In downtown Regina this month, a mosque received a permit to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer (adhan) for roughly three minutes every Friday at noon from a rooftop speaker. The first broadcast triggered a wave of online criticism, noise complaints, and, according to the mosque, threats and abusive messages.

But no specific examples of actual threats have been made public, nor has any clear line been drawn between “abusive messages” or simple complaints and genuine threats. At least not in the legacy media coverage.

Regina Police responded with a statement confirming the permit met city bylaws. They also announced an enhanced police presence around Muslim gathering places and declared: “Threats will be taken seriously and investigated under recently enhanced Canadian hate crimes legislation.”

That legislation is Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which received Royal Assent in June 2026 and comes into force on July 18. While police statements focused on threats, the broader legal architecture now in place makes ordinary pushback against unwanted visible cultural changes increasingly risky.

The New Legal Framework

Bill C-9 creates several new or strengthened offenses in the Criminal Code:

• Intimidation or obstruction of access to places of worship and other spaces primarily used by identifiable groups.
• A standalone hate crime offense that enhances penalties when an underlying crime is motivated by hatred.
• Rules around the public display of certain hate or terrorist symbols.

In keeping with the slippery language of the bill, the first bullet point raises problems:

Under the Canadian Criminal Code, an “identifiable group” is a group distinguished by race, color, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, etc.

This creates an asymmetric protection in practice:

• A mosque, synagogue, or LGBT community center is very clearly “primarily used by an identifiable group.”
• A regular mainstream Christian church that serves a broad, mostly white Canadian congregation is less obviously covered under the “identifiable group” clause (even though places of worship are separately mentioned).

(Also noteworthy, well over 100 Churches have suffered arson attacks since Justin Trudeau’s first election in 2015. The main spike in Church fires was in 2021. Trudeau’s response to the arsons was that “…the anger against the Catholic Church is fully understandable…” in the wake of the narrative launch of alleged Amer-Indian child-graves at residential schools.)

Critically, Bill C-9 also adjusts hate propaganda provisions and introduces broader, more discretionary language around what constitutes prohibited conduct.

Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy, who testified before the Justice Committee on the bill, warned that C-9 criminalizes an emotion. He noted the proposed definition of hatred as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification, and that is stronger than disdain or dislike.” 

Pardy observed: the line between legal “dislike” and criminal “detestation” is undefined and “will be drawn wherever the authorities want it to be drawn to punish speech that the government hates.”

He also highlighted the new language around protests that “provoke a state of fear” -not necessarily fear of violence (already covered by existing law), but fear of offensive ideas. This, he argued, gives the state post-hoc power to decide after the fact whether speech or protest crossed an invisible line.

Similar concerns apply to related legislation such as elements of the Safe Social Media Act framework (C-34 and its predecessors), which target online content that “foments hatred” and empower regulatory bodies and platforms to police expression.The result is a system in which the state gains significant discretion to determine, after speech has occurred, what counts as illegal.

Regina as a Test Case

The Regina episode illustrates how these powers can intersect with real-world cultural friction. A public religious broadcast in a shared downtown space drew entirely predictable pushback over noise and changing neighborhood character.

Police immediately framed potential responses through the lens of the new hate crime regime.

Critics on social media and in commentary noted the asymmetry: complaints about the amplified adhan were being routed to “hate crime” scrutiny, while the practice itself was protected as a form of permitted religious expression. This is precisely the environment Pardy and others have warned about, where dissent against certain religious or ideological assertions in public space, and nearly always Islamic, can be recast as intimidation or hatred.

The Larger Pattern

This is not happening in isolation. Parallel efforts include significant government and institutional funding for “anti-Islamophobia” programs, education initiatives in schools, and advocacy that frames factual criticism of Islamic doctrine or practices as inherently problematic.

These measures, combined with the expanding web of hate speech and online harms legislation, create a one-way pressure: public assertions tied to Islam receive institutional protection and state-backed promotion, while resistance is increasingly pathologized and potentially criminalized.

While Canada moves to shield amplified calls to prayer with enhanced hate crime legislation, Denmark is heading in the opposite direction. On June 24, 2026, Denmark’s center-left Social Democrat Immigration Minister Morten Bødskov announced plans for a nationwide ban on the public broadcasting of the Islamic call to prayer, stating: “The call to prayer should not be heard over Danish rooftops. It has no place in Denmark, and you shouldn’t be in any doubt whether you’ve ended up in a suburb of Islamabad.”

If Denmark can do it, then it shows the world that it can be done if the state wills it. This makes it even clearer that what we see in Canada and parts of the United States is purpose-driven and not an abused or stretched aspect of various charters of rights and freedoms.

Free Speech’s Core Purpose

Freedom of speech exists, above all, to allow criticism of political and religious authority.

That is its fundamental justification in a free society. Once that function is compromised, the ability to criticize anything else, from social norms and cultural practices to government policy, quickly evaporates.

Islam is distinctive in this regard because it is a comprehensive system that integrates religious doctrine with political, legal, and social prescriptions for every aspect of life. Criticism of its public practices, scriptural claims, or governance model is therefore criticism of the system itself. When such criticism is chilled or criminalized through hate speech frameworks, the practical effect is to shield one ideology from the scrutiny that will be applied to others. For example, Deuteronomy’s condemnation of Homosexuality will be prosecuted.

Sharia codes that categorically state that homosexuality is a crime that must be punished by death, will likely not be prosecuted. We already see similar applications of the law with previously existing “hate crimes” legislation in Canada.

But reading parts of the Bible that list homosexuality as a sin and a behavior to be avoided will almost certainly be prosecuted under C-9. At least according to Canada’s Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.

In other words, once you cannot criticize Islamic religious beliefs, then you can no longer criticize the seemingly trivial, like women’s fashions or food choices. because Islam dictates all of those things and more. And criticizing or complaining about Halal as the only food choice in a given location, or modest dress for women, could, and likely will be prosecuted as a hate crime.

This is de facto Sharia. This is where hate speech laws are merely the Leftist version of Blasphemy laws. And the overlap is so large that it is at best, a distinction without a meaningful difference.

The Direction of Travel

Canada already has robust laws against threats, violence, and genuine incitement. The newer generation of legislation represented by C-9 and related bills goes further, expanding vague categories of prohibited emotion and expression, removing longstanding safeguards, and empowering authorities to make case-by-case determinations after the fact.

When a mosque in Regina can broadcast the call to prayer over loudspeakers in a shared public space, and police immediately signal that criticism may fall under enhanced hate crime rules, the message is clear:

certain cultural and religious changes are to be accommodated, while resistance to that special accommodation is to be policed.

This is how legacy norms are replaced, not always through dramatic confrontation, but through the steady accumulation of legal tools, institutional incentives, and cultural pressure that make dissent costly and conformity easier.

The question is no longer whether Canadians are allowed to notice these shifts. It is a question of whether they will still be permitted to say so.