(Watch the conference presentation on video: Separation and Cooperation: Perspectives from the USA and Europe)There are widespread fears that the current George W. Bush administration represents an unusual and ominous convergence of religion and politics in American life. The new book by one-time Republican party strategist Kevin Phillips, titled American Theocracy, argues that the Christian Right includes dangerous groups that deny the separation of church and state, embrace a foreign policy agenda resting on pre-millennialist ideas regarding the Rapture, seek to construct a Christian theocracy at home and abroad, and have successfully carried these ideas into the White House.1 At one level, such fears are clearly exaggerated. The war in Iraq, for example, may or may not be a good idea. However, the chief strategists behind it clearly had objectives in mind other than a hastening of the End Times. At another level, though, the contemporary infusion of Christian ideas and energy into American politics is very real. . .and nothing new at all. Indeed, one cannot begin to understand the history and character of the United States without facing the repeated and fundamental blending of religious enthusiasm and American politics, from the colonial origins of American nationhood to the present. The supposed grounding of American political society on the "separation of church and state" is simply not true. Indeed, even the phrase "cooperation of church and state" does insufficient justice to the American experience. To appreciate the American story, it is helpful to compare it to an almost pure case of religious establishment: namely, The Church of Sweden. Now I stand before you as a spiritual grandchild of The Church of Sweden. I was baptized, raised, and confirmed into the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the American offspring of the Swedish national church. So I confess to a certain fondness toward my subject here. The Church of Sweden traces its origins to 1527, when Swedish King Gustav Vasa embraced the Protestant rebellion. In part, this came in reaction to Papal intrigues that favored Denmark's efforts to unite all Scandinavia under a single Danish crown. Also in part, Gustav Vasa saw the church's wealth as a fine resource for building a nation. Perhaps there was a genuine conversion, as well. In any case, King and Parliament declared Sweden a Lutheran land in 1544. A century and a half later, The Church of Sweden Act [1686] provided that King and Parliament should jointly regulate this Church, to the exclusion of all others. At its best, The Church of Sweden evolved into a folkkyrka, a people's church, a pillar of Swedish nationhood. Sweden's bishops gained their own political base, claiming one of the four legislative chambers in the nation's old Parliament. At its worst, The Church of Sweden behaved like a classic monopoly, suppressing all potential rivals, and private conscience. During the 18th Century, foreign merchants residing in Sweden—including Catholics and Jews—did gain the right to worship quietly in their own manner; and the late 19th Century saw a degree of toleration extended to the so-called "free churches," or dissenting Protestant groups. All the same, as late as 1999, The Church of Sweden was governed by the 1000 paragraph Church Law established by Parliament; all new Swedish babies automatically became members of the church if at least one parent was a member; parishes could levy a church tax of about 1 percent on income; and Parish Councils were elected along political lines.2 Financially, these arrangements left the Church of Sweden at the millennium's end as perhaps the wealthiest religious body on earth. Spiritually, The Church of Sweden was nearly dead. While 88 percent of the population were formally members of the Church, a mere 2 percent were regular worshippers. Moreover, politics altered the church. Prior to 1919, The Church of Sweden reflected the nationalism and conservatism of the old Kingdom, a politics of the 'God, King, and Soil' variety. Since 1931, the Swedish political order has been dominated by the Social Democratic Labor Party, and the Church of Sweden has largely been reshaped in its image.3 A personal story might help here. Several decades ago, I conducted interviews with Alva Myrdal, a key socialist and feminist architect of the contemporary Swedish welfare state. At the time, she served in the radical cabinet of Olaf Palme, as Minister of Disarmament and Church Affairs. In the latter capacity, she was the one who would select new Bishops for the Church of Sweden from a list submitted by the General Synod. She joked: "Here I am, a lifelong atheist, choosing the new leaders of the Swedish Church." For good reasons, most modern Swedes came to view their people's church as merely another branch of government. In the year 2000, the Church of Sweden was formally disestablished. Church leaders hope for a spiritual renewal. For now, though, the parishes of The Church of Sweden stand mostly as sentimental relics, museums of past faith.4 The American story is less unitary, moving more by fits and starts. During the early colonial years, two broad themes emerged. On the one hand, the Puritan settlement in Massachusetts sought to be as "a city on a hill," an ideal Christian commonwealth freed from the corruptions of the Old World. All the same, most colonial American governments opted for some version of an established church. Ten of the thirteen colonies at some point gave privileged status and financial support to a single church: in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, the favored body was The Church of England; in Massachusetts (including Maine), New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut, the Congregationalist church prevailed. At the same time, though, the tiny colony of Rhode Island experimented with a radical form of separatism. The colony's founder, Roger Williams, had been expelled from Massachusetts for his religious troublemaking; above all, his disruptive quest for the truly pure church. As Garry Wills has commented: Williams always had trouble finding people pure enough to pray with—his enemies could never make out whether that meant he prayed only with his wife or not even with her. They were certain it precluded him from grace before meals except when he dined alone.5 His colony attracted a rag-tag body of religion eccentrics, including the mystic Anne Hutchinson and the then rowdy Quakers. Orthodox Puritans labelled Rhode Island the "sewer of New England." All the same, Williams' fastidious regard for religious purity led him to conclude that mere fallen men could never rule over the divine church. Emerging as a radical Augustinian, Williams demanded a complete separation of state and church, in order to protect the true church.6 Not coincidentally, the earliest synagogues in America appeared in Rhode Island. In the mid-Eighteenth century, these rival American visions of religion and society rolled into an event called The Great Awakening. As historian William McLoughlin explains, the American "Revolution can be described as the political revitalization of a people whose religious regeneration began in the Great Awakening."7 Starting about 1735, a new wave of evangelists—exemplified by Jonathan Edwards—spread through the colonies. Edward's most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," condemned the colonists for having fallen away from the faith of their fathers, into greed and quarreling. Tens of thousands of the American colonials did fall on their knees, confess their sins, and beg for forgiveness. These "New Light enthusiasts," as they came to be called, were condemned by orthodox religious authorities as extremists driven by unbridled emotions. And in truth, they did pose dangers to the prevailing order. Their pietism translated into rebellion: hundreds of congregations split after bitter quarrels over the 'New Lights'; many "enthusiasts" were jailed or saw their property seized by colonies with established churches. 'New Light' preaching crossed denominational bonds and encouraged voluntary—rather than inherited—loyalties. 'New Light' post-millennial optimism also led to the conclusion that God meant to convert all the people of America and to engage them in preparation for Christ's return. The New Jerusalem could come through the work of man, a great task that would begin in America. Disobedience to worldly tyrants was obedience to God. With only slight twists, all of these religious themes could be—and were—transformed into political imperatives. A poem by Philip Freneau, written in 1771, ably captures this bond of religious enthusiasm to political action. Entitled "The Rising Glory of America," it reads: Here independent power shall hold her sway, And public virtue warm the patriot breast: No traces shall remain of tyranny, And laws, a pattern to the world beside, Be here enacted first. . . A New Jerusalem, sent down from heaven, Shall grace our happy earth—perhaps this land, Whose ample breast shall then receive, tho' late, Myriads of saints, with their immortal king, To live and reign on earth a thousand years, Thence call'd Millennium. . .8When the American victors crafted a Constitution for their new Republic, the issue of church and state formally arose. Article Six prohibited religious tests "as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." And the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights declared that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Animating these "establishment" and "free exercise" clauses were beliefs that religious activity was an inalienable but fragile right requiring special protection; that any authority exercised over religion should be a state, rather than a federal, matter; and that the federal Congress was a potential threat to religious liberty and to existing established churches in the states.9 At the fundamental level, these clauses meant that there could be no preference for any religious sect by the new federal government.10 More broadly, these clauses reflected fresh developments in American society. The Revolutionary Army had included a large number of clergymen, who developed a pronounced inter-denominational unity.11 This grew into an informal American assumption of denominationalism, which repudiated—at least at the legal level—claims that "we alone are the true church," which allowed broad use of the Christian label, and which laid the groundwork for cross-denominational cooperation on practical and moral matters. American churches would also rely increasingly on the voluntary support of a committed laity. Hierarchies gave way to democratic governance; religious allegiance grew more competitive. These changes largely explain the steady dis-establishment of churches in the states: South Carolina in 1780; Connecticut in 1818; Maine in 1820; and finally Massachusetts in 1833.12 But this did not mean a separation of religion and state. Indeed, just as the young American Republic settled into a new Century, another outburst of religious enthusiasm shook—and profoundly transformed—the nation. Called The Second Great Awakening, it began in New England. In recent years, church membership had floundered. Alcohol abuse grew widespread. Sexual morals loosened; by 1800, over a third of American brides arrived at the altar already pregnant.13 The revival began with reported "heavenly sprinklings" of the spirit in Connecticut and New Hampshire in 1797. The same year, students at Yale University formed a secret "Moral Society," soon turning that school into "a little temple; prayer and praise seem to be the delight of the greater part of the students." A new generation of evangelists spread from Yale across the land: Nathaniel William Taylor, Bennet Tyler, Asahel Nettleton, and Lyman Beecher. Church membership soared by 300 percent; particularly among the young. Missionary societies formed to convert the Indians, to send ministers to heathen Asia and Africa, and to witness to the frontiersmen. Out on that frontier, great camp meetings convened where "displays of divine grace" transformed the cultural landscape. Dozens of new Christian denominations took form. At the more innovative level, the Second Great Awakening also gave birth to the Latter-day Saints (or Mormons) and the Seventh-Day Adventists, movements that would grow into world religions. This spiritual episode sparked moral revival, as well. The Temperance movement took form; within a century it would ban alcoholic beverages nationwide. In a stunning turn, pre-marital pregnancy fell sharply: from 35 percent of new brides in 1800 to only 10 percent by 1850. Most importantly, the anti-slavery movement was nurtured in the bosom of the Second Great Awakening. Lyman Beecher, "baptized into the revival spirit" in 1797, headed the family and the campaign that would finally crush The Slave Power in 1865.14 This Nineteenth Century also witnessed a budding cooperation between church and state. While established