National Post (National Edition)
Our shrinking freedoms
THE SUPREME COURT DECIDES FAITH IS NOW BANNED FROM CANADA’S PUBLIC SPACES
Trinity Western University suffered a stinging loss in the Supreme Court of Canada on Friday, which found that law societies in B.C. and Ontario were justified in not accrediting the university’s prospective law school because of its policy on premarital sex. But no one should harbour any illusions that the pain will be limited to the small Christian school in B.C.’s Fraser Valley.
The impact of the court’s decision against TWU will seriously afflict the engagement of religious communities with public life across this country, regardless of whether it’s the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army or Muslim and Jewish charitable organizations.
The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether TWU’s Christian “community covenant,” in which students and staff agree to the understanding that sexual relations must be limited to heterosexual marriage — which, by definition, excludes homosexual relations — was a legitimate prerogative for an accredited law school. In layman’s terms, the court had to discern the balance between Charterprotected religious freedoms and emerging rights of sexual minorities to live their identities freely and fully.
The court ruled that the refusal of the two law societies to accredit TWU’s law school was a “reasonable” balancing of rights. Its logic was that LGBTQ students would be unlikely to apply to TWU given the communitycovenant requirement, so they effectively would have 60 fewer spaces available to them. Other students have access to the 16 current law schools, plus TWU’s 60 spots, and that therefore constitutes an inequality. By compiling that perceived inequality with the fact that students at TWU commit to reserving sexual intimacy for within traditional Christian marriage, the court concluded that the TWU covenant created a “public interest” harm to the reputation of and public confidence in the legal profession. These outweighed, in the court’s assessment, the “minor” consequences of denying religious freedom to the TWU community.
The court went so far as to invalidate TWU’s community covenant. Curiously, it somehow found that this foundational statement of Christian faith “forces” LGBTQ students “to deny a crucial component of their identity in the most private and personal of spaces for three years in order to receive a legal education.”
It does nothing of the sort, of course. No one is “forced” to go to any law school in the country, much less one at an evangelical university in the bucolic seclusion of rural British Columbia. As was referenced by some of the justices themselves during two days of hearings last November, there are plenty of law school spaces in Canada.
So, attending the school necessarily means a student has voluntarily accepted the limitations that TWU asks all members to abide by equally. No student is required to “deny their identity” in any way. Students are asked only to willingly adhere to a specified code of conduct.
The dissenting minority, justices Suzanne Côté and Russell Brown, insisted the law societies of B.C. and Ontario had no business interfering in the internal life of TWU on a matter irrelevant to educating lawyers to professional standards. That the court’s majority did not agree, despite acknowledging that quashing the community covenant violates Charter rights, signals clearly how faith in Canada has been reduced to an entirely private matter.
As the court determined only a few weeks ago in the Wall case — which upheld a Jehovah’s Witness community’s right to ostracize an unruly member, even though this affected his livelihood — religious groups are free to regulate themselves within the close confines of their communities and places of worship. But outside? In the public square? Their freedoms are now at the mercy of secular interest groups and such quasi-state actors as law societies and other professional regulatory bodies.
Over the next few years, we will see with increasing clarity the specific limitations this puts on Canadians of every religious tradition as they seek to put their faith into active practice by adhering to requirements for continued membership or service.
Those limits will come, some sooner, some later. The court’s own privileging of sexual identity over all other Charter rights and freedoms ensures it.
For if the state, through the courts and its other agents, can reach through the gates of tiny Trinity Western University to dictate its community relations with its students and staff, what is to stop it from doing the same thing again in the future, wherever and whenever it wishes? Why would it want to stop?
Ultimately, the TWU decision means the deep pluralism that has characterized Canadian society since the Quebec Act of 1774 — the ability to live side by side accepting the reality of difference — has become part of our past.
Even the diversity that has been celebrated so exuberantly for the past two decades has now become a monoculture where sexual identity thrives and all other social considerations such as religious faith fall behind.
TWU’s loss, then, is Canada’s loss as well. We should all prepare ourselves for the sting of once-basic freedoms being increasingly denied.