Liberals still don’t get religion

Lessons to learn with Dogwood and jobs fund

Wednesday’s parliamentary outrage du jour was an online summer job posting from Dogwood, a B.C. environmental group. The successful applicant will “help (Dogwood’s) organizing network stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker project,” and she will make $15 an hour thanks to the generosity of the Canadian taxpayer. The Canada Summer Jobs Program distributes funds to all manner of not-for-profits and small businesses, with local MPs — two New Democrats and one Liberal, in this case — deciding which applicants are most deserving.

It careered into the public spotlight only recently when the Liberals found that MPs, including one of their own, had been signing off on funding for anti-abortion groups, including at least one known for displaying grisly photos of aborted fetuses. A woman’s absolute right to manage her own pregnancy is central to Liberal policy. It made perfect sense that they would want to close the tap. And for the same reason, it would have made sense for the Liberals to cut off an organization like Dogwood. Trudeau and his deputies swear blind that Kinder Morgan must and shall be completed, but it faces many significant obstacles — not least activists like those in Dogwood’s employ. Why would the government pay them?

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was in high dudgeon about it on Wednesday. “If the Prime Minister claims to be trying to build public support for this pipeline, perhaps he can explain to the House why his government gave a grant to an environmental lobby group that specifically used those funds to hire an activist to protest against the Trans Mountain pipeline,” he said in question period.

“Does the Prime Minister not realize that paying groups to protest against these projects is exactly part of the problem?”

Trudeau had two comebacks. One, that Dogwood got funding under the Conservative government as well. A fair point, certainly: tactically, if anything, it was weirder for the Conservatives not to object than for the Liberals, who can (or could) reasonably hope some Dogwood supporters might vote for them. And two, that “unlike apparently the leader of the official opposition, we believe in free speech.”

I don’t even know what to call that. I would call it chutzpah, but even after weeks upon weeks of controversy, I’m not convinced the Liberals and their most ardent supporters actually understand why people object so strenuously to the way they have handled the anti-abortion carve-out to the Summer Jobs Program.

The most logical way to ensure that government money isn’t spent advocating for or against a government policy is to stipulate that it not be so spent. “Tick this box to affirm that your summer employee will not participate in any anti-abortion/anti-pipeline/ anti-whatever activities.” Easy peasy. Instead bureaucrats somehow came up with this: an applicant organization has to attest that “both the job and my organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights.”

This unambiguously shifts the focus from behaviour (protesting a pipeline, parading around photos of aborted fetuses) to belief. A government is on much shakier ground when it discriminates based on belief; indeed, if anything is a “value underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” freedom of religion certainly is. Yet Liberals seemed baffled as more and more religious organizations, notably Bible camps, refused to tick the box — not because they had anything to do with anti-abortion advocacy but because their core mandates are to reflect their beliefs in all that they do, and their religious beliefs include the sanctity of human life in utero.

If Team Trudeau really can’t wrap its mind around the nature of devout religious faith, despite an obvious imperative to do so, then perhaps this Dogwood episode can ram it through their skulls. You don’t need to be religious to understand. Just flip it around. Imagine the Conservative government had decided to nix summer jobs funding for anti-pipeline advocacy (not a stretch), or to throw a rare bone to its social-conservative wing and refuse to fund pro-choice advocacy. It would have been well within their rights, but people would have howled.

Now imagine they had asked every progressiveminded summer camp to attest, say, that “it’s important to get Alberta’s natural resources to tidewater,” or that “there is no Charter right to abortion.” The howling would have rather increased, no?