churches disappeared among the states, the Second Great Awakening actually gave the Christian churches enhanced political influence. In an important 1817 court case, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not arbitrarily seized the property of churches or church-related institutions. In the words of the Jesuit analyst John A. Hardon, this decision established "the principle that most Americans are citizens of the two societies, Church and State, and that consequently they have rights and privileges which no political power may take from them."15 The "common school" movement of the 1830's, which spread rapidly throughout the country, actually rested on a generic Protestant Christianity, complete with prayer, Bible readings, and instruction in Christian morality. For the next 130 years, most court decisions and Congressional actions reinforced a model of cooperation. Some examples: In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal immigration law that prohibited an Episcopalian church from hiring a minister from abroad. The Court explained "that we are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity."16 In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that a parent had a right to educate his child in a parochial church school, an extension of rights "to marry, establish a home and bring up children [and] to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience."17 Three years later, in the case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the same Court overturned new Oregon law that required all children to attend state schools. It declared that "the child is not the mere creature of the state" and that parents have the liberty "to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control."18 Court decisions during the early-20th Century allowed for free transportation and the distribution of state textbooks to children in church schools.19 Military chaplains have existed since the Revolutionary War; their status was fully regularized in 1937. War Department regulations instructed chaplains to "promote morality, religion, and good order." In 1942, the Congress appropriated funds to build chapels on military posts throughout the country, for worship by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Since their origin, both houses of the U.S. Congress have had chaplains as well, who open each daily legislative session with prayer. In times of crisis, American Presidents and—on occasions—Congress, too, have formally called for national days of prayer. As far back as 1789, George Washington instituted a day of Thanksgiving, so that Americans might "acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will,. . .and humbly to implore His protection and favor." A Congressional Resolution of 1941 fixed this day as the fourth Thursday of each November. To this list we might add: the tax deductibility of gifts to religious entities; the legal recognition of religious conscientious objectors to war; the exemption of seminarians and clergymen from the military draft; a series of generous tax benefits for the clergy; and legal protection of priests relative to the confessional. All such forms of cooperation are the fruit, more or less, of the pervasive religiosity that infused American life during the 19th Century. In similar ways, subsequent religious outbursts have marked American life. In 1906, a small revival among African-Americans on Azusa Street in Los Angeles exploded into the modern Pentecostal or charismatic movement: again, dozens of new denominations formed; revivalists filled with the spirit fanned out across the continent and globe. Today, exactly one hundred years later, an estimated 500 million persons worldwide are the spiritual children of that event. Between 1945 and 1965, Roman Catholics in the United States poured out of ethnic urban ghettos into new suburban homes, sparking the "marriage boom" and the "baby boom" of that era. The proportion of Catholic families with four or more children more than doubled. Meanwhile, a young evangelist, Billy Graham, organized a small revival in Los Angeles in 1949, which sparked the modern Evangelical movement. Still another revival in religious enthusiasm and behavior appears to have begun in the late 1970's; we still live in its wake. All of these religious episodes, I need add, had important political consequences: most recently, the faith-based initiatives in social services launched by the current Bush administration. Now, as a spiritual grandchild of The Church of Sweden, I am appalled by this American spectacle: the excessive emotion; the ill disciplined worship; the promiscuous spread of new denominations; the chaotic relationship of government to religion; the theological laxity. However, as an historian—and as an American—I find this pageant to be endlessly fascinating. Moreover, The Church of Sweden stands today largely as an empty shell; while the spirit-driven churches of America enjoy a turbulent growth. A final question remains? If cooperation between church and state is the main American story, why do many talk today about a crisis in American church-state relations? Part of the problem derives from a 1947 Supreme Court decision in the case, Everson v. Board of Education. Appealing to Thomas Jefferson's interpretation of the First Amendment as erecting "a wall of separation between church and state," the Court ruled here that even sect-neutral support of religion was unconstitutional. This reading of the First Amendment has since led to bans on prayers in public schools or at school-sponsored events and to the prohibition of tax deductions and credits for church school tuition.20 Critics of the Everson decision point to four historical mistakes made by the Court. First, in judging the intent of the drafters of the First Amendment, the Court relied almost exclusively on the ideas of Jefferson and James Madison. True, they were key figures in the drafting of the Constitution and their personal opinions tack closely, at times, to a strict separtionist view. However, the Court ignored the hundreds of other voices—and votes—at the Constitutional Convention and in the state ratifying conventions which clearly offered a much more expansive view of church-state relations. Second, the Court completely misunderstood why Catholics had founded their own schools in the 19th Century. They did not object so much to the secular nature of the state schools, but rather to their informal Protestant nature. Lack of Bible reading was not the problem in the state schools of 1880; use of the King James Version was. Third, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was never meant to limit the free exercise of religion. And fourth, the Court's implicit fear of religious zealotry flew in the face of real American history, which has been largely defined by a form of religious zealotry.21 Also, something new appeared on the American scene during the 1970's: a militant secularism designed to drive religious sensibilities out of the public domain. The logic behind the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states, was of this pedigree. So were a series of regulatory initiatives launched during the Jimmy Carter Presidency designed to control church fund raising practices, sharply narrow the definition of church, shut down many religious schools, and curtail religious tax exemptions.22 These clumsy efforts directly contributed to the rise of the contemporary Religious Right, portending the "culture war" in which Americans are still engaged.Notes 1 Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006). 2 See: Nicholas George, "Swedish Church and State Looking for Divorce," Scandinavian Review 82 (Autumn 1994): 19-22. 3 As an example of this leftist orientation, see: Kenneth Hermele, "A Letter from Sweden: The Bishops Take the Lead," Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 45 (Feb. 1944): 30-32. 4 E. Kenneth Stegeby, "An Analysis of the Impending Disestablishment of the Church of Sweden," Brigham Young University Law Review (1999, #1): 703-67. 5 Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990): 345. 6 Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972): 154-55. 7 William G. McLoughlin, "'Enthusiasm for Liberty': The Great Awakening as the Key to the Revolution," in Jack P. Greene and William G. McLoughlin, Preachers and Politics: Two Essays on the Origins of the American Revolution (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1977): 73. 8 Philip Freneau, Poems on Various Subjects (London: Russell Smith, 1861): 50-51. 9 Arlin M. Adams and Charles J. Emmerich, A Nation Dedicated to Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Heritage of the Religion Clauses (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990): 43-47. 10 Gerard V. Bradley, Church-State Relationships in America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987): 19. 11 McLoughlin, "Enthusiasm for Liberty," p. 67. 12 Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 381-83. 13 Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, "Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640-1971: An Overview and Interpretation," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (1975): 553. 14 Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 415-440. 15 Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ, "Cooperation of Church and State in the United States," at: http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Church_Dogma/_Church_Dogma_035.htm (5/1/2006). 16 Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457-71 (1892). 17 Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 397 (1923). 18 Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 45 U.S. 571 (1924). 19 Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education, 281 U.S. 370 (1930). 20 Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 15 (1947). 21 See: Bradley, Church-State Relationships in America, pp. 1-13; 121-46; William K. Lietzau, "Rediscovering the Establishment Clause: Federalism and the Rollback of Incorporation," DePaul Law Review 39 (1989): 1191-1234; Mary Ann Glendon and Raul F. Yanes, "Structural Free Exercise," Michigan Law Review 90 (Dec. 1991): 477-550; Michael W. McConnell, "The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion," Harvard Law Review 103 (1989): 1410-1517; and John Witte, Jr., "The Essential Rights and Liberties of Religion in the American Constitutional Experiment," Notre Dame Law Review 71 (1995): 371-450. 22 Allan Carlson, "Regulators and Religion: Caesar's Revenge," Regulation: AEI Journal on Government and Society (May-June 1979).

1. Preface and Summary Court decisions come at a rapid pace and in no logical subject order. Only when they are described together does a pattern emerge; for those interested in judicial decisions that touch on religious belief or practice, and have been concerned about the direction of those decisions, the cases gathered here will provide clear evidence for their concerns. Dr. Ogilvie reviews court decisions that show the regard (and disregard) courts have had for faith. She focuses on the virtual banishment of religion qua religion especially from the public square. A banishment that, quite apart from its injustice, is startling due to the fact that it is out of all measure to the proportion of Canadians who profess religious belief. This paper catalogues some of the more surprising decisions in connection with education, employment, family life, health, the welfare state and intrusion into ecclesiastical affairs. Dr. Ogilvie raises the spectre that, as she puts it, "the gradual eradication of the religious voice from the public square in Canada should not distract us from the fact of that eradication and the threat it poses to liberty generally." A few years ago, an Atlantic Monthly article by Glenn Tinder discussed the question of its title, "Can We Be Good Without God?" Dr. Ogilvie's paper raises a wider question: can our society remain democratic without maintenance of a flourishing religious basis? After all, religious freedom and political freedom evolved hand-in-hand. Can we maintain, for example, respect for persons but avoid an examination of the spiritual and moral ends of both person and state? Those raised within the nominal shell of religious faith were nonetheless imbued with its precepts, however inadequately they were taught to ground them on religious presuppositions. Because the former shell of nominalism has, in large part, vanished, liberal parents look with horror on children who do not accept their taken-for-granted "ought" propositions. But one cannot give what one does not have. When morality is no longer taught for fear of "imposition," the temptation is to rely on retribution. While law and morality have their respective spheres, it is questionable whether law can function properly without morality. