Wildrose too vague on ‘conscience rights’
Party’s socially conservative issue needs a better explanation
The Wildrose Party should have your undivided attention by now.
It raised almost as much money as the Progressive Conservatives did in 2011, it is pulling ahead in public opinion polls, and at this point in the election campaign, it appears on the verge of winning a majority government April 23.
As such, it’s not just another in a long list of opposition parties banging its head futilely against the PC wall. The Wildrose is poised to bring the wall down. So, Albertans might want to ask the Wildrose a few questions.
Just exactly who are you? What do you stand for? How will Alberta change under a Wildrose government? The Wildrose better get used to questions like these, and more.
Albertans don’t really know much about the Wildrose other than it has a charismatic leader, Danielle Smith, and that it stands for “free enterprise, less government, increased personal freedom and democracy.” Most Albertans would probably agree with those goals. Who, after all, is against democracy?
And, going through the party’s policy handbook and election promises, it’s clear the party also stands for whistle-blower protection for government workers, easier and cheaper access to Freedom of Information requests and more powers for the province’s ethics commission and auditor general. As someone who has been lost more than once in the labyrinth of Alberta’s FOIP laws, I welcome easier and cheaper access.
However, the Wildrose would also scrap the Human Rights Commission and replace it with a “Human Rights Division” of Provincial Court. Smith says the party is concerned the current process infringes on freedom of speech. But do we have to scrap the whole commission system and send human rights complaints off to our already overcrowded and clogged court system? Is this idea about streamlining human rights complaints or strangling them?
Teachers might be interested to know that in 2010, Wildrose policy declared education an “essential service” to remove the right of teachers to strike. The party amended that policy to say a Wildrose government should examine what is declared essential services and make sure those services are “treated fairly.”
The rewritten policy doesn’t sound nearly as drastic, but it’s vague enough that teachers might still lose the right to strike under a Wildrose government.
Then there’s “conscience rights.” The Wildrose policy book says government should “implement legislation protecting the ‘conscience rights’ of health care professionals.” The policy doesn’t spell out what that means, but when party delegates voted for the policy they put it in the context of a health-care worker — who is against birth control — being allowed to refuse to fill a prescription for the morningafter pill.
And Smith, it seems, wants to take conscience rights one step further to include marriage commissioners.
In August, responding to a questionnaire from the Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association, she wrote “the Wildrose will ensure conscience rights for marriage commissioners and health professionals. This would ensure the protection of personal expression for individuals, while also ensuring that personal beliefs are respected for all Albertans.”
Again, Smith was vague, not specifying what conscience rights would mean for marriage commissioners, but when used in the past the term has referred to allowing marriage commissioners to refuse to perform civil ceremonies for same-sex couples. It smacks of state-sanctioned discrimination and a Saskatchewan court has deemed the idea unconstitutional.
When Ralph Klein was premier he talked of getting around the constitution by invoking the notwithstanding clause to allow the discrimination, but then thought better of it. If you allow marriage commissioners to refuse to marry same-sex couples you are opening the door to them refusing to marry anyone they don’t like based on the commissioner’s own social, cultural or religious beliefs.
So, what does Smith mean when she says she wants to “ensure conscience rights for marriage counsellors and health professionals”? She won’t say. She ducked the question posed by journalists on Wednesday, saying vaguely that anything dealing with human rights should be dealt with by the courts. “If anyone is ever denied service for any reason, then our new proposal for how we would deal with that is with a separate division of the provincial court,” she said during a campaign event at Concordia University College. “All we’re doing is providing a process, so that in the event that rights come into conflict, we have the ability for them to be adjudicated.”
Smith doesn’t want to touch this topic during the campaign, realizing that although many Albertans support the Wildrose on fiscally conservative issues, they might not do so on socially conservative issues. And nothing says socially conservative more than “conscience rights” on birth control and same-sex marriage.
Progressive Conservative leader Alison Redford, on the other hand, is eager to talk, calling it a “defining issue” in the campaign. “I was very frightened to hear the discussion today and I’ve been quite frightened to hear the development of that in the last month,” said Redford.
“This thing about conscience rights — everyone is entitled to their personal beliefs, that’s fine, but if you have assumed professional responsibility to provide services for people, then I believe it’s important that every Albertan can trust that they are going to get those services.”
I don’t know if it will indeed become a “defining issue” of the campaign.
I’d just like Smith to explain what she means when she says “the Wildrose will ensure conscience rights for marriage commissioners and health professionals.”
After all, she might be in a position to make good on that promise in a matter of weeks.