Quebec’s Bill 21 Has It All Wrong

I am writing this, not because Quebec’s “An Act respecting the laicity of the State”, commonly referred to as Bill 21, goes against Canadian values and violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which it does, but because it’s provisions will not achieve it’s supposed purpose of a secular state and civil society.

As an atheist I support secular public institutions. That means government and public institutions should be religiously neutral. The institutions should not favour one religion and include religious symbols, like crucifixes in the National Assembly or government buildings, hospitals or schools named after saints or popes. It does not meaning everyone working in the public sector needs to be an atheist.

Quebec has historically been a Roman Catholic Christian society. That historical majority, with or without individual symbolism, will see itself within government and public institutions. For public institutions, like schools, to be truly religiously neutral they must reflect all of Quebec society and it’s people of various religions. That inclusiveness and diversity, like justice, must not just exist but must be seen to exist. Quebec’s Bill 21 has it backwards.

Much Ado About Religious Accommodation

Much is being made of a decision by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) managers at Toronto's Pearson airport to allow a small group of Hindu priests to avoid screening by female border guards to comply with their religious beliefs.

Apparently some female CBSA officers feel that they were discriminated against by this decision. I could understand an outrage if female officers were only allowed to deal with female visitors but this was a small exemption made for a special case. Why all the fuss about this when so many more significant examples of religious discrimination are entrenched in our laws and practices in the name of freedom of religion.

For example an employer being allowed to designate higher profile positions for males only and more subservient positions for women only. This is a clear violation of all Canadian employment legislation and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms but still allowed in the name of freedom of religion.

What about persons delegated by the state the right to perform legal marriage ceremonies being allowed to discriminate in terms of who they will marry on the basis of their personal religious beliefs.

And much more serious, medical practitioners, such as doctors and pharmacists, being allowed to refuse to provide medical treatment or services on the basis of their personal religious beliefs.

Perhaps one of the most outrageous examples of discriminatory religious accommodation, a clear violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but constitutionally allowed, is the public funding of religious-based schools for one religious group only (and not even the largest group at that) - a huge government subsidy to one religious group that all political parties are afraid to deal with because of the risk of losing that groups votes.

If we are to be outraged by inappropriate religious accommodation let us be outraged by matters of substance, not by attempts to accommodate a small groups religious preference that has little impact on others' rights.

Postscript

This post sees the return of the Fifth Column after an interregnum, not caused by a lack of ideas but simply a lack of motivation to make the effort to write them down. Hopefully my posts will be more regular from now on.

The Fatal Weakness of the United States Constitution Bill of Rights

Americans love their Constitution and beloved Bill of Rights. However it has one fatal weakness in that it's provisions are unrestricted without the requirement that such rights as freedom of assembly and speech and the right to bear arms be exercised responsibly. This leads to the inability to restrict hate speech including the desecration of funerals by lunatics claiming to be acting on behalf of god, as well as the inability to prevent the unfettered ownership and use of weapons, including the use of military assault weapons to kill innocent children.

What the American Bill of Rights needs is a "reasonable limits clause", such as is provided in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

1.The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Thinking It Through Brings Clarity

So what is an atheist who believes in a single secular public school system supposed to think about noon hour Muslim prayers in public schools.

The answer should be simple but first let us look at the context.

In the province of Ontario there are two publicly funded school systems, one for a specific religion and one for everybody else (all other religions and non-religious persons). If one did not have an understanding of the province's constitutional history, one might assume the religion with the separate school system was the largest religious group in the province, but actually it is the second largest group that gets special treatment.

This religion has it's own school system where they are allowed to indoctrinate students in their religion and adopt policies that provide "when there is an apparent conflict between denominational rights and other rights, the board will favour the protection of the denominational rights".

While the Roman Catholic Church, and it's separate school boards, may be exempt from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Constitution Act, Section 29), I cannot ignore it.

Thus, as long as one religion is allowed to have it's own publicly funded school boards in which to indoctrinate students, the minimum reasonable accommodation that should be made for other religions, in the name of equality, is to allow them to use school facilities for prayer services for the convenience of students, as long as no one is compelled to attend such services.

The real solution, of course, is a constitutional amendment to remove discriminatory rights given to one religion and provide for one secular public school system in Ontario, as has been done in other provinces, including Quebec.

What is Really Scary is ...

Some people will support the police whatever they do. When I saw the recent CBC poll I was disturbed, but then when I saw the CFRA poll I was disgusted.

