We live in one world and, according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, every world citizen is my neighbour. That means I am to be concerned about every one. Not only concerned, but to love them and to want the very best for them. So, in this blog, I write about neighbours and social issues, often by bringing in someone else's writing and then commenting on it from my Christian point of few.
The powers that be in Canada, consider it a secular country. Whether that describes the majority of Canadians is something that is assumed, but may not be true. Certainly, there are millions of Canadians who do not consider themselves secular, with me being one of them. But even among those who do not consider themselves secular, there are many who have been so deeply influenced by it that in fact they are secular, including many Christians, in the sense that they support many secular causes. Just like African Christians are still influenced by African Traditional Religion (ATR), so many Canadian Christians are profoundly influenced by secularism. In Africa, ATR is in the air and people as it were "breathe" it; in Canada the same with secularism.
When the government insists on neutrality of religion, it defines neutrality in a secular way--which means it is not neutral. To make it worse, our high government officials at every level of government, are highly educated people in a secular perspective, but in religion they are at the level of Religion 101. They are at best at Grade 1 level in religion. So, people with Ph.D.'s, highly educated, think their insights in religion are at the same level as their knowledge of their subject of graduation. In fact, their knowledge does not go beyond Grade 1--which means they are bound to get it wrong. Highly sophisticated officials make Grade 1 decisions about religion and often sound stupid and clumsy., all the way to the top, hardly anyone excluded.
Now, it is with that scenario that mid-level Quebec officials are to make decisions about sincerely held religious beliefs and on that decision decide other things for citizens. But they do so at a Grade 1 level! How can you trust that situation, those decisions or those officials?
Okay, now go read the rest of this post and then see what you think of the issue. Can you really have confidence in the decisions to be made?
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Greame Hamilton recently published an article in the National Post of June 6, 2018, that appeared also in some other newspapers, including the Vancouver Sun of the same date. The Sun title of the piece is "Quebec to assess 'sincere beliefs.'"
Beginning next month, at least one employee in every Quebec government body, municipality, transit agency, school board, university, daycare and hospital will need a new skill: judging the sincerity of religious beliefs.
Across the province, hundreds of “accommodation officers” are getting crash courses on whether to accept or reject requests for accommodations made on religious grounds, such as meals respecting dietary restrictions or time off for religious holidays.
In recently published guidelines, the provincial government says the officers will apply a number of criteria established over time thorough jurisprudence, including whether the request for a religious accommodation stems from a “sincerely held belief.”
Quebec women attend a protest in 2010Allen McInnis/The Gazette
This month’s training blitz is the final chapter in enacting Bill 62, the Liberal government’s controversial legislation that it hoped would settle a decade-old debate over the place of religion in Quebec’s public sphere.
But there is no sign the law has settled anything. Its most controversial provision, prohibiting people from giving or receiving public services with such face-covering religious garments as the niqab and burka, has been suspended pending a court challenge.
And the entire law could be short-lived, as the front-running Coalition Avenir Québec has promised to “tear it up” if elected in the Oct. 1 provincial election.
In comments last month about the new guidelines on religious accommodations, Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée did little to dispel the impression that the law is a solution in search of a problem. “There is no invasion of requests for religious accommodation, as some would have you believe,” Vallée told a legislature committee May 16.
In fact, less than five per cent of the 582 complaints of rejected accommodations received by the provincial human rights commission in the last five years alleged religious discrimination. The large majority — 90 per cent — related to physical disabilities.
The new guidelines for dealing with requests for religious accommodations take effect July 1. It is expected that existing employees will take on the work.
Quebec Justice Minister Stephanie Vallee provides further details about how the government’s controversial Bill 62 will be implemented at the legislature in Quebec City Tuesday, October 24, 2017.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot
The government has published a 15-page guide aimed at clarifying the process, but its instructions are vague. “A request may be reasonable in a large organization, but unreasonable in a small one,” the guide says. “The analysis is carried out on a case-by-case basis. It is important to be innovative and creative to find a solution acceptable to all.”
To be approved, an accommodation must address a situation of discrimination under the provincial Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, it must be based on sincere religious beliefs, it must be consistent with the principles of equality of the sexes and state religious neutrality, and it must not cause undue hardship for the government agency concerned.
Isabelle Marier St-Onge, an aide to Vallée, said it was impossible to offer a template for specific accommodation requests. She gave the example of two women police officers seeking to wear the Muslim headscarf known as the hijab, one in Montreal and one in Quebec City. The one in Montreal might be prepared to wear a sports-type hijab posing no safety risk, while the one in Quebec City might insist on a more free-flowing garment that would pose a danger.
“The Montreal request could be accepted and the Quebec City one refused,” Marier St-Onge said.
