In Alberta, some cyclists are special
Sikhs’ helmet exemption wears thin logically
Just in time for Sikh Heritage Month, Alberta recently became the third province to allow Sikhs the dubious privilege of riding motorcycles without helmets. In a government press release, Transportation Minister Brian Mason nodded to “civil rights and religious expression,” while Canada’s first turban-wearing Mountie, Baltej Singh Dhillon, appreciated the government “respecting diversity and religious rights.”
“The government should always strive to accommodate free expression,” said Kelly Ernst, president of the Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association, “especially when the expression does not harm others.”
NDP governments have brought in all three exemptions, curiously enough — the others are in Manitoba and British Columbia. Indeed, in his former life as an Ontario politician at Queen’s Park, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh sponsored a private member’s bill to the same effect. In his current life as a man desperate for votes in Quebec, I wonder if he wishes he hadn’t. Quebecers have gone quite mad about harmless-to-non-existent religious accommodations in recent years. But in this case the accommodation, while hardly earth-shattering, really is quite stupid.
Some Muslim women credibly claim to feel an obligation to wear a niqab, or Jewish men to wear a yarmulke or keep kosher, or Sikh men to wear a kirpan or turban. Over the years, this has become controversial when it comes to everything from attending public school to working for the government to riding the bus.
So far as I know, no Canadian Sikh has ever claimed a religious obligation to ride a motorcycle. Insp. Dhillon is welcome to champion any cause he likes, but to put his battle to serve his country in the same press release as some aggrieved motorcyclists is just barmy.
A Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia ruled in a Sikh motorcyclist’s favour in 1999. A proper court in Ontario went the other way in 2008, with Justice W. James Blacklock arguing the rights infringed were more than justified by the government’s sincere interest in preventing injury and death.
“The applicant is not prohibited at all from wearing an unencumbered turban anywhere or during any activity other than while riding a motorcycle on a public road. His religious life is in no other way affected,” Blacklock wrote. “He is moreover, not excluded from ac- cess to the public thoroughfares in any other motor vehicle. Finally, for him or other similarly situate persons to engage in the only activity to which this law limits their access, namely helmetless motorcycle riding, would expose the riders and their own families to significantly elevated levels of risk to life, health and economic hardship.”
And what of the government’s and its supporters’ arguments? To whatever extent that helmetless Sikh motorcyclists do “not harm others,” per Ernst, surely that’s true of helmetless non-Sikh motorcyclists as well. Mason, the Transportation Minister, seemed to dismiss the other obvious concern — the potential for increased health-care costs — by saying not many people would avail themselves of this new right.
Well, that’s great: a freedom bestowed by government to a select few, to do something demonstrably inessential, that the government hopes they won’t actually do. These are not the hallmarks of a Great Day for Human Rights, I’m afraid. But Ontario’s Sikhs on two wheels are already redoubling their demands for similar treatment, calling for an end to “unfounded subjugation” and accusing Premier Kathleen Wynne of “deny(ing) the Sikhs this basic right.”
That is some remarkable language coming from a group of people who know quite a bit about actual subjugation. And it would sure be a better look if they argued everyone should be treated the same — which is exactly the situation they’re in now and a very worthy goal, even if it might confine some of us to the indignity of four-wheeled transport.
A FREEDOM BESTOWED BY GOVERNMENT TO A SELECT FEW.
Like I say, this is hardly the end of the world. But the last thing this country needs right now is to further muddy the waters on religious freedom. The Supreme Court recently issued a baffling ruling that argued a British Columbia First Nation’s religious freedom wouldn’t be violated by building a ski resort on sacred lands. In the next few weeks, in the matter of Trinity Western University’s proposed law school, it could well deliver a stinging blow against religious education. An Ontario judge allowed two First Nations parents to pursue various brands of non-Indigenous quackery instead of chemotherapy, ostensibly to uphold their right to access Indigenous medicine — a right that no one was even questioning. To listen to some of the rhetoric over the Liberals’ summer jobs program fiasco, you would think a non-existent Charter right to abortion had officially trumped the very-existent Charter right not to be discriminated against by the government on grounds of religion.
Elevating motorcycle riding, of all bloody things, to a “basic right” can only make us more collectively addled.