CBC Poll - Did the Ottawa police officers go too far in their dealings with Stacy Bonds?

Yes 88.99%

No 8.93%

Undecided 2.08%

CFRA Poll - Should Ontario’s Attorney General resign after the province said it supports the decision made by crown prosecutors to proceed with a case against Stacey Bonds?

Yes, it’s an injustice and a travesty that the case went ahead in spite of how she was treated by police 60.3%

No, just because Bonds was not convicted doesn’t mean the decision to proceed was wrong 36.3%

Other 3.27%

Ottawa Citizen story


What I realized is that, indeed, some people will support the police no matter what they do. These are people who think the courts are too soft and that the police never arrest anyone that isn't guilty. These people think that if someone is beat up by the police they probably have it coming to them.

These are the same type of people who supported the right wing law and order blame the scapegoats German equivalent of the Tea Party in the 1930s.

These people are very scary and they are growing in numbers, egged on by people like Glenn Beck and Lowell Green. We must speak up against them.

Every Canadian Should Read This

It is long. It is shocking. It will make you sad. It will make you cry, It will make you puke. It will make you angry. It will make you fucking scream. But you should read it.

How I Got Arrested and Abused at the G20 in Toronto, Canada: backofthebook.ca

Why Is Bill Blair Still Toronto Police Chief

If there is one thing I thought all Canadians agreed on, in it was the rule of law and that the role of the police was to enforce the laws made by our elected governments not make up their own.

I find it hard to understand how a chief of police could admit to making up his own law and instructing the police to enforce it, while lying to the public about it, without adding "therefore I resign immediately". It does not even matter whether the law was enforced fairly or appropriately, which in this case the evidence indicates it was not - the police do not make up their own laws. It seems to me there can be no greater crime that a police chief could commit than to do that and upon admitting that there is no choice but immediate resignation.

Am I missing something. Why is there not total and complete public outrage over this. Are there really that many people that think a police state is acceptable, even for a weekend.

The G20, Peaceful Protests, Black Bloc Vandalism and Police Violence

The rationalizations are coming out now for why the police were conspicuously absent when acts of vandalism were taking place (away following peaceful protesters around Toronto streets), why they abandoned police cars for the Black bloc to torch (was it inadvertent, incompetence or intentional), and why they decided the best way to counteract a small group of criminals was to attack peaceful protesters, media and bystanders by detaining, arresting and even assaulting them for simply exercising their Charter right of peaceful assembly.

The rationalizations being - it worked, there were no incidents of vandalism on Sunday so whatever the police did was justifiable - they did arrest some criminals so that justifies the arrests of hundreds of innocent people along with them - and the ever used, people were asking for it by being where the police did not want them to be and refusing to do what the police ordered, whether lawful or not.

Indeed the overkill of police intimidation no doubt played into what changed the protests from protests against the actions of the G20 into demonstrations in support of the Charter right of freedom of peaceful assembly.

While we all deplore the vandalism of the Black bloc tactics, interestingly enough there were no reports of physical harm to people resulting from them, while there are many reports of physical harm from attacks on innocent people by the police, as well as massive attacks on the civil liberties and Charter rights of Canadian citizens.

The Story in Videos







For more reports from citizen journalists see Progressive Bloggers.

Over 900 people were arrested and the police claim about 400 will be charged with criminal offences, a tacit admission that over 500 innocent people were arrested. My prediction is that after the Crown Attorneys look at the actual evidence and eliminate those charged simply because they were talking to the wrong people or were wearing black in the wrong neighbourhood (sounds familiar, except for the "wearing" part) less than 100 will actually be charged with anything.

On the upside I suppose it was educational - for a weekend Torontonians and all Canadians got to see what it is like to live in a police state.

I Hate Hate But I Love Freedom of Speech

This is the challenge facing many Canadians. It involves getting our priorities right. But it is not as difficult a challenge as it seems. Once one realizes that the best way to fight hate is with free speech the choice becomes obvious.

Freedom of thought is the freedom to be who you are, and freedom of thought is meaningless if you cannot express your thoughts, Freedom of expression is the freedom to be yourself. And if you are a bigot or a racist, all the better that others know it. Hate is most effective and at its evilest when it is underground.

This issue was recently addressed by University of Windsor professor Richard Moon in his report on Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

The CBC reports:

"My principal recommendation, in the end, has been for the repeal of Section 13," Moon told CBC News on Monday. "That does not mean that we no longer have hate speech regulation. What it means is that the Criminal Code of Canada, which has a ban on the wilful promotion of hatred, would be the recourse."

