OTTAWA, April 21, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The practice of opening with prayer at meetings of provincial legislatures, municipal councils, and even the Canadian Senate and House of Commons is being called into question in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in the Saguenay case.
The Supreme Court justices ruled that Saguenay council’s opening prayer (and the crucifix hanging on its council chamber wall) violated the spiritual “neutrality” that they believe government owes the Canadian public.
Though the ruling was in support of a Quebec decision based on that province’s human rights code, legal academics were quick to claim it applied equally across Canada. “It is a heck of a decision,” University of Ottawa law professor Giles Levasseur told reporters. “It means the concept is applicable across Canada.”
The president of Humanist Canada, Eric Thomas, promised the Ottawa Citizen his group would be sending members to city councils and provincial legislatures across Canada to extinguish civic prayer –and crucifixes—root and branch.
Thomas coyly insisted, “We’re not being critical of religion,” just resisting its presence in government. Cheryl Milne of the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights, echoed that the decision “doesn’t signal an anti-religious stance. It just means you’re ensuring you’re not discriminating against people of other religions.”
But would people of “other religions” and cultures feel more welcomed by a spiritual silence from government, or prayers from many faiths? Edmonton city councillor Scott McKeen believes the latter. “I hope nothing will change because our tradition in council has been to open it up multi-faith. We welcome and honour and celebrate people of all faiths.” So far, Edmonton has no plans to drop its prayer and believes other councils could escape legal action by imitating their multifaith approach.
What is more, people of “other religions” are not protesting public prayers, said Brad Wall, the premier of Saskatchewan. Wall insisted the provincial legislature there would continue with prayer. “I have not had one complaint. Not one concern registered. We're very fortunate in Saskatchewan to have seen unprecedented population growth and we're attracting people from all over the world,” Wall told the Star Phoenix. “They all have certainly different beliefs and I've just never heard the concern. And that's why I don't think there's any particular call for it to change.”
And while some legislatures, such as British Columbia’s, alternate through a rota of prayers from different religions, Saskatchewan sticks to one from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that asks that God favour the legislators, that their work glorify God, and that they be granted “eternal life through God’s mercy.” Nonetheless, Wall said, the province’s legal advice is that neither Canada’s provincial legislatures nor its Parliament are governed in their internal practices by the Supreme Court decision.
Moreover, although Thomas and Milne cite the tender feelings of members of minority faiths, it is not they but atheists who have brought several recent lawsuits to end prayer, including the one against Saguenay council. “It is just a tiny minority who object to prayer,” Lawrie McFarlane, a former deputy minister in both the Saskatchewan and British Columbia governments, told LifeSiteNews.
McFarlane wrote a stiff editorial against the Saguenay decision in the Victoria Times Colonist, saying that it was a move towards replacing the higher values espoused by religion with “the sterile grinding of a faceless bureaucracy, and its legal companion piece — a court bereft of human instinct.”
Already Regina city council has cut its prayer while Ottawa has suspended its prayer, which said in part: “Almighty God, let us work together to serve all our people.” According to a statement from Mayor Jim Watson: “City Council will not say a prayer this morning and will be reviewing this practice to ensure that the City of Ottawa conforms to the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
Meanwhile Oshawa Mayor John Henry said his council’s recital of the Lord’s Prayer will continue despite the ruling. “You can choose to say it, not say it, you can participate or not participate, you can reflect on something in your life. Canada is one of those countries where you have freedom of religion or freedom not to do religion.”
But increasingly, said McFarlane in his opinion piece in the Times Colonist, it means only the latter. McFarlane later told LifeSiteNews that religion served several important purposes in modern society, not least with such encouragements to civility as “loving your enemy” and “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
As well, “It is a comfort to some, an inspiration to others, a bulwark in time of trouble.”
Though secular humanists would counter that this could be done privately, McFarlane argued in his editorial that “strange as it may seem,” religion can provide important public service, especially as a bulwark against the growing power of government institutions: “The idea that all authority is vested in government is a dangerous one. The idea that final authority is vested in a panel of judges even more so.”
While McFarlane respects politicians as human beings (he worked with them for decades at the provincial level), he told LifeSiteNews that politics itself is “corrupt and dissolute,” and needs the moral encouragement provided by religion and religious symbols.
McFarlane criticized the Supreme Court both for basing its ruling on Saguenay on nothing more than “an appeal to sentiment, the sentiment, moreover, of a noisy but scant minority,” but for doing so to address a problem that does not exist. Canada’s Constitution, he noted, “has nothing to say about religion in the halls of government. The court admitted as much. It felt compelled to reach this decision, we’re told, because ‘an evolving interpretation of freedom of conscience and religion’ demanded it. That’s not an act of legal reasoning.”
“But it’s the gratuitous ignorance pervading this judgment that troubles me,” McFarlane continued. The Court, in other words, appears to be ignorant of all the good religion does. “Maybe 500 years ago when people were still being burned at the stake,” he told LifeSiteNews, there was reason to limit religion’s involvement in government, but not today. “This decision is perverse. It stomps on minority practice in the name of diversity.”
