applying the amended statute to live cases, and, in time, to appellate courts if disputes over the reach of the change reach them.

Observations

The removal of a statutory defence is a comparatively rare event. Defences tend to accumulate in criminal codes over decades; their repeal usually signals a considered legislative judgment that the defence no longer serves a legitimate function in modern prosecutions.

For the Canadian legal community, the immediate tasks are practical. Law societies and continuing-education providers will update criminal practice materials. Practitioners will adjust trial preparation. Academics will assess the change against the broader framework of Canadian criminal law.

For parties affected by the change — defendants, complainants, and counsel alike — the operative fact is simple: Parliament passed Bill C-9, the religious text defence is removed, and Canadian law now proceeds without it.