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done, and to see it as being done, one must know what justice looks like, that is an essentially moral vision. Dr. Ogilvie notes that "... accommodation has too often metamorphosed into assimilation, so that purportedly Christian communities often minimize and trivialize belief to the point of non-recognition." Neither nominalism nor the reduction of virtues to values can pass on a flourishing form of the faith that gives life and frame to culture. Near the end of her paper, Dr. Ogilvie notes that "the revival of freedom of religion and of the religious voice in public discourse may well be essential to the re-formulation of the liberal state on the basis of genuine pluralism and equality. If we go on as we have recently done, the prospect before us is truly frightening." As with all Centre publications, it is hoped that this paper will prompt reflection and discussion for those concerned with all aspects of public policy formulation in Canada.—Iain T. BensonOvercoming "The Culture of Disbelief" by M.H. Ogilvie In my more pessimistic mental rambles around the topic of the relationship of religion and Canadian society at the close of the twentieth century, I frequently detour to the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. by Alaric the Goth, which caused the severe psychological stress for Christians in the late Roman Empire, so neatly captured by Jerome when he wrote, "If Rome can perish, what can be safe?" (Ep. 123, 16). This cataclysmic event drove Christians across the sea to North Africa and to the diocese of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who responded by writing his final book, De civitate dei, over the last fifteen years of his life, completing it just before his death in 430 A.D. Augustine considered it to be his best book, the culmination of his thinking over a 70 year period, on the meaning and purpose of life in this world. Yet, for the most part, De civitate dei is not just a theological treatise, rather it is a vast work of pastoral theology, prompted by a pastor's concern for his flock. Augustine sought to comfort the Christian refugees of his day, by reminding them that while Rome had been a great empire, established for providential purposes, its fall, and the loss of their property, their suffering, deprivation and even death, was no ultimate loss. Rather, their real future and hope should be in things eternal—in the glorious City of God not the transient City of Man. The analogy of the early 5th century with our own day is undoubtedly superficial, yet in a limited way, enlightening. The Roman Empire had been nominally a Christian empire after the conversion of Constantine in 313 A.D. and the adoption of Christianity as the state religion in 324 A.D. The early Christian church was already fractured into numerous competing sects, each boasting that it possessed the universal and exclusive truth. The Empire had been repeatedly overrun by "barbarians", from a variety of races and cultures, bringing their alien ways of life, alien beliefs and alien practices into the heart of the greatest empire the world had yet seen. The ruling elites lived lives of private debauchery and public corruption, enjoyed the rewards of ruling status, but were unable to repair the deterioration of both economic and social infrastructures and the general decline in economic well-being. Violence and crime were rife in the large cities of the Empire, exacerbated by racial, religious and economic rivalries and jealousies. To many the "end of history" seemed to be at hand. And Alaric was a baptized Christian. Against a similar historical backdrop, there is among Christians in Canada a rising tide of apprehension, anger, a sense of betrayal and alarm at the speed with which the formerly Christian fabric of Canadian society has been unraveled within the half generation since 1982 and certainly within the generation since 1968. It may not be politically correct to observe that the sacking of Christian Canada has been largely accomplished by baptized Christians. Yet, the Alarics in our legislatures and on our benches have demonstrated that laws can be as effective as fire and the sword in the destruction of earthly cities, and that persecution and oppression can be equally wrought by psychological as well as physical means. Augustine described the state as a "band of brigands"—an analogy with which many find it easy to identify in Canada today, as they sense that something is terribly wrong in their country, that Canada, like the United States, seems to be careening out of control, while its elites plunder their spiritual inheritance and increasingly deny its expression in everyday life. While it is the Christian community which is primarily under siege from lawmakers in Canada today, by virtue of its greater numbers, it is mistaken to think that Christians are the only target of the self-assumed smart and sophisticated legislators and judges of the past generation. Rather, it is religious faith itself, in all its forms, which is the target—that precious sense imprinted in human kind that there is a deep mystery at the heart of the universe, whose personal knowledge gives the highest meaning and purpose to the otherwise seemingly accidental collection of existential events of ordinary existence. While some members of non-Christian religious groups, recently arrived in Canada, still think that they are striking a blow for freedom of religion against a strong and powerful Christian establishment, by targeting Sunday pause days or public school holidays, the more recent increase in co-operation amongst adherents of both Christian and non-Christian religions in targeting the modern, liberal, secular state, and all its works, suggests growing appreciation of the political power of a common foe. In any case, the speed of the collapse of the Christian edifice and the paucity of dust and rubble left behind in the public square (although not necessarily on the private hearth) suggests it to have been a cardboard facade, a movie set, long ago gutted, and requiring only a whisper to topple. As psychologically satisfying as it may be, to open for Sunday shopping or wear a kirpan to school, the fact remains that the gutting of the Christian public square has been largely the work of nominal Christians over the past few generations, who have suffered profound doubt, loss of self-confidence and nerve, in the face of secular modernism. When judges can blandly assert (as did the Ontario C.A. in Peel,1 in 1991) that Christmas and Good Friday are mere commercial holidays devoid of religious significance, and sustainable as such, as holidays, the Christian game in the public square is clearly up. Assaulted for over a century by science, socialism, affluence and the ridicule of the intelligentsia, many Christians have retreated to self-doubt, self-loathing, loss of faith, apology and compromise—frequently finding temporary relief in accommodation with apparently compatible secular ideologies, such as the social gospel with the welfare state. But accommodation has too often metamorphosed into assimilation, so that purportedly Christian communities often minimize and trivialize belief to the point of non-recognition. Yet, some signs that the corner has been turned and assimilation has been identified as faith-destroying, are now evident, as the Christian community realizes that not only ought it not to be regarded as the real target but rather that in harmony with Moslems, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews should turn to face the true enemy of all people of faith, the secular, socialist state in Canada and its institutional fellow travelers. It is the state and its instruments, the legislatures, the courts, the social welfare agencies, the schools and universities, which have neutered, trivialized, ridiculed and banned from public discourse the practice and expression of faith in the public square. This banishment of religion qua religion from the public square in Western societies may well constitute a turning point in the evolution of the liberal, democratic state from freedom to a totalitarianism which threatens not only faithful citizens but all citizens who wish to pursue their personal visions for their lives in liberty and to participate in public discourse on any topic in the language they naturally use. The alarming acceleration in the silencing of voices deemed to be politically incorrect—and there can be no more politically incorrect voice than the voice of faith in the public square—suggests that the movement from democracy to totalitarianism is further advanced than might be wished. Let us consider what our legislatures and courts have done in recent years to bring us to this not so pretty pass. Examples of attempts to eradicate religion from the significant experiences, events and relationships of life abound.1. Education: All religious faiths share a common future: their children. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the school classroom is the most shell-pocked battleground for religious disputes whether between faiths or between church and state. It is salutary to recall that state-financed public education systems are a recent feature of Western societies and that for our great grandparents, the church-run school and university was the social and educational norm. However, with the advent of state schooling, the requirement of the state that children attend school at least until age sixteen, because this is thought to be in the future best interests of society, means that the battle for the classroom is permanently joined. Since education is funded by parents and other taxpayers, it might be expected that the educational establishments and courts would pay some attention to their concerns generally, and in particular to the concerns of religious parents, in the education of their children. So, what of it? Religious exercises (even faith-based through the temporary separation of children)—banned by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1988 (Zylberberg).2 Religious instruction (even faith-based through the temporary separation of children)—banned by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1989/91 (Essex County Case).3 Funding for religious schools on a Charter s. 15(1) equality basis with Roman Catholic schools—denied on the grounds that this would be destructive to the public schools and that Roman Catholic school funding is an irrelevant historical anomaly whose constitutional entrenchment puts it beyond further re-examination for all eternity—the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 (Education Act Case)4 and the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1994 (Adler).5 And, as for home-schooling by religious parents, the Supreme Court of Canada has said that when provincial legislation requires provincial certification, a failure to invite state approval is not protected by s. 2(a) of the Charter but is a reason to prohibit homeschooling as a reasonable limit demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society pursuant to s. 1 of the Charter (Jones, 1985)6. And as for the universities? Well, while "academic freedom" (whatever that means) has probably precluded judicial supervision of university life to date, it is well-known that the culture of contemporary Canadian universities is such that academic freedom may only protect the attempted indoctrination of students in Marxism, radical feminism and the other current obsessions of an intellectually and morally decadent intelligentsia. Become known as a religious person on campus, whether student or professor, and you will be professionally sidelined, publicly ridiculed (with no speech code protection) and suspected of or be openly accused of being unfit to hold a university appointment. History, politics, philosophy, literature, must now be taught with religion left out. And, of course, those modern subjects, such as sociology, psychology, criminology, have been largely antithetical to religion from their respective outsets. In short, with the exception of the state-financed schools of those constitutionally privileged Roman Catholics, our public educational system is a spiritual wasteland, devastated by the courts and the educational establishment. But, in recent years, more sinister still, the schoolroom has become a centre for attack upon religious belief and the moral values instilled through belief. Faith—all faiths—are treated like life-style choices, all equally valid and invalid, like homosexuality. Thus, children are placed in a situation of confusion where the lessons in the classroom contradict the moral directions given by devout parents of all faiths, a situation with the potential to undermine permanently the relationship of parent and child. The eradication of religion from the public school classroom has been virtually achieved. The assault upon the nurturing of religious faith by home and church in the growing child has begun.2. Employment: There have been three major points of confrontation between the religiously devout and their employers over the