Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
On behalf of the Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada, l would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to address a very serious concern—that of prejudice, violence, and discrimination against people because of their religion.
CMDS Canada is a fellowship of over 1,600 doctors and dentists whose goal is to integrate Christian faith with professional practice. Christian faith is an intrinsic part of who we are as human beings. We cannot just turn on or off our faith in God. Faith is so much a part of who we are that it must, by its very nature, spill over into all aspects of our lives.
Because of this commitment, we are very empathetic to the concerns of all religious groups when we hear about prejudice, discrimination, or lack of tolerance in Canadian society. We believe that Canada is a pluralistic society within which every Canadian is able to live out their faith, their beliefs, or their creed and to participate in as many aspects of civil society as their values permit. It is intolerable that certain groups, because of their religious beliefs, should be excluded from any opportunity available to the average Canadian or be subjected to hate crimes, violence, prejudice, or discrimination.
l worked for several years with the Government of Nova Scotia, developing training materials for government employees in relation to the respectful workplace policy. We developed policies that extended the rights guaranteed under the Human Rights Act for groups with protected characteristics related to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, and so on. We also extended that to include personal harassment or bullying. I was proud that we were working towards a workplace where no one would be bullied or harassed for any reason. I think there is a general Canadian consensus that this is an admirable goal.
Given this effort, imagine the following scenario. Imagine there was a group within Canadian society that had one of the protected characteristics found under either the provincial Human Rights Act or the charter. Imagine that members of this group were unable to practise their profession in certain provinces or be educated in certain professional schools because they had a particular protected characteristic. In discussions in class, there was no acknowledgement of the legitimacy or viability of their world view. They were told not to seek positions in rural areas because of their protected characteristic. They were advised that they could only work in certain small sections of their profession because of their protected characteristic. In policies put forward by their regulatory bodies, people who shared their moral convictions on a topic were deemed unprofessional, selfish, and not worthy of the noble position that their profession provided. Regulatory leaders openly spoke of decades-old anecdotes that were the product of theoretical discussions that never took place. When regulatory leaders began to use their power to act upon their prejudice, the inevitable result was discrimination.
This scenario is not fictional. It is real. It affects doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals in Canada who cannot, because of their religious beliefs, be involved in the intentional killing of patients at any stage of life. Their conscience and religious convictions tell them that killing patients is morally wrong, and they cannot participate in it. We cannot participate in procedures that go against our moral responsibility to God and our fellow human beings, yet some provincial regulatory authorities, like those in Ontario, require physicians to arrange for patients to be seen by doctors who will end their lives or in some cases to actually end the life of the patient themselves through providing a lethal prescription.
As a result, students report being told in class that if they have these beliefs, they should avoid certain geographic practice areas. Physicians have been told by regulators to retrain for a small subset of specialties, such as plastic surgery, pathology, or sports medicine. Applicants for medical schools—as part of the admissions process—are faced with questions that put them at a clear disadvantage because of these ethical issues. Prominent medical school ethicists have gone on record as recommending that students who have conscientious objections should be screened out before they ever get accepted into medical school.
Imagine that this scenario was occurring to systemically exclude any group of people who had one of the protected characteristics. Imagine that people were being penalized because of their colour or sexual orientation, or gender, or racial group. The powerful forces in our society—government, media, universities—would not tolerate this. Why is it tolerated when this discrimination is against people of faith? Why is this serious attack on our constitutional values accepted?
I would suggest the reason is that Canada is at an important crossroads. We need to decide what it means to have a secular state. Everyone feels that state neutrality is a good thing, that the state must never be in a position where it favours one religion or creed at the expense of another one. This allows a pluralistic society to flourish.
However, something more insidious is happening here. People are being discriminated against. They are being forced to do things that go against their religious convictions, convictions that will not allow them to participate in certain procedures that involve bringing about the death of their patients. The requirement to do this, even against conscience, is enforcing and promoting secularism or atheism, which is in itself an identifiable creed. State neutrality is breached, therefore, when a secular state decides to impose secularism on people who have established religious beliefs that should be protected under human rights legislation and the charter.
These concerns involve a broader spectrum than just Christians. Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus who are physicians, nurses, or other health care professionals are also threatened, as are many who are secular humanists and atheists who do not feel that killing patients is in the patient's best interests. An argument based on multiculturalism actually supports greater care or support of conscience and religious rights, as many of the new immigrants coming to Canada bring with them religious beliefs that can enrich our cultural mosaic.
At the Senate justice committee hearings on the bill that would legalize euthanasia in Canada, three major religious groups stood shoulder to shoulder in advocating for conscience rights for health care professionals. This unity of purpose was evident because many religious groups in Canada sense they are in a battle for human rights against a radical secularism that would remove all reference to God, and even the transcendent, from every aspect of public Canadian life.
Secularists who espouse this view do not recognize that they are imposing their values on others. Because they have such a fervent belief that they are right, they feel justified in using the tools of the state to force others to either be coerced into joining them or potentially lose their livelihood. This is the essence of bullying.
Such a stripping of the fundamental core of the human person will only lead to an impoverishment of the Canadian mosiac—