Marie-Michelle Lacoste, who now goes by Warda Naili after converting to Islam, left, and her lawyer Catherine McKenzie speak to the media at a news conference Tuesday, November 7, 2017 in Montreal.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
While the safety issue in her example makes an accommodation officer’s job relatively easy, things will undoubtedly become trickier when trying to establish whether a request is based on a sincerely held belief.
The guidance from the government states: “The religious belief that is asserted must be in good faith, neither fictitious nor capricious, and must not be an artifice. It is not necessary for that practice or belief to be based on a religious precept recognized by established religious authorities or shared by a majority of believers.”
Supreme Court judges have wrestled with these questions; now it will fall to mid-level bureaucrats.
Nathalie Roy, secularism critic for the Coalition party, said the government should have provided more specific guidance, drawing on previous cases adjudicated by the rights commission. “I worry that the door is being swung wide open to subjectivity in these decisions,” she told the legislature committee.
Her party, like the opposition Parti Québécois, wants stricter rules barring religious symbols for all state employees in a position of authority, from police officers to teachers. “For us, a school is not a church . . . and a police car is not a place of worship either,” Roy said.
Vallée accuses the opposition parties of seizing on the secularism issue to sow division.
“This question of identity is polarizing . . . and certain political parties will no doubt try to exploit it in the coming months,” she said at the committee hearing.
I hope you don’t get tired of my apologies
and my changes in direction or even promises not kept—which is not the same in
my mind about breaking promises. The
document that I thought I would discuss in follow up from the last post is not
what I expected it to be. So, we will let it go and do something else today. However,
in case you’re curious, here’s URL that deals with issues somewhat related to
that of Post 151--
Yes, something else, but not something
completely different. While the last post talked about shooting and murdering,
this post will talk about spanking. To some people that’s in the same class as
shooting and murder—it’s all doing violence to people. Some time ago a friend of mine, Mark
Penninga, the Executive Director of the Association for Reformed Political
Action (ARPA) Canada published an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun under the title”Time and Place for Spanking.” I’ve
written about this issue before, because I believe when a government gets
involved in ordinary family affairs, it is intrusive and goes far beyond its
legitimate reach. Government and family
exist in different spheres, each of which have their own laws and protocols.
Governments may only interfere in families when there is evidence of families
being highly dysfunctional. To some people, spanking, any kind of spanking, no
matter its severity, becomes the government’s business, for its mandate is to
protect its citizens, even infants, from violence, including parental violence.
Penninga’s main point is that the term
spanking covers a broad range of meaning, ranging from the gently corrective to
that of the cruel and abusive. Attempts to have government make every form of
spanking illegal in order to prevent the cruel type, has the opposite
effect. Then he demonstrates his point at
length, all of which you can read yourself by turning to the articles’ URL (see
below). One study, for example, that covered 50 years and examined 26 other
studies concluded, “Whether physical punishment compared favorably
or unfavorably with other tactics depended on the type of physical punishment.”
The study looked at what the researchers called an “optimal” type of physical
discipline — conditional spanking—and upheld it as legitimate.
Penninga wrote:
Sweden in 1979 became the first
nation to outlaw all physical discipline. Since then, criminal charges for
physical child abuse by relatives against children under age seven increased by
489 per cent between 1981 and 1994. There was also a shocking 519-per-cent
increase in criminal assaults by children under 15 against children aged 7-14.
Perhaps most devastating, 46-60 per cent of cases investigated under Sweden’s
law result in children being removed from homes. About 22,000 Swedish children
were removed from homes in 1981, compared with 1,900 in Germany, 710 in
Denmark, 552 in Finland, and 163 in Norway.
Consider
the 2010 case of a mother and father from Karlstad, Sweden, jailed for nine
months and ordered to pay 25,000 kronor ($11,000) to three of their children
who were spanked. More damaging than the jail and fines, all four of their
children were removed from their home. Although the court concluded that the
parents “had a loving and caring relationship to their children,” apparently
spanking is serious enough to merit such an extreme sentence.
And then he concluded,
Parents
will have a variety of opinions about the merits of physical discipline. But
problems arise when the state assumes the role of parent. The role of the state
is limited to preserving an orderly society and punishing wrongdoers (including
child There is much that the state can do to promote a society in which
children are safe and families can flourish. Banning physical discipline will
achieve neither.
Parents will
have a variety of opinions about the merits of physical discipline. But
problems arise when the state assumes the role of parent. The role of the state
is limited to preserving an orderly society and punishing wrongdoers (including
child abusers), so that the other institutions of society can flourish. The
institution of the family is an independent part of civil society accountable
directly to God (although the state increasingly understands itself to be a god
it seems). Parents are entrusted with the authority to lovingly raise their
children and the state may only interfere in exceptional circumstances, such as
real child abuse.
There is much
that the state can do to promote a society in which children are safe and
families can flourish. Banning physical discipline will achieve neither. So far my
friend Penninga.