past decade or so: absence from the workplace on holy days; wearing religious dress or religious symbols on the job; and, attempts to control the private lives of employees. While the education cases show the consistent application of the principle that religion be banned from the classroom, a somewhat different pattern seems to run through the employment cases, that is, the courts have generally accommodated religious practice on the job with one exception. Where the challenges have been made by members of minority, often recently arrived groups, the courts have always acceded to their requests, but where the issue has been an employer requirement of a religious practice for mainstream Protestant employees, the judicial decision has almost always gone against the enforcement of that requirement. Thus, both courts and human rights tribunals have required employers to accommodate to the point of hardship the holy days of Seventh Day Adventism, the Worldwide Church of God, Judaism, and of one solitary member of the Free Church of Scotland, residing in Ontario (O'Malley;7 Christie;8 Renaud;9 Gohm;10 Rand;11 Janssen12). Sikhs have been permitted to wear turbans when safety helmets might have been thought advisable (with potential social costs to all taxpayers in the event of accidents) (Bhinder13) and kirpans where a weapon-free environment might seem safer, in schools and hospitals—but not in the courts (Singh14). But where an evangelical Christian school or nursing home have sought to ensure that their employees practice Christian moral precepts in their private lives and accordingly have dismissed employees living common law or who have had children out of wedlock, their reinstatement has been ordered on the ground that Christian lives are not a bona fide occupational requirement for employment in Christian institutions, unless this is made an express written condition of employment. (Garrod15; Parks16; Lothian17). By contrast, the courts have consistently upheld the constitutional right of Roman Catholic schools to dismiss teachers who have married outside the church, indeed in all the reported cases to believing and practising Protestants, as within the ambit of the s. 93 entrenched rights of these schools. (Caldwell18; Stack19; Casagrande20; NTA21). Thus, dismissal for "denominational cause" is permitted to Roman Catholic school boards because it is thought to be constitutionally mandated, but denied to other Christian institutions. Thus, the accommodation of some religious practices is permitted but others may not be insisted upon even within a religious institution. No devout person of any faith can be critical of the decisions relating to holy days or wearing religious symbols on the job. Members of all faiths would hope to receive similar treatment. Wearing crosses or crucifixes is, after all, offensive to many Christians, yet these practices have never been illegal. However, the denial of a right to privately-funded Protestant organizations to require a Christian life of their employees is deeply troubling. Is this reverse discrimination against Protestants? Are the courts trashing some imagined Protestant establishment or engaging in self-hatred? Or, is the unspoken trajectory uniting both education and employment cases, an equally unspoken judicial assault upon Protestantism in Canada? The proper interpretation of these cases is fraught with ambiguity.3. Family Life: Religion and the law intersect in two areas of family life today: custody in divorce proceedings and health care decisions for minors. At one time, the law regulated virtually all aspects of family life, primarily through the Criminal Code, so as to enforce Christian moral and sexual teaching in relation both to family and other personal relationships. Most of this legislation has been repealed, leaving citizens free to make their own choices in such matters. Nevertheless, courts do continue to intervene, particularly when decisions involving children must be made. Thus, in making custody and access orders, courts give instructions in relation to the religious upbringing of the children—whether they may be taken to religious services, participate in other religious activities (proselytizing), or be given religious instruction in the homes. The overriding principle in making such orders is the best interests of the child, as determined by the court.22 While I strongly believe that family court judges try to do their absolute best in making such orders, it should be recalled that most faiths regard parents, alone, as having authority over their children, so that the potential for conflict is ever present when the state purports to exercise its authority over children in a fashion conflicting with parental views. Courts have also recently removed decisions about the health care of children from their parents in matters of life and death when religious issues have to be weighed, in particular, in relation to those cases in which Jehovah's Witnesses' children requiring blood transfusions are placed in protection for the duration of the treatment and then are returned to their parents after the course of treatment has ended. The religious views of the parents have been entirely overridden and deemed irrelevant to a decision based on the secular, modern preference for life at all costs, even (for religious people) at the cost of eternal life.234. Health: While the courts and the legislature have generally left adults with the freedom to determine their own health care on the basis of their religious or other beliefs, protecting these decisions through the common law doctrines of informed consent and the torts of assault and battery, the beginning and the end of life have come to be matters of debate in the public square, with strangers attempting to shape laws within which those whom they do not know will have their fates determined. Presumably, the reason that birth and death have come to be contentious matters is that at each point in life, a person is not able to make informed choices for herself, and the issues are of who shall make those choices and what criteria shall be used to make those choices. Matters of life and death have become public property today as society appears to abound in persons willing to make decisions on behalf of the unborn fetus and the unconscious dying person. Since the de-criminalization of abortion by the Supreme Court of Canada in Morgentaler24 in 1988, theoretically, women are legally free to have abortions. Those whose religious views prohibit abortion need not undergo the procedure. But should those whose religious views prohibit abortion as murder expect to use the public law to force those who do not share their views to forgo the procedure? Would they wish to have the views of others in other medical issues forced upon them? Who should make the decision—the party or parties most closely concerned or society generally, or at least that part of society which makes our laws? Paradoxically, a religious view which regards parents as having Godgiven authority over their children to the exclusion of all others is compatible with the view that the decision over the future of the fetus belongs to its parents; who must also, of course, take responsibility for their decision to all eternity. That abortion is no longer regarded as a moral decision founded in religious beliefs about the sanctity of divinely created life is evident in two features of the public debate over the past decade or so. First, the public abortion debate has been transformed from being about the right to life and/or murder of an unborn fetus into a women's equality issue. Morgentaler exemplified and blessed this transformation, as the Supreme Court adopted the construction of the issue advocated by radical feminism, as solely a women's issue. As a result, secondly, public funding for abortion through the tax system means that religious people opposed to abortion on religious grounds or those who are opposed to it on other moral grounds are nevertheless obligated to support it indirectly. Thus, abortion funding has come to represent the fundamental moral dilemma which the welfare state poses for people of all faiths, insofar as political elites have created legal entitlements funded by reluctant taxpayers to state-financed services unreflective of the moral views of substantial numbers of taxpayers. Death could be defined as the ultimate equality issue since it is the fate we are all born equally to face. The recent public debate as to how the public law should be drafted to impose public solutions on decisions that touch on matters of faith, suggests once more that decisions about life and death, in relation to which most religions speak, are being removed from their original theological context to be tossed around on the sea of public opinion, as shaped frequently by non-religious people. Whether the issue is the legal status of living wills requesting "no heroic measures"; self-inflicted suicide; assisted suicide; or active euthanasia, most religious people would prefer to make their own decision informed by their own theological views both for themselves and for their immediate relatives, rather than in the light of state-imposed views not necessarily similar to their own.5. The Welfare State: Underlying the foregoing issues is, of course, the general problem which an homogenous welfare state poses in a religiously and culturally plural society. At one time, when western societies were more homogenous than they are now, it seemed a good idea to ensure that minimum standards of living were accorded to those members of society who could not gain such for themselves and that the state was the most appropriate vehicle for that wealth transfer. Now, we are no longer sure about much that is done in the name of social justice, especially when affirmative action programs increasingly appear to bestow special legal and economic privileges on sections of or groups in society whose privileges are founded on claims repugnant morally to the faithful of many religions. In earlier, less complex societies in which families and communities of faith cared for one another in sickness and in health, and in which governments were small and far away, the separation of church and state could be more easily accommodated, although ironically, was hardly necessary in light of the cultural and religious homogeneity of those societies. But the modern, welfare state with its complex social welfare system and universal taxation base makes it difficult for religious people to devote the fruits of their labours to social projects congruent with their religious beliefs. Indeed, when such a political system is dominated by elites who would silence contrary voices, religious or not, the tension created for religious people who are under a duty of good stewardship of their earthly possessions is very great indeed. As individual taxpayers have learned when they have withheld taxes in relation to government expenditures on defence (Prior25) or for abortion funding (O'Sullivan26), the courts are unsympathetic, characterizing the dilemma as either a chimera in the mind of a just quite possibly unbalanced litigant or as a trivial infringement of freedom of belief and as such permissible in a free and democratic society. Of course, chaos would result if it were otherwise—it would be impossible to tailor tax regimes for every individual taxpayer and to re-jig them periodically to reflect that taxpayer's changing views in life. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the solution increasingly advocated by religious people is to reduce the size of the state and the number of entitlements to the minimum required for economic progress: real classroom education, basic health care and law and order. Let all citizens, including citizens of faith, be free to dedicate their money to the private entitlement systems which accord with their beliefs, once the basics for a civilized society have been provided universally.6. Intrusion into Domestic Church Affairs: Courts, and occasionally legislatures, have always in our constitutional system, founded on Parliamentary sovereignty, had jurisdiction to regulate the internal domestic affairs of religious institutions. In the past, diffidence and reluctance to interfere was the normal response, although there are certainly cases of intervention when a court thought that to be the appropriate response. Recently, intervention has become more frequent, indeed approaching the norm, and courts no longer begin their decisions with those embarrassed apologies at having to interfere, once ritually expressed by reluctant judges prior to rendering judgment. Admittedly, judicial intervention has been good at times, such as in the recent spate of cases requiring the United Church of Canada to employ fair procedures in its church courts—an injunction equally applicable to other denominations as well (Lindenberger27; McCaw28; Davis29; Lakeside30). On the other hand, once the practice of intervention in domestic matters becomes ingrained in the judicial attitude to religious institutions, one must fear for a future in which the issue is not procedure, but substantive theology, and in which theological issues are transformed into equality issues, such as the ordination of practising homosexuals or of women, in those churches theologically opposed to such. There is no current reason for optimism that theology will be accorded precedence to "equality", when such issues come before our secularized courts, as the transformation of the abortion issue predicts. How might we summarize these developments since 1982? Essentially, religion has been excised from the schools and universities and from those family arrangements which are still obliged to come into contact with the law. Other issues, which were once regarded as governed by divine revelation, as found in holy books, have been re-categorized in public discourse as equality issues, in which the dominant voices in the public square are those whose views contravene divine revelation, and who may also have, according to opinion polls, tiny support bases within the general population. While the courts increasingly intervene in the domestic affairs of religious organizations, whether by dictating the life styles permitted to their employees or by re-instating dismissed clergy. Under the rubric of freedom of religion, as a society we have moved quickly toward freedom from religion. The modern, overarching welfare state has proven itself to be as much as enemy of religious autonomy as it is of economic, political, social and individual moral autonomy. It is possible to be even more specific and to suggest five general underlying themes and trends in these legal developments in Canada. First, most of the cases inviting confrontation between church and state in Canada have been initiated by members of recently arrived minority religious groups, who think that they are engaged in a great work, wresting freedom and liberation from a strong Christian state. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are tilting to windmills. The left liberal judiciary happily accommodates them because as secular moderns, they no longer care. Thus, the social task of thinking through how to make religious pluralism work has fallen into the laps of the religiously cynical—an unpleasant prospect for all. Secondly, the accommodation of non-Christian religious groups has been largely at the expense of the historic religious minorities in Canada—Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Presbyterians. The religious censuses since Confederation show that the largest religious group in Canada has always been the Roman Catholic church and since the 1951 Census, it has also been just about the majority, hovering about 50% of the population. The historical Protestant denominations have always been, individually, minority religions in Canada in contrast to the Roman Catholic church and have never enjoyed the constitutional entrenchment of powers enjoyed by that church pursuant to s. 93, other than for a period of about 60 years in Quebec before the provincial government watered down the funding guarantees for Protestant denominational schools. Thirdly, while the purpose of recent litigation had been to achieve accommodation within Canadian society, the effect of the litigation has been the removal, generally, of religion from public life and public institutions. Of course, this may well be the only workable solution in the classroom or in the Criminal Code, but an unwanted outcome has also been the marginalization and, therefore, trivialization of religion as a significant factor in both public and private lives. Fourthly, the trivialization and marginalization of religious perspectives has been facilitated and legalized by the legislatures and especially the courts, which have been manned for most of the past generation by secularized judges and legislators, who do not even bother, in contrast to their American equivalents, to pay public lip-service to religious concerns. The assault on "Christian Canada" mounted by recently arrived religious groups has meshed quite nicely with the political and social agendas of the political elite. Fifthly, the net result has been the transformation of many public issues from moral or theological issues rooted in divine revelation as God's purpose for his creation into secular issues, framed as equality issues by predominantly anti-religious special interest groups and their liberal supporters, in a way which frequently perverts and disguises their origins in religious morality. The reason for the political success of this transformation is clear—who can be opposed to equality? Thus, even religious people are reluctantly co-opted into the secular goals of our secular society. Contemporary society requires some schizophrenia of the devout of all faiths as they accommodate often conflicting public and private agendas. Some release from this tension might be got by adopting a live and let live attitude; however, momentary recall that, as a taxpayer, the devout person in a welfare state is still required to finance conduct regarded as morally wrong, because it is a contravention of God's laws, quickly deflates that easy option. Not surprisingly, public debate, once inconceivable, about dismantlement of both public social nets and private employment benefit plans is beginning, not simply because the money may no longer be there but, more importantly, because the public will may no longer be there either. From the perspective of a religious person, the dismantlement in substantial part of the excessive state entitlement schemes might allow for the recovery of what the homogenous welfare state has obscured, individual identity as a religious person within a community of faith, leading a life of integrity rather than alienation. One of the great gifts of all religious groups in Canada, brought by recent immigrants from other religious traditions, is the remembrance of and models for the recovery of integrity and coherence as communities of faith. Additionally, these groups have further demonstrated how important to community integrity and identity is the willingness to speak in the public square in a religious voice. That is, to assert in the teeth of secular politics and its marginalization of religious perspectives that communities of faith can be autonomous and independent centres of authority and meaning with as justifiable a claim, even measured against liberal criteria, to be protected and heard as such in public discourse as the claims of other special interest groups today. The assimilation of indigenous 20th-century Protestantism in Canada with secular modernism stands reproved in contrast. The idea that religious groups usefully serve as autonomous centres of authority in the modern state is not new. In his clairvoyant book, Democracy in America, published in 1848, Baron Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the role religious groups could play vis à vis the modern state, as a bulwark against state tyranny for the ordinary person and as an independent moral voice. Recently, Professor Stephen Carter of Yale Law School has re-worked this theme in The Culture of Disbelief, published in 1993. The observation is equally applicable in Canada today. To raise successfully, the religious voice in the public square today, many biases, characteristic of "the culture of disbelief" must be overcome. Professor Carter identifies some:the myth that religious people are in some pre-Enlightenment sense, irrational or abnormal—a view very popular amongst psychologists;the notion that "God" should be a private hobby—indeed, perhaps the last private hobby to be indulged in the dark and behind closed doors;the myth that faith necessarily leads to political sedition;the public willingness to hear the religious voice in support of liberal political causes but to denounce the religious voice when it speaks in support of politically incorrect causes;the assumption that because the origins and inspiration for the religious voice are inaccessible to the post-Enlightenment scientific mind, because found in divine revelation, that the religious voice is therefore irrelevant;the liberal assumption that only economic entitlements and political rights are important to people today, so that only these may be discussed in public;the myth that because the faith claims of every faith are both exclusive and universal, therefore, faiths can never live side-by-side or engage in interfaith dialogue;the assertion that when religious people speak as such in the public square, they are arrogantly trying to impose their beliefs on others, but that when those others speak, they are modestly offering some ideas for public consideration;the myth that when religious language is used in public discourse, it is always, as it so often seems to be in America, phony, and an attempt to impose some kind of "civil religion" on Canada, which is vaguely "Protestant" but largely vacuous and platitudinous.Recent liberal political theorists (John Rawls, Bruce Ackerman, Kent Greenwalt) have argued that when religious people wish to participate in public debate, they should do so in secular language, providing secular justifications for the positions urged, although their origins may be religious. Such theorists believe that there exist certain moral premises shared by all persons and that public debate can proceed on the basis of these premises. Thus, all participants in the debate should shed their backgrounds, and just perhaps, their true selves, in order to participate. On the other hand, Professor Carter has argued that every person should be free to speak with his or her own voice in the public square—whether that voice is religious or not. I agree. Every person should be permitted to be themselves in public discourse as much as in private discourse. And there may well not be any fundamental shared moral premises at all. This requires a psychological re-adjustment to be made in the way in which we think about religious and other groups, from a position of mere toleration or accommodation to a position of real equality of voice—a level playing field. This means a collective rejection of our current way of thinking about religions in Canadian society as one where there is a single majority and a variety of minorities. With the possible exception of the Roman Catholic church, which has never got over that 50% hump in the census statistics, we are all minorities. A glance at the 1991 Census shows that there are 84 different religious minorities recorded, as well as about 4 million unbelievers. We are a nation of religious minorities. "Toleration" is, therefore, an inappropriate concept since it requires not only the existence of a majority, but also implies on the part of that majority, forbearance, absence of respect, non-approval and an implicit hope of conversion in relation to the "tolerated" minorities. Toleration is a power word. In any case, Toleration is not even a religious virtue, since all faiths worth their salt profess exclusive and universal access to truth, while toleration imports lukewarmness and even absence of real belief. Rather, instead of thinking about religions in terms of toleration or accommodation, perhaps it is time to jump into a new psychological attitude and language which respects the exclusive and universal claims of each religion without public criticism, that is, a language acknowledging an equality of voices, including religious voices in public discourse. In any case, religions are showing no signs of melting away along with capitalism as Marx had expected, so as a society we might as well get used to its many voices, as well as the remarkable number of times, many faiths can speak with one voice on public issues. The accommodation of religious equality within the public square is more easily accomplished within the American constitution than our own. The First Amendment that, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", was originally designed to protect religion from the state, rather than the state from religion. Today, it is widely interpreted to ensure absolute state neutrality in its dealing with religious groups, which therefore enjoy complete equality before the law. The First Amendment constitutes a voluntary surrender by the state of control over religion. How differently we have arranged things in Canada. Our Charter (s.2(a)) guarantees freedom of conscience and religion as a fundamental freedom, but only if demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society (s.1), as decided by the judiciary. It also entrenches privileges for denominational schools (s. 93 & s. 29) by way of state funding. Rather than voluntarily surrendering control over religion, the Canadian constitution grants the regulation of religion to the courts, which since 1982, have ritually commented not only that freedom of religion is far from absolute in Canada, rather is a relative