In his report, which was made public Monday, Moon also suggests that the application of the Criminal Code provision should also be limited. He says it should only be applied in cases where the speech "explicitly or implicitly threatens, justifies or advocates violence against the members of an identifiable group."

The report, indeed, recommends that only “speech” that advocates harm would be illegal and it would have to be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a court of law.

This is a Canadian compromise that may not go as far as United States First Amendment Rights but balances the rights of those who want to exercise their free speech with the rights of those that may be harmed by it.

The Supreme Court Rules !

As my daughters would say “The Supreme Court Rules”. And just why does the Supreme Court rule. The Supreme Court rules because the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in “R. v. A.M.” that young people do not lose their constitutional protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms simply because they are in a school.

According to a CBC report:

The first case involved an unexpected police visit to St. Patrick's High School in Sarnia, Ont., in 2002. During that visit, students were confined to their classrooms as a trained police dog sniffed out backpacks in an empty gymnasium.

The dog led police to a pile of backpacks, one of which contained marijuana and magic mushrooms. A youth, identified only as A.M, was subsequently charged with possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.

But police admitted they didn't have a search warrant or any prior tip about drugs in the school. The officers had instead visited on the basis of a long-standing invitation from school officials.

In 2004, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld a previous trial judge's decision to exclude the drugs as evidence and acquit the youth. The court referred to the incident as "a warrantless, random search with the entire student body held in detention."

In Friday's ruling, the Supreme Court wrote that while "a warrantless sniffer-dog search is available where reasonable suspicion is demonstrated" in this case, "the dog-sniff search was unreasonably undertaken because there was no proper justification."

The court wrote that students' backpacks "objectively command a measure of privacy."

"No doubt ordinary businessmen and businesswomen riding along on public transit or going up and down on elevators in office towers would be outraged at any suggestion that the contents of their briefcases could randomly be inspected by the police without 'reasonable suspicion' of illegality," the court wrote.

Indeed, the Supreme Court does rule. Young people are slowly gaining the recognition that they deserve the same constitutional rights as anyone else and should not be discriminated against solely because of their age.

Do You Hate Young People

Do young people annoy the hell out of you. Then you need the Mosquito Youth Repellent. The Mosquito, created by Welsh inventor Howard Stapleton, emits a pulsing noise above 16,000 hertz that capitalizes on the fact most humans can catch the mind-numbing frequency only between the age of 13 and 25.

Bureaucrats from the City of Montreal are studying whether the device could legally be used to clear young drug dealers and bums from scary city tunnels, but the machine is already a hit among some West Coast businesses.

"It's awesome," said Lisa Deacon, manager of the 57 Below Bar and Liquor Store in New Westminster, B.C. The bar was one of the first North American businesses to try the device, in 2006. It turns on at night and keeps away all the young punks who hang out at the SkyTrain station."

Two Mac's convenience stores in Victoria have used the Mosquito to clear out drug dealers while two others in Richmond, B.C., have used the squealing machine to clear massive crowds of teenagers.

I thought the “no teenagers allowed” signs I have seen in coffee shops were abhorrent enough. The mentality that the future leaders of our communities and our country are all punks and drug dealers and “bums” is disgusting.

It is one thing for ignorant business people to somehow think attacking their future customers would be a good thing. It is a completely different thing for public officials to consider such a discriminatory attack on young citizens.

This device, and the mentality behind it, calls for the addition of age to the prohibited grounds for discrimination in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and all federal and provincial human rights legislation.

Rick on Ezra

The Rant says it best.



When the relatively insignificant Western Standard was the only Canadian publication to publish the infamous Mohammad cartoons I felt sad that they had felt the need to publish such an insult but pride that all other Canadian publications had voluntarily declined to join the frenzy.

The response to the Western Standard’s decision can only cause us all to be uncertain of the voluntary nature of all those other publications decisions and wonder if our pride in Canada’s response to this issue has been misguided.

You can read more about what the Fifth Column has to say about Freedom of Thought here.

Hate and Freedom of Thought

We all hate hate, but does that justify compromising our most fundamental of freedoms.

René Descartes postulated “I think therefore I am”, reasoning that thought is the very essence of our being.

Freedom of thought is guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which states:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.