The Vancouver Sun published an editorial
supporting Penninga’s main argument, while the highest court of the land agreed
as well, but not everyone did, as you can see on the last of the three websites
that appear below. As to myself, I am the product of a tradition of occasional
reasonable spanking when deserved and emerged a humane, highly educated and
successful person from a peasant background without any spanking baggage to
sour my life. The same holds true for all 9 of my siblings as well as for the
11 and 9 siblings of my father and mother respectively.As the Bible puts it, “Spare the rod and
spoil the child.” That’s ancient wisdom that liberals tend to deny, often
having contempt for the past and its ways.
So, here are three URLs for you to check out,
with the third one vigorously rejecting the point of this post.
I had a few other subjects in mind for the next
posts, but the issue of competition between Canadian governments and their
citizens popped up again, unannounced and unexpectedly. The last post, you may
remember, dealt with competition between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
(CBC), a so-called “crown corporation” with special ties to the Federal
Government (FG), and private broadcasters. The CBC receives hefty subsidies
from the FG but also advertises like any other medium house, often against
their private competitors who support them through their taxes. I have expressed
my deep displeasure with that arrangement.
Today this same topic intrudes again as I read yesterday’s
VS today. This time the issue is between BC Government Liquor Stores (GLS) and
private wine stores. Please understand, I am hardly a wine bibber and so this
does not personally apply much to me, except that every individual in any given
jurisdiction is affected when major economic shifts occur. There is always a
ripple effect. Furthermore, sometimes I wonder whether we all would not be
better off without all that alcohol stuff, given the misery and suffering it
creates form day to day. Yes, I do take a drink very sporadically and sometimes
actually enjoy it, but wines, hardly.
A major shift has occurred in the alcohol world
of BC. Whereas formerly, liquor was sold only in GLS-es and bars, with the
exception of wine that was also for sale in private wine outlets, recently, the
gates have been opened with the result that liquor is now available in all
kinds of places. That spells serious competition for the wine sellers, but it’s
private vs private. That’s the nature of our economy. Not a problem to me,
though such major adjustments spell serious challenges to which those sellers
have to adjust. Again, that’s our economy for you. Change is as common as
stability. You have to learn to cope. It’s the name of the game. Nothing
guaranteed.
The problem is that the GLS has increased its
business hours to include Sundays and statutory holidays.Patrick Greenfield, owner of a wine store
complains that his Sunday sales are down considerably. On Good Friday 2015 they
were down by 40% for him. Another owner, John Clerides, said his Sunday sales
have fallen 15-20 percent since FGS opened Sundays. Greenfield complained, “It’s hard to compete
with the government, which seems to have a ‘bottomless chequebook,’ noting the
millions of dollars being spent to add refrigeration facilities to government
stores.”He continues, “It’s hard when
the government is (both) your competitor and your supplier,” without even
talking of its control over legal power. It’s not a “level playing field,” for
GLS doesn’t “face the same consequences.” For one thing, not every store needs
to show a profit, for it can be carried by the entire network.
Clerides has applied to the Government—the very
department that makes the rules and from which he gets his supplies—for “the
right to sell beer and spirits in his store so he can better compete against
government stores,”but that request was turned down.It has, he surmises, “obviously” fallen on
deaf ears. Why is that not surprising?
You see the mess such an arrangement
creates?Someone please explain to me
why the Government is into liquor sales. Has anyone ever defined the role of a
government, especially in a “free” Western society? I checked the internet
about the history of this mess, but perhaps lacked the patience to pursue it
long enough, for I did not find any reference to this history. If it were
important enough to me, I might even go to the Public Library for literature on
the subject. As it is, I am left guessing. One of my guesses is that it is one
of these brilliant NDP achievements with its union friends blocking any move
towards a freer market.Well, yes, they
have a good thing going for themselves, what with government salary and job
security as good as guaranteed. I am almost jealous!
But what of its citizen tax payers?It is unconscionable that these entrepreneurs
are forced to purchase their supplies from their competitor, who has virtually
unlimited power over the market and part of whose income comes from those very
taxes. No government should be allowed to compete with its citizens and no
citizen should be saddled with such a competitor-master. I am not
anti-government and certainly not anarchist. I'm just a plain old conservative with
a Christian twist. Note the small "C," though I am also (still) a large "C-er."
The same argument can also be applied to private
schools vs public schools, but that’s a much more complicated issue that I’ve
touched upon before and, no doubt, will again in the future.
I think I will visit my neighbourhood wine store
and buy a bottle just to show my support. It would be the first time in my
life, not of buying wine but of buying in a private wine shop.
[With thanks to Bruce Constantineau for his VS
article “More choice is a bad thing for private liquor stores” (Aug 15, 2015).]