matter which may be infringed upon in favour of some more pressing policy, but also that equality of treatment for religions is not mandated by the Constitution and that again, it is constitutionally permissible to treat religions unequally in this country. The First Amendment sustains and nurtures a political environment in America where religions can be autonomous centres of moral authority; the Charter subjects them to the power of the state in Canada. History presents many examples of the fact that one of the earliest actions of totalitarian states, once they are fully established, is the abolition by law of religious freedom and the bringing of religious institutions into the strangling grip of some department of state. Independent centres of authority to the state are unwelcome, and religious centres, drawing as they do on the deepest and most meaningful experiences and resources available to humankind are rightly seen as the most subversive force in totalitarian societies. The gradual eradication of the religious voice from the public square in Canada should not distract us from the fact of that eradication and the threat it poses to liberty generally. Yet, historically, there was no force more intimately related to the evolution of modern parliamentary democracy than religion. Those who still remember the history of that development—with the religion left in—will recall that religion and religious concerns, were the key issues at every step along the way of constitutional development. Religious freedom and political freedom evolved hand-in-hand. Freedom of religion is important not only to those who wish to be religious in late twentieth century Canada, but it is also essential as the touchstone for political freedom and the survival of the truly liberal state—not the socialist state in liberal disguise as we sometimes appear now to have in Canada. The revival of freedom of religion and of the religious voice in public discourse may well be essential to the re-formulation of the liberal state on the basis of genuine pluralism and equality. If we go on as we have recently done, the prospect before us is truly frightening. An hour or so ago we began with the Christian refugees from Rome and the pastoral response to them shown by the greatest father of the church, Augustine. Perhaps we might end with another group of religious refugees and another theologian for refugees who was a refugee himself. I hope you will indulge me while I practice what I have just preached, by relying on a leading theologian of my own faith community: John Calvin. Calvin, was with many other French Protestants, forced to flee the religious persecution of Protestants which marked the failure of the Reformation in France. He finally settled in Geneva along with so many of his fellow countrymen that the population of the town quadrupled in size in the space of a few years. Writing toward the end of his life in the final 1559 edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (IV.20.2). Calvin described the proper role for civil states in relation to religion thus: Civil government has as its appointed end, so long as we live among men, to cherish and protect the outward worship of God, to defend . . . the position of the church, to adjust our life to the society of men, to form our social behavior to civil righteousness, to reconcile us with one another, and to promote general peace and tranquillity . . . If it is God's will that we go as pilgrims upon the earth while we aspire to the true fatherland, and if the pilgrimage requires such help, those who take these from man deprive him of his very humanity.Let us hope that the peoples of all faiths in Canada join hands to take back our common humanity from those who would deprive us of it.Notes 1 Re: Regional Municipality of Peel, etc. (1991) 78 D.L.R. (4th) 33 (Ont. C.A.).2 Zylberberg v. Sudbury Board of Education (1988) 52 D.L.R. (4th) 577 (Ont. C.A.).3 Canadian Civil Liberties Assn. v. Ontario (Minister of Education) (1990) 65 D.L.R. (4th) 1 (Ont. CA.).4 Reference re: Bill 30 (1987) 1 S.C.R. 1148.5 Re: Adler and The Queen (1994) 19 O.R. (ed) 1 (Ont. C.A.).6 Jones v. The Queen (1986) 31 D.L.R. (4th) 569 (S.C.C.).7 Re: O.H.R.C. and Simpsons Sears Ltd. (1985) 23 D.L.R. (4th) 321 (S.C.C.).8 Alta. H.R.C. v. Central Alta. Dairy Pool, etc. (1990) 72 D.L.R. (4th) 417 (S. C.C.).9 Central Okanagan etc. v. Renaud etc. (1992) 95 D.L.R. (4th) 577 (S.C.C.).10 Gohm v. Domtar Inc. (1992) 89 D.L.R. (4th ) 305 (Ont. Div. Ct.)11 Rand v. Sealy etc. (1982) 3 C.H.R.R. D/938 (Ont. Bd. Of Inq.).12 Janssen v. Ontario Milk Marketing Board (1990) 13 C.H.R.R. D/397 (Ont. Bd. Of Inq.).13 Binder v. C.N.R. (1985) 23 D.L.R. (4th) 481 (S. C.C.).14 O.H.R.C. and Pandori v. Peel (1991) 80 D.L.R. (4th) 475 (Ont. Div. Ct.) and Singh v. W.C.B. Hospital, etc. (1981) 2 C.H.R.R. D/459 (Ont. Bd. Of Inq.).15 Garrod v. Rehema Christian School (1991) 92 C.L.L.C. 17,003 (Cdn. H.R.T.).16 Parks v. Christian Horizons (1991) 92 C.L.L.C. 17,008 (Cdn. H.R.T.).17 Lothian v. Catholic C.A.S. (Toronto) (1986) 8 C.H.R.R. D/3969 (Ont. Bd. Of Inq.).18 Re: Caldwell and Stuart (1984) 15 D.L.R. (4th) l (S.C.C.).19 Stack v. St. John's R.C. School Board (1979) 99 D.L.R. (3d) 278 (Nfld. T.D.).20 Casagrande v. Hinton R.C. Separate School District No. 155 (1987) 38 D.L.R. (4th) 382 (Alta. Q.B.).21 Re: Nfd. Teachers' Association etc. (1988) 53 D.L.R. (4th) 161 (Nfld. C.A.).22 Young v. Young (1993) 4 S.C.R. 3 and P.(O) and S.(C) (1993) 4 S.C.R. 14.23 See "Editorial Note" at the end of main text.24 R. v. Morgentaler (1988) 1 S. C. R. 30 (See "Editorial Note" at end of main text).25 Prior v. R. (1989) 89 D.T.C. 5503 (S.C.C.).26 O'Sullivan v. M.N.R. (1992) 84 D.L.R. (4th) 124 (F.C.T.D.).27 Lindenberger v. U.C.C. (1987) 20 O.A.C. 381 (C.A.).28 McCaw v. U.C.C. (1991) 82 D.L.R. (4th) 289 (Ont. C.A.).29 Davis v. U.C.C. (1992) 8 O.R. (3d) 75 (Gen. Div.).30 Lakeside Colony v. Hofer (1992) 97 D.L.R. (4th) 17 (S.C.C.).

What should Canadians expect from the new Stephen Harper-led minority government? Predicting the direction of any government is an imprecise science—governments necessarily respond to the issues of the day, and their best intentions can be overtaken by political dynamics. Especially for a minority government, agendas are necessarily shaped by compromise and by a keen "political" rather than "governmental" mindset. Still, there are core motivating priorities that will emerge at the heart of this governing party, and understanding where they fit within the political framework remains the most reliable predictor of how Canadians can expect to be governed. How is this political framework being formed? Some analysts have focused on the regional differences between the West and central Canada; others have highlighted the urban-rural split in voting patterns; still others find most significant the social values and fiscal values which are seen to divide not only Canadians but even the Conservative Party. To one degree or another, all of these forces are obviously in play. But in order to turn our focus from the rear-view mirror (what brought us here) to the front window (what lies ahead), it will be helpful first to understand why this week's election played out as it did. Consider at least these three alternative theories on what this vote meant.Three theories for the Conservative mandate One theory suggests that voters used this election to "send the Liberals a message" that their role as the natural governing party is not absolute. Although uncomfortable with the Conservatives and their real agenda, it was an acceptable risk to allow them a short-term stint, while the Liberals are punished for allowing scandals and internal division to distract from the task of good government. The expectation is that the Harper government is just a blip that will fast-forward the Liberal internal renewal process, and that in a few years, with a new leader and renewed vision, the Liberals will almost naturally reassume their governing role, since they better reflect the "centre" of Canadian values. A second theory presumes that both the Conservatives and Liberals are in the mainstream of "the Canadian consensus," and while the wedge issues of a campaign magnify the differences between the parties, essentially both walk the centre line. The 2004 election represented the first time since 1988 that Canadians had a choice between two parties that had a realistic chance of forming government. And as long as that choice exists, future campaigns will most likely be about management and competence. It really doesn't much matter which party governs—the essential policy direction and vision of the Conservatives and Liberals are relatively compatible. An inevitable mainstream momentum of public consensus will drive government decision-making, regardless of who holds office. There is a third theory. It requires us to revisit the very idea of a Canadian consensus and "Canadian values" and ask if there really is a homogeneous mainstream that represents, whether with a right or left emphasis, a clear path on which to govern. Questioning the mainstream model is certainly a daunting task; it is, after all, the working consensus in today's broad public debate. The present model has been operative since Pierre Trudeau, and its continuation can be labelled a pan-Canadian consensus:a strong central government unified under the maple leaf, multiculturalism and bilingualism;an activist government developing new social programs (cf. the argument of some in the recent campaign that national daycare is as desirable as national health care);an aggressive rights-based polity that identifies with tolerance over definition;peacekeeping over taking on one's enemies; andprograms targeting the perceived causes of crime over policing and punishment.There is little question that governments from Trudeau's in the 1960s through Mulroney's into the 1990s operated on the premise of this pan- Canadian consensus. But what's happened to that consensus today, in 2006? The answer to that question is the key to understanding Stephen Harper and what Canadians should expect from his Conservative government.Cracks in consensus Understand the division (and failure) of yesterday, and one might understand the unity (and success) of today. In explaining 20 years of division of the political right, it is too easy to call it simply a poorly managed civil war and too easy to attribute Harper's success today to his ability to simply put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Rather, it is more accurate to see these 20 years as the process by which the political right sorted out its response to the demise of the pan-Canadian consensus. It is telling that the issues dividing the party were not just those that typically split social conservatives, neo-conservatives, and red Tories. The fissure erupted while the Conservatives held power under Mulroney and resulted in not one but two significant breakaway groups: the Reform Party in Western Canada and the Bloc Québécois in Quebec (as well as several less significant movements including the Confederation of Regions Party and the Christian Heritage Party). While these movements disagreed about many things, what they had in common was an agreement that the pan-Canadian consensus wasn't for them. Although what you are against forms an easy point for division, the genius of successful politics is translating that into what you are for in a way that can attract the support of a critical mass. For the right, this integrating process began with the October 2003 agreement between Peter MacKay as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and Stephen Harper as leader of the Canadian Alliance. The 2004 federal election was held before the new party had an opportunity to define its framework consensus in a policy convention. Although the Conservative policy convention in Montreal in March 2005 was as significant for the topics it avoided (e.g. contentious social issues) as for those that it addressed, its declarations provided the launching pad on which the campaign platform of 2006 could be designed. What is most significant from a careful analysis of both the convention declarations and the 2006 platform is that they do not neatly fit within any one of the various camps that make up the Conservative Party but represent instead a unique amalgam of the many streams of contemporary conservative thought. This significance can be illustrated in two policies that had significant play in the recent campaign. The first is the daycare policy. The Liberals had in the previous Parliament introduced a national daycare policy that reflected classic pan-Canadian politics: the federal government provides the money through a series of federal-provincial agreements that allow the feds to both insist on certain conditions and claim credit for a "national daycare program" that, even by the most optimistic of predictions, would provide child care space for only a small fraction of the nation's children.There was