Freedom of thought is meaningless without the freedom to express one thoughts, thus freedom of thought and expression are interlinked in one statement in The Charter.

Popular ideas do not need protection. The very point of protecting freedom of expression in the constitution is to protect the expression of unpopular ideas. After all today’s heresy may be tomorrow’s science, as history has taught us. And it is those that espouse hate that would love to control what other people think and say. We know better.

The irony of combating hate with restrictions on freedom of thought and expression is that it is these very freedoms that are the best protection against hate. The very worst expressions of hate are those that are institutionalized by governments or corporate media. The best defence against such hate is the freedom of ordinary people to challenge it with logic and reason, without restriction on their freedom of expression.

Take, for example, government censorship and control of information and mandatory versions of history. The truth does not require being made “mandatory” or “official”. It can stand on it’s own. Such mandatory versions of history are virtually always false (with one unfortunate exception which is a subject the Fifth Column will examine separately in the future) and often used to promote hatred by authoritarian regimes.

Government restrictions on freedom of expression to fight hatred can also have perverse effects. Should we make it illegal to insult religion in order to combat hatred on the basis of religion. That is actually not such a huge leap of reason and we have seen what can happen when that leap is taken.

Much has been made of the use of the Internet to disseminate hate but the Internet is the best thing that could happen to the spread of hate. The old way was a lot more work for the hate mongers but a lot more effective. They would target susceptible individuals, often alienated or disaffected youth, and would then befriend them and provide them with an onslaught of controlled information via pamphlets and meetings and oratory. They would only see one side of the picture and this would all be done out of public scrutiny.

With the Internet we all can see the message of hate they are spewing and, more importantly, the target audience using the Internet to access hate messages has unfettered access to all of the counteracting anti-hate information on the web. More often than not the hate mongers will simply end up preaching to the converted, something us bloggers understand all too well.

The only restriction that should be put on freedom of expression is against promoting or counseling others to commit illegal acts that involve violence or cause harm to others and that is where the reasonable limits provision of the Charter comes into play:

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Freedom of expression is too precious to compromise, even with the best of intentions, for the best of intentions can go awry. Allowing the government to decide what are acceptable thoughts for people to express is a very dangerous idea.

We must not let the hate mongers intimidate us into compromising our fundamental freedoms but instead we must take the attitude of Voltaire who wrote: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write”.

Abolishing The Senate - An Easy Solution

New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton has called for a national referendum on the abolition of the Senate, while others, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper want to reform it, while the expert think abolition is unlikely.

Certainly at a time when politicians and political institutions are perhaps at their lowest in public respect, the Senate is the least respected institution and Senators the least respected politicians.

Politically, abolishing the Senate is an easy solution.

The real question is not whether Senators are doing a good job or whether the institution as it is constituted now is useful. The real question is whether our federal government requires two legislative chambers, a bicameral system, when the provinces function fine without them. Do we need a “chamber of sober second thought”.

In many ways the provinces deal with jurisdictions of a more administrative nature, such as health care, education and transportation infrastructure, while the federal Parliament is the one that reflects Canadian values.

Although health care administration is under provincial jurisdiction it was when the federal Parliament adopted Medicare as a national program that it became the most sacred of all Canadian values, along with national social programs.

As I type this I cannot help but think of the major role the New Democratic Party has played in establishing Canada’s national values, from inventing Medicare in Saskatchewan to opposing capital punishment, which recent polls indicate has become entrenched as a basic Canadian value.

As with the capital punishment decision, it is the federal Parliament that decides what we as a society consider to be right or wrong, in its responsibility for the Criminal Code. It decides who our friends and enemies are and what Canadians are willing to fight and die for, in it’s responsibility for foreign and military policy. It decides who we let immigrate into the country and become Canadians. It decides, on behalf of all Canadians, what our responsibilities are in the world in protecting and promoting equality, human rights and a sustainable environment. It is the level of government that ensures Canadian values are entrenched in our laws and public policies.

The Fifth Column proposes, for purposes of discussion, that we consider establishing a New Chamber with a more focused role.

That role would be to ensure that legislation complies with Canadian values, and in particular, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The New Chamber would also retain the “sober second thought” role of identifying flaws and unintended effects in legislation before it is passed, and sending it back to the House of Commons, basically saying “did you really want to do that”.

The New Chamber would be different. It would not be appointed. It would not be elected. It would be selected randomly from the population similar to the jury selection process. It would not be made up of politicians and it would not be divided by party allegiances. It would be an attempt to represent the people directly, rather than indirectly through elected representatives.

