Scrap this office

Canada’s short-lived Office of Religious Freedom appears destined for the dustbin, and for good reason. Former prime minister Stephen Harper never made a solid case for spending $5 million a year on the office he created in 2013.

Although ostensibly opened to bolster religious freedom around the world, the agency never shook off the suspicion that Harper’s primary goal lay closer to home — courting the vote of Canada’s religious communities and playing to the Conservative base.

The failure of a Tory motion in Parliament last week to preserve this controversial agency means that its mandate and funding are set to disappear at the end of the month. Outside of Conservative circles, it won’t be much missed. It’s telling that the Liberals, NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens all opposed maintaining the office.

There’s no doubt that freedom of belief is under pressure in many parts of the world. According to the Office of Religious Freedom-website, almost 77 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries with “high government restrictions” on freedom of religion or where there is significant “social hostility” to such liberty. And the problem is getting worse. Only 68 per cent of people lived in such a state in 2007.

The list of religious minorities enduring harsh repression is far too long to enumerate here, from Christians in Iraq to Tibetan Buddhists, and from Iranian Baha’is to Sunni Muslim Uighurs in China. But setting up an office in Ottawa, with a relatively small staff and funding, is hardly an ideal way to address their concerns.

The cause of religious freedom is best served by making it an integral part of a determined push to promote all human rights. At root, liberty to pursue one’s faith is difficult to divorce from freedom of speech, assembly and association. Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion was right to stress Canada’s continued commitment to promoting religious freedom as “a fundamental human right.” A separate office isn’t needed to do that.

Over its three-year mandate the office helped to fund efforts at “interfaith dialogue” in Nigeria and in Ukraine, and boosted the monitoring of religious persecution in Iraq, among other initiatives. But such modest steps could well be undertaken by others.

The head of the office, Andrew Bennett, the former dean of a Christian college, is in the process of moving on, having accepted a position at a Hamilton-based think tank. Now it’s time to wrap up the office itself.

Harper may have meant well, but this agency was conceived as a campaign promise on the election trail and it always carried a partisan taint. That’s hardly an ideal atmosphere for the promotion of fundamental freedom and universal understanding.

It’s time to wrap up the Office of Religious Freedom