a diverse reaction to this proposal within the conservative camp. Libertarians found the increased reach of government unnecessary and expensive. Social conservatives naturally rejected this state involvement in family life. But to avoid advocating a daycare program would have alienated the Red Tories in the tent. The fiscal conservatives were not ideologically opposed to daycare per se, but did worry about the longterm burden of another universal social program. The other camps within the conservative streams had variations on these concerns. The daycare alternative proposed by the Conservatives in their 2006 platform was as popular as it was symbolic: budgeting twice as much money as the Liberals in order to provide $1,200 per child under six years old for parents to spend as they choose. The compromise not only won enthusiastic support from almost every corner of the Conservative Party, it reflected the sort of solution that better suits the new era of Canadian politics. It was understood and celebrated very differently in different parts of the constituency, precisely because the pan-Canadian consensus has dissolved. The point is, even as the policy has different results as the money flows to different people, the compromise is widely supported. A similar example is the Conservative policy regarding the fiscal imbalance. Several analysts have suggested the turning point of the campaign was Stephen Harper's December 19 speech in Quebec City. Although a lot of groundwork had preceded this speech outside of the public eye, until that day the Conservatives were perceived by virtually everyone to be a non-factor in Quebec, with less than 10 percent support in that province. In one month, they converted that to 25 percent and 10 seats in the province. Though the bravado from every leader on patriotism, the maple leaf and the fleur-de-lis was hard to penetrate, the Quebec City speech hit its stride on the fiscal imbalance issue or, to oversimplify, the appropriate powers and responsibilities of federal and provincial governments when it comes to taxation. It was here that the Conservatives unveiled their (awkwardly named) "Charter of Open Federalism." The details of this document have understandably escaped the notice of most Canadians, but its impact is significant. Essentially, under this plan, no new federal proposals regarding national cost-shared programs (such as daycare) may be proposed without majority provincial support. Even then, provinces that wish to opt out can receive financial compensation provided they offer a comparable provincial program. Since finding a way for the provinces to pay for health and education is among the most difficult tasks facing Canadian politicians for the next decade, the ground rules established by this plan could scarcely have been more timely. The point is this: for 30 years, the federal government has assumed the role of equalizing and ensuring standards across the country—defending and enforcing the pan-Canadian consensus. It is clear, both in the West and in Quebec, that this consensus has been fraying for some time. But the lack of a credible national alternative has allowed the Liberals to keep power. Even though the principles underlying the Liberal government have remained unchanged essentially since the 1960s (and if this theory is right, no longer reflect a Canadian consensus), what the Liberals lacked in ideas they made up for in superior organization and tactics (at least until this campaign). It isn't without reason that Wilfrid Laurier remains a Liberal icon: "It is not enough to have good principles; we must have organization also. Principles without organization may lose, but organization without principles may often win."Ahead of the curve To summarize the theories and their implications, if the first is right, there is a Canadian consensus and the Conservatives are outside it. The most Harper can hope for is to competently manage government while the Liberals renew themselves, but as soon as they do, they will reassume their place as the natural governing party. If the second theory is correct, both the Liberal and Conservative parties represent different streams in the mainstream consensus, and we are back to the two-plus party system that shaped Canadian politics from the 1950s through the 1980s, with the best organizers and managers likely to maintain power. This theory presumes there is no essential difference between the Conservatives and Liberals—both reflect the mainstream of Canadian values. While the parties may campaign against each other's policies, they will inevitably implement the same basic framework. (See for example the various positions on deficits, tax cuts, free trade, and the GST.) Under such a theory, a Harper government will look very much like the Martin government did. But if the third theory is correct (as we believe it is), then the Conservative party is ahead of the curve in adjusting to the emerging Canadian polity. The challenge of Liberal renewal thus runs much deeper than finding a way of overcoming the internal feud between Chrétienites and Martinites. A new expression of liberalism must be found that works within the postpan- Canadian consensus era. There are hints that this internal discussion is taking place under the surface within the party, although traditional Liberal discipline has for the most part kept this out of the public eye. At the same time, the internal contradictions within the campaign were stark. Paul Martin made a centrepiece of equating values with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (including the proposal to dump the notwithstanding clause) while Deputy Prime Minister (and leading constitutional expert) Anne McLellan disagreed. Ironically, over 10 percent of Liberal candidates disagreed with their party on the immediate issue (samesex marriage) that provoked the discussion. Former deputy prime minister and leadership contender John Manley talked last year about a North American economic and security community. Newly elected MP and rumoured potential leader Michael Ignatieff outlined a foreign policy framework that is very different from his own party's. Thus, while it would be unfair to say that the Liberals had no ideas—they had many, and some were very provocative and worthwhile—it is fair to say that not all Liberals were working from the same framework, whatever common campaign slogans they might have been using. The results of this campaign demonstrate that all of the parties—Conservatives, Liberals and NDP—still have work to do to come to grips with whatever it is that will replace the pan-Canadian consensus. On the opposition side of the house, there is likely to be more radical reorganization (the freeing of the responsibiliites of government and a leadership race will provoke a more open and vigorous debate). We expect a very different political realignment between the Liberals and the NDP. The springtime agreement (and resulting "NDP budget") between Paul Martin and Jack Layton, plus the blatant appeals from each party for strategic "progressive" voting, indicate some partisan competition but more significantly, an attempt by both parties to hold on to the old pan-Canadian consensus. Both parties advanced in each of these past two elections a resistance to the "scary Conservative social agenda"—but with Harper unlikely to significantly push that agenda during this mandate, both parties face a huge challenge in the next election. The "Harper will take away your Charter rights" advertisements and arguments will simply not have any basis for credibility, and lacking an alternative argument, the opposition will see only further Conservative advances in the next election, and a majority government. The challenge for both the Liberals and the NDP is to find a new argument to raise, and such an argument is likely to find resonance only if it is based on the current reality of Canadian diversity, not a leftover argument from the old pan-Canadian consensus.Building the new consensus While the challenges for the NDP and Liberals are significant, they are much more intense for Prime Minister Harper, as his actions will be subjected to more intense media scrutiny. He needs to sort through the different aspirations of his coalition, keeping them all on-side while he lowers the expectations and the pent-up demands that 13 years (and for those who left the Mulroney conservatives earlier, 20 years) of opposition powerlessness have created. As we already noted, it is too simplistic to view the Conservative party as a fiscal/social conservative coalition. If the party's strength were that limited, it would inevitably crumble, as there are too few natural compromises around which such a coalition can be sustained, especially in the context of minority government. The nuances of the coalition are the keys, and it's in deeply understanding these nuances that Harper will find the building blocks for the consensus he needs to sustain power. In fact, Harper's model for making the different Conservative streams work together is where he will need to start in minority governance. The political left sees an almost counterpart six-party division on their own side, and it is minority government that will provide both a framework for Harper to work with the opposition and a spur for the Liberals and New Democrats to develop a renewed policy framework that will work in the post-pan-Canadian consensus era of Canadian politics.A six-strand coalition There are at least six distinct streams within the Conservative movement, all of which will need to find some identification within a Conservative government to motivate their ongoing support.Libertarians with an emphasis on individual rights and minimal government;Populist/democratic Conservatives with an emphasis on structural reform and process;Social Conservatives with an emphasis on social issues. This group is not as homogeneous. There are those for whom immediate action on the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage is a practical litmus test, while there are others (for whom a description such as Burkean Conservatives would be more accurate who advocate a broader social agenda. It would include creating space for institutions other than government to be part of the solution to larger problems. This would include a foreign aid agenda that leverages the relief work of religious organizations, alternative approaches to poverty and welfare issues that recognize a greater role for community (including religious) groups, and a cities agenda that recognizes a place for the church.Liberal Conservatives (Reagan Democrats) with a self-consciousness based on cultural identity and tradition;Fiscal Conservatives with an emphasis on fiscal accountability and less costly government; andRed Tories with some historic affiliation with the Progressive Conservative Party, but otherwise not fitting into any of the above categories.The way for Prime Minister Harper to appease the often-conflicting expectations of these groups will not be as much through the direct actions of the federal government but rather the facilitation of actions by others. The daycare example provides the classic illustration. By providing choice and space for other institutions (such as extended families, neighbours, community groups, faith groups, etc.) to provide daycare services and be indirectly supported through federal dollars, the proposal earns the support of these various groups in a way that a government daycare program never would.Sticking to priorities So what to expect from the Harper government? There is no immediate risk of any party forcing an election within two years so, assuming basically competent and scandal-free government, Harper has the space to implement the five priorities he highlighted during the campaign:Clean up accountability and ethics in Ottawa. As he noted in his election night speech, this will mean not just replacing Liberal appointees with Tory appointees, but changing the system to strengthen the institutions and make them accountable to the Canadian taxpayer.The crime and punishment agenda. Dealing with the crime issue will not only address a philosophic Conservative priority and election promise, but it will have the added benefit of increasing exposure to the leaders of major urban centres, which will raise the profile of Conservatives in those areas where they were electorally shut out.The child care choice via the tax credit.Tax reform: Symbolically important and practically impossible for the other parties to oppose, cutting the GST has tremendous symbolic significance as a promise that must be kept for the sake of political integrity.Committing the health care system to limiting patient waiting lists.As with health care, the fiscal imbalance issue will require great cooperation between federal and provincial governments. And for both issues, more significant even than the dollars involved is the structural impact. Tackling them will affect the "Quebec question" and will