The New Chamber would not initiate legislation. That would be the role of the politicians that we elect on the basis of their policies and personal character. It would, as previously stated, provide an oversight role in ensuring that legislation complies with Canadian values and it would undertake studies on matters of public interest and policies and present non-partisan reports to the House of Commons for consideration.

This proposal would definitely not be an easy solution.

Should Taxation Fund Religious Schools in Ontario

Ontario has two publicly funded school systems, one secular and one Catholic. According to the 2001 Census there are 3,935,745 people that identify themselves as “Protestant” and 3,911,760 people that identify themselves as “Catholic”. Does it not seem strange that the one religious group that gets public funding for its schools is not the group with the largest number of followers.

Of course it all goes back to history. At the time of confederation Ontario and Quebec had Protestant and Catholic school systems. “Protection of the Separate School system was a major issue of contention in the negotiations that led to Canadian confederation, due in large part to racial and religious tension between the (largely Francophone) Roman Catholic population in Canada and the Protestant majority. The issue was a subject of debate at the 1864 Quebec Conference and was finally resolved at the London Conference of 1866 with a guarantee to protect the separate school system in Quebec and Ontario.” ((Wikipedia). This was guaranteed in Section 93 of the British North America Act, now the Constitution Act. In Ontario the Protestant system evolved into the secular school system and now there is only one Protestant school board in Ontario with one school, the Penetanguishene Protestant Separate School Board.

So we now have a secular publicly funded school system and a publicly funded Catholic school system but no public funding for the small religious groups or even the larger Protestant religious group. Does this not seem at odds with the equality provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Charter states:

15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

However the Charter also states:

29. Nothing in this Charter abrogates or derogates from any rights or privileges guaranteed by or under the Constitution of Canada in respect of denominational, separate or dissentient schools.


In 1996, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that this was not a violation of the Charter primarily due to the provisions of section 93 and 29 of the Constitution.

So we have what appears to be a case of constitutionally entrenched violation of the Charter.

The United Nations human rights committee says Ontario's policy of fully funding Roman Catholic schools, while denying full funding to other religious schools, is discriminatory.

The status quo is a violation of the spirit, if not the letter of the Charter, and cannot be justified by any logical argument. The only argument presented for it seems to be that “has always been that way” and to try and change it would be politically difficult.

However, such constitutional provisions can be changed and have been changed, even in the Roman Catholic dominated province of Quebec which eliminated funding for Protestant and Roman Catholic schools systems and established language based school systems instead. Public funding of religious based schools in Newfoundland has also been eliminated.

So what we essentially have is not a constitutional issue but an issue of public policy. We can continue the discriminatory status quo or we can either extend public funding to all religious schools or provide it to none. There is no other justifiable or logical alternative.

The current policy of funding Roman Catholic schools has not been without concerns, including the teaching of evolution in science classes and creationism in religion class; the teaching of Catholic sex education and the church’s attitude to birth control; as well as the churches attitude towards gays and lesbians and it’s statement that they are sinners for simply being who they are.

Extending public funding to every religious group will not only see public funding of extremist groups within the mainstream religions, such as fundamentalist Christians and Muslims but potentially funding of groups such as Witches and Satanists. Lest I be cited for fear mongering, let me say it is not the labels we need to worry about. I am more worried about the extremists within the Christian churches than I am about the Wiccans. I have heard the bigotry, whether based on race or sexual orientation spouted by some so called Christian churches and I do not want taxpayers funding such propaganda. I am not as familiar with the extremists in other religions but I have no doubt that there are extremist Jewish, Islamic and other groups whose teachings most Canadians would not be comfortable with.

How would this be done. Who would decide what was a legitimate religious school worthy of funding. Who would police the thousands of individual independent schools to ensure they were following the provincial curriculum and were not teaching bigotry or hatred. It would simply be unworkable.

I am one of the biggest promoters of multiculturalism and religious pluralism is part of that. Canadian multiculturalism is a wonderful thing. It allows immigrants to become part of Canada without having to deny or abandon where they came from. It allows them to bring their cultures into the Canadian mosaic. It is important that they keep their cultural institutions. But the school system should be an institution that brings us all together, a place where we can learn about each other, share our cultures together as Canadians, and learn Canadian values.

It is time for a single publicly funded secular school system in Ontario. It is almost enough to make one vote Green