Dangerous direction

Re: The PM’s elastic Charter, John Ivison, Jan. 9

I would like to thank John Ivison for defending religious and philosophic freedom in his piece about the requirement to endorse abortion on the summer job grants application. The issue goes much further than his piece suggests, since it is not only pro-abortion groups that are affected, but any group opposed to abortion or to the “human right of the day”, whatever the nature of their proposals. In 2016, I completed a summer jobs application on behalf of a Catholic charity I worked with. The project, which we ran for several years as a grant recipient, was a summer camp for low income girls. It had nothing to do with reproductive rights one way or the other. In fact, it was religiously neutral and welcomed girls from all backgrounds. However, this charity will be unable to endorse the abortion clause should it remain on the application in the future, and will be barred from applying. The same could be said of a soup kitchen run by Evangelical Christians, say, that wanted to bring on a few summer students.

If the Trudeau government can apply heresy tests to people running summer camps, what is to prevent them from making such tests mandatory for any sort of grant? You could apply it to university researchers, for example, or graduate students, or small businesses. They all have grants available to them.

This is a dangerous direction for a free country and I’m glad the National Post is sounding the alarm on it. Catherine Dalzell, Saint John, New Brunswick