Canada’s State Religion
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When Canadians go to the polls, we vote for a single office-holder: a member of Parliament to represent our electoral district, or riding. Canadians do not have the luxury of “ticket splitting,” or dividing their votes between political parties. Thus when we vote for a local candidate, we are in effect voting for the party he or she represents to form a government. More often than not, a single party wins a majority of seats, but with well under a majority of votes.
In last week’s election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party won, but the party was reduced from a majority of 177 seats in the 338-member House of Commons to a plurality of 157.
[…] Trudeau’s record as prime minister is mixed, economically speaking. But on cultural issues, particularly those touching on religious freedom, he has marked a clear path in what many see as a progressive direction. His late father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was responsible for Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees “freedom of conscience and religion; freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; freedom of peaceful assembly; and freedom of association.” But under the younger Trudeau’s watch, the Charter has evolved from a constitutional guarantee of personal liberties against government encroachment into a bludgeon used by the government to punish those who disagree with Trudeau’s interpretation of the document.
The Charter is notable for what it does not claim to protect. It does not protect a woman’s right to abortion. Unlike Roe v. Wade, Canada’s 1988 Supreme Court decision that invalidated the former section 251 of the Criminal Code restricting abortion never claimed that a right to abortion was to be found in our Constitution Acts. In 2004 the Court refused to rule on whether the Charter obligated the government to allow for same-sex marriage (in this respect, Canada’s Supreme Court has had a less activist bent than its American counterpart). In its 2015 decision in Carter v. Canada, the Court did strike down the Criminal Code’s absolute prohibition of assisted dying, claiming that its protection of the vulnerable was “overbroad,” but it left actual legislation to address its concerns in the hands of Parliament.
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