The people of Canada said, ‘Enough!’
‘What we heard from faithbased groups,” explained Labour Minister Patty Hajdu, as reported by Macleans on Dec. 6, 2018, “is that they want to be very clear that this isn’t a judgment about what they believe.” She continued by saying, “I think we’ve managed to do that. The application is very clear that this is about projects and activities, it’s not about faiths and beliefs.” Good.
I am happy to see that the government finally listened and responded to the concerns of the faith communities across Canada who revolted against the government’s attestation requirement in the Canada Summer Jobs (CSJ) application. That’s the program that grants funding to charities and small businesses to hire students in the summer months. It allows young people not only to make money but to gain valuable work experience. Last year, the wording on the application demanded fealty to the government’s worldview in exchange for funding.
The concept of government seeking compliance with its ideology on such moral issues as abortion struck a deep democratic nerve in religious and nonreligious citizens alike. It was gratifying to see, for once, the secular and religious press converge in agreement that the government had gone a step too far. Identity politics had reached the bulwark of freedom of conscience and religion.
As a result, the government has now announced modifications to remove its problematic values test. This is a positive development. Still, the 2019 attestation is not without some ambiguous and potentially problematic aspects. In particular, the CSJ will not fund projects that “advocate intolerance, discrimination and/or prejudice” nor “undermine or restrict the exercise of rights legally protected in Canada.” As of yet, we do not know what those terms mean, particularly in the context of religious groups whose teachings or practices may diverge from the secular majority. More clarity is needed before we can truly rest easy.
Some time ago former Chief Justice Brian Dickson, of the Supreme Court of Canada, stated, “Religious belief and practice are historically prototypical.” This great expositor of the law understood what many scholars of yesteryear concluded: religious freedom is the touchstone for other human rights. The ability to think, speak and act in keeping with our beliefs about what makes life meaningful is a precious and fundamental right that has made free and democratic societies the envy of the world. That right came about, in a large part, because religious people recognized that all were created equal and all had the right to express their thoughts and live their lives according to their conscience. It is why we have such a right in our constitution.
Therefore, when governments, no matter their intention, step on the fundamental right of conscience, they step on the very essence of who we are. To stay silent in the face of such challenges is to deny our identity and our very being.
For this reason, the people of Canada said, “Enough!” To some, the issue over Canada Summer Jobs seemed like a minor tempest in a teapot — or, as the PM said, “a kerfuffle.” Key moments in history, though, sometimes emerge from the most unexpected and unassuming events. It was a bus seat in the southern United States that commenced the Civil Rights tsunami that flooded every court and legislative hall of the nation. It was the climate carbon tax that burned Paris just recently.
The religious community in Canada is now “woke” to the demands being placed by Canada’s elites who seek to enforce their own areligious views on others. This year alone we have witnessed a Supreme Court opinion (in the TWU law school case) that government regulators can deny regulatory approval of religious institutions because they disagree with the religious views and practices; as well as an Alberta government intent on imposing its own ideology on private Christian schools in that province. In this context, the federal government’s insistence that religious views were at issue on a grant application was simply too much.
Perhaps the CSJ issue is the highwater mark for this government’s inappropriate intrusion into the beliefs of citizens. Maybe it’s not. But one thing is for sure: the CSJ issue has made it very clear that we can no longer passively take our freedoms for granted. As the Irish politician John Philpot Curran said, in a speech in Dublin on July 10, 1790, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”
We’ve been reminded of that anew. And we’ll be watching.