Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at town hall meeting in Hamilton, Ontario (January 8, 2018). |
APOLOGIA
By Hendrik van der Breggen
The
Carillon, January 18, 2018
According to Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau, there has been a “kerfuffle” over the Canada Summer Jobs (CSJ)
program. Permit me to add my two-cents.
Recall that the CSJ program allows
employers (non-profits and businesses) to receive wage subsidies to hire
students, thereby helping employers (including many churches and charitable
organizations) provide valuable work experience for young people, work
experience that often benefits others, especially in the case of faith-based charitable
agencies. So far, so good.
Problems arise, however, with the government’s
new eligibility requirement, i.e., employers must now sign an “attestation.”
According to the CSJ guidelines, employers
must “attest that both the job and the organizations’ core mandate respect
individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights.”
Moreover, “These [rights] include
reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis
of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical
disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
The guidelines explain that “reproductive
rights” include abortion.
Many of the rights listed are important
and legitimate, but some are reasonably controversial. I see (at least) three
problems.
1. Though women have the right to
access safe abortions (when needed), it is not true that women have a carte blanche right to abortion
(whenever wanted), contrary to what our Liberal “pro-choice” government seems
to think.
As a matter of fact, in 1988 Canada’s
then abortion law was struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) not because
abortion is a woman’s right, but because there wasn’t equal access across
Canada to therapeutic abortion committees. The SCC struck down the extant law
and asked parliament to make a better law for women and unborn children,
suggesting a gestational-age approach.
Let me repeat: The SCC did not say that abortion is a woman’s
right. (Note: that X is legal does not mean that we have a positive right to X.)
2. A problem arises from the reference
to the “values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” to which
the CSJ program asks employers to attest. The Charter explicitly explains the
underlying values as follows: “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize
the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”
This means God’s revelations by
Scripture or conscience trump government’s requirements for citizens to
“attest” to whatever goes against these.
This also means many Canadians believe
God has given all humans—unborn children included—the right to life. In other
words, these Charter-abiding Canadians cannot
“attest” that they agree with “reproductive rights” when those include the
right to kill a child.
So at the get-go the CSJ program and
its “attestation” requirement infringes on the rights to equal benefit of the
law (Charter, section 15) of those employers who take seriously Canadian law
and its underlying values. This is blatant and unjust discrimination—built into
the CSJ program.
At this juncture PM Trudeau would object
(as he has) that when it comes to abortion we cannot restrict “the right to
women to control their own bodies.”
In reply, thinking Canadians should
notice this fact: It’s one thing to control one’s own body; it’s quite another
to kill the body of another!
Moreover, no pro-life or anti-abortion Canadians
are against the right of any woman to control her own body. Rather, they are
concerned about the body that isn’t the woman’s body, i.e., the body of the
child who is destroyed by abortion.
3. The CSJ program’s non-discrimination
requirement concerning “gender identity or expression” assumes an ideological
position on the alleged truth of many such identities and expressions, an
alleged truth not settled by science or even common sense.
Think about it. Facebook used to offer
58 gender options and now allows “unlimited custom identities.” Canadians must
“attest” to this to be eligible for public funding? Seriously?
In conclusion, I recommend a revision
to the requirements of the Canada Summer Jobs program.
As is, it represents poor thinking or an
ideological power play—or, probably, both.
Hendrik
van der Breggen, PhD, is associate professor of philosophy at Providence
University College. The views expressed in this column do not always reflect
the views of Providence.
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