Note to PM: our principles inform our actions
LIMERICKING
On Tuesday, the federal government attempted to salvage something from the wreckage of its crude attempt to turn the Canada Summer Jobs Program into an exercise in abortion absolutism. Having been denounced by friend and foe alike for its insistence that all applicants for the program assent to its extreme abortion position, the federal Liberals published “supplementary information” to explain how applicants can still get the money.
Which demonstrated again how clueless this government is about the fundamental freedoms at stake. The employment minister, Patricia Hajdu, thinks that private citizens, small-business owners and churches want to find a fig leaf that will enable them to swear the government’s loyalty oath on abortion. She cannot seem to understand that they find it unjust and unconstitutional for the government to force them to say something that they don’t believe, or discriminate against them when they profess what they do believe.
Despite the additional information, applicants must still attest that “both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect … the right to access safe and legal abortions … and the rights of gender-diverse and transgender Canadians.”
The key clarification is that the “core mandate” is the “primary activities undertaken by the organization that reflect the organization’s ongoing services provided to the community. It is not the beliefs of the organization, and it is not the values of the organization.”
In a failed attempt to make things better, Hajdu has made thing worse. Worse still, she has not the faintest idea of why she is going backwards, as the terrain of human rights appears alien to her.
Her position is that groups who do not agree with her on abortion, or do not have a position on abortion, can still attest that they do support the government’s position because working against it is not part of their “core mandate.”
A pro- life landscaper can therefore say that she supports abortion on demand — and therefore be eligible for a student wage subsidy — because the government has decided cutting grass is the core mandate of the small business. The business owner can be forced to profess what she does not believe, not to worry, because the really important business is mowing the lawn. The core mandate, now defined by the government, is the activities — landscaping, summer camp, refugee assistance — and not the “beliefs” or “values.”
It is embarrassing that the employment minister seems unaware a basic element of political liberty, freedom of expression and religious liberty is that the state does not determine what the “core mandate” of a citizen is. The state cannot mandate a private citizen or small business to profess a political opinion on the grounds that the federal cabinet has determined that is a secondary, not core, matter. Free citizens get to make that call, not the clerks who are processing grant applications.
The absurdity i s compounded in r elation to churches and faith- inspired groups. How can the government tell them that their beliefs and values are not part of their “core mandate”? What — literally in God’s name — is the point of church otherwise?
What exactly is the “core mandate” of a church, for example? The worship of God, the proclamation of the truth, the life of virtue, service to the suffering and those in need. The government thinks it is being clever by telling churches, in effect, that we will consider your “core mandate” to be service to the poor for the purposes of this program. Any self-respecting church would reply: our activities are the consequence of our beliefs and values, and cannot be separated from them. We serve the needy precisely because we believe in God.
It’s not the competence of the state to determine the mandate of churches, or small businesses, or citizens. But this government is grossly incompetent in even understanding the issues at stake. Basic logic, to say nothing of respect for human rights, should have alerted the ideological extremists advising Hajdu that it is nonsensical to tell a church that serving the poor is a core mandate separate from the belief in God who mandates it.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed what he called this “kerfuffle” — interesting choice of words for violations of our basic charter rights – some weeks ago. He proposed that Canadians are entitled — gracious concession, that — to hold views that differ with his government, but if they act upon them, then the government will penalize them. Trudeau’s view, now expressed in Hajdu’s policy, inhabits a strange world in which what one believes is separate from how one acts, as if one’s principles — including political, philosophical and religious principles — are not supposed to shape one’s actions.
It may be that the federal Liberals believe that principles should be separated from action. It may even be that they find this a congenial way to proceed themselves. But they are not entitled to require the rest of us to behave that way.
We behave as a consequence of what we believe. A “mandate” literally means to be sent, to be appointed to a task. In a liberal democracy, it is not the government who sends us.