significantly impact the ability of federal governments to return to the pan-Canadian consensus model. Between these priorities, learning the ropes of effective politics, making Conservative rather than Liberal appointments, and providing a contrast in style and attitude to the Liberals, a Harper government will more than likely provide an adequate base for appealing in the next election for a majority. Will this keep Harper's base satisfied? The challenge will be whether the leaders of the various groups—all of whom had proportionately more influence in their part of the old divided right than they do in the larger united right—are patient enough to look for long-term change rather than a shortterm victory they can trumpet to their constituencies. That will require a significant mindset change—Conservatives are more accustomed to the periphery of complaining than the core of decisionmaking. And government is not the only institution that matters; cultural change cannot be legislated. The comparatively friendly ride (at least compared to previous campaigns) the Conservatives enjoyed from the media is unlikely to be repeated, and there is little evidence that the fifth estate has undergone the transition that government has. Cultural groups and even significant portions of the business establishment have well-established ties that are not close to this government. Old habits die hard, and it will take a sustained period of competent government before the naysayers will be convinced and the new government will be taken seriously as a potential long-term player on the federal scene. What does Prime Minister Harper want out of all of this? It is interesting to note that his attempts to avoid being tagged as belonging to any of the six strands (despite some evidence from his writings in pre-leadership days that he had libertarian leanings) is both deliberate and consistent. It reflects an understanding that no one segment of the conservative movement has an adequate base around which to build enough momentum to form government. As he noted last year, his ambition was to build a new national governing party, one that he rightly understood needed to build on policies that could resonate with the diversity of values that motivate his potential support base. Still, for all of the challenges Harper faces, his surprising ability to merge two parties that were thought to be unmergeable by many, his ability to transform his image and learn from the challenges of the 2004 campaign, and his ability to discipline and unite a disparate team that reflects the full diversity of the Canadian family, has shown him to be as poised as any one to succeed. And if Mr. Harper conducts himself with the same savvy in the next few years as he has in the past few, the question that Canadians will be asking themselves in the next election will not so much be about Harper but about whether the opposition parties have sufficiently reorganized themselves to be considered viable alternatives in the new reality of Canadian politics.

This is the first in a series of discussion papers that will be issued periodically by the Centre for Renewal in Public Policy. It is hoped that these papers will be of timely assistance to those debating key issues in Canadian society. It is one of the purposes of the Centre to facilitate a range of research studies by knowledgable people in each area being discussed. It is hoped that the papers will be copied and widely distributed and that the sources quoted will add to the quality of the debate on each issue. This paper is presented from a medical point of view. In one of its next discussion papers, the Centre will issue a paper by lain T. Benson that will examine euthanasia and assisted suicide from a legal and philosophical persective. This paper was originally presented by Dr. Voth at a meeting on Parliament Hill on March 10, 1994 to which all members of Parliament were invited. That meeting was under the auspices of the Centre for Renewal in Public Policy. The Centre is a non-profit, charitable society established to further education in key areas of public concern. Further information on the Centre and its activities may be obtained by contacting the Development Coordinator for the Centre, Mr. Greg Pennoyer at (613) 567-9010. This paper has been edited for this publication by Philip Marchand and Peter Stockland, both members of the Centre's Research Board, and by lain T. Benson, the Centre's Senior Research Fellow.Executive Summary This paper provides a framework for discussion on the controversial topic of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Dr. Voth's examination of what he prefers to label "Death by Choice", offers a unique and thought provoking perspective that will, we hope, be of benefit to all who are interested in the issue. Advances in medical technology, as recent high profile and well publicized cases are forcing Canadians to consider, as never before, the moral implications of adopting "death by choice" as a legislated principle. The paper suggests that it is an issue on which Canadians will inevitably demand a resolution from their elected officials. Among the questions analyzed in the paper is whether or not the State has the authority to restrict an individual's choice to be killed on their own terms. The author suggests that individual actions can and have implications for the broader community which justify cautious and limited intervention by the State. This rationale is central to the paper's development. The article raises a number of concerns regarding how a decision of such magnitude could be effectively reached in a society as diverse as Canada. The Parliamentary process is described as less than an ideal way of achieving the desired consensus, as are potentially divisive and nonbinding national referenda. The article suggests that the mechanism for change is less important than the ability to develop or garner the moral authority that must precipitate any kind of lasting consensus on such a controversial issue. In addition to questioning the decision-making process, the author examines the implications of a decision favouring legalized Euthanasia or "Death by Choice". With the use of historical and current examples, a number of troubling questions and scenarios are presented which are not easily dismissed. Indeed, any future debate on the issue would be negligent if it failed to address these justifiable concerns. The paper concludes by developing a number of proposals which are intended to clarify key questions in the debate, specifically: i) who supports death by choice, ii) why do they support death by choice, and iii) How can the "new" boundaries be guaranteed andor prevented from shifting? Issues of such impact and importance must be grounded in rigorous analysis related to a meaningful conception of the person and society.Recently, it has been all but impossible to pick up a newspaper or watch a television newscast without hearing something on the subject of euthanasia. Yet I cannot recall ever hearing the word 'Euthanasia' mentioned in medical school, except perhaps in the same breath as some other grave felonies occasionally committed by physicians. Most people know by now that the word 'euthanasia' is a Greek word meaning simply 'a good death.' It did not necessarily mean a death that was in any way hastened or caused by a physician. This makes it a very imprecise term which I will use as little as possible. I prefer several other terms which are much more precise. Physician assisted suicide means just what it says. It implies that the decision to end life is not only made by the patient or individual but that at least part of the act is performed by him. Mercy killing means the active ending of a life for reasons of compassion and mercy regardless of whether the person killed had any part in the decision or the act. Death by choice means a death caused by a deliberate decision and act. It is an omnibus term I have created to cover all forms of euthanasia, mercy killing, suicide, or physician assisted suicide. Voluntary euthanasia is mercy killing at the specific request of the patient, usually but not necessarily by physicians. Of course, all of the above are currently forbidden by the criminal law except for suicide. The idea of death by choice has been with us for almost as long as mankind itself has existed, but recently it has been thrust into the centre of the political arena by names like Jack Kevorkian, Nancy B., and most recently Sue Rodriguez. Except for the ill and the dying themselves probably no two groups are more immediately affected by the controversy than parliamentarians and doctors. Parliamentarians will be forced to deal with rewriting the law, if and when this becomes inevitable. I and my colleagues will be forced to live with the consequences of that law. It seems almost certain that this current government will be forced to deal with the question of the Criminal law on death by choice. I believe there are good reasons why you should reexamine this question now. First, our own medical technology has forced the question upon you. The number of people who have watched a friend or a family member spending weeks and months in suspended animation on a respirator waiting for death has increased by the thousands. The prospect of physician assisted suicide frightens them less than the possibility of seeing their family members or themselves as a laboratory preparation on a machine. Second, you will have to deal with the question because it is an inevitable one. It deals with very deeply held convictions of right and wrong and with very deeply felt fears. Such questions are not easily legislated away, or talked away, or hushed into silence. Therefore history will force you to decide this question again even though, in the laws of this country, it has been decided for at least a century. Why should the country's government have any right to decide? A fundamental premise of a liberal democracy is that the individual must be given the largest possible amount of personal liberty in managing his or her life and its inevitable end, death. The state must justify any intervention in the life of the individual. The individual need not justify keeping the state out of his or her life. Therefore the question "Does the State have any right to decree how 1 deal with my life and my death?" is of paramount importance. If the answer is no, then those of us who oppose any form of mercy-killing, have no political grounds on which to base any opposition to death by choice. I believe the State does have certain very legitimate interests in how I manage my life. Some acts, though they appear to involve only the individual, nonetheless have very broad effects on society. For example, to allow even one single individual in Canada, to consent to an assault is to make assault acceptable. If you allow even one person to use his or her own liberty to allow a moral wrong, you have begun the irreversible destruction of the prohibition of assault and weakened the respect for persons in society. Similarly, allowing even one single case of physician assisted suicide in the nation has immediate implications for every citizen of the nation. What was never an option before has now become an option, no matter how many individuals not only did not want the option but are genuinely dismayed and frightened about having it. Human life has become a little less sacrosanct for everyone. Therefore, although it is and should be severely limited, the State does indeed have some very legitimate power over how people manage their bodies, their lives, and life's end. How then should a nation decide the question of a new law on death by choice? The Hippocratic Oath states very clearly "I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan." Every Code of Medical Ethics since then has either directly or implicitly forbidden any physician from ever taking the life of a patient. But by even raising the question, society has already dismissed traditional medical ethics as a final arbiter. A national referendum on the question has been proposed many times, but I fear that there are too many Canadian groups who will not respect such a decision unless it agrees with what they wanted to do anyway. The judicial option of persuading the courts to ignore, set aside or change laws they do not like, as Holland has done, should alarm everyone who is committed to the preservation of a liberal democracy. If a small group of men and women who are responsible to no one, elected by no one, and appointed without any public review are allowed to rewrite the law, the effective government will have passed from an elected Parliament to a few individuals in a court. Overnight, democracy would be transformed into an oligarchy that is very easily subverted to the ambitions of a corrupt government. Therefore I think the judicial option would be in no one's best interests. As impotent as we may feel in the governmental process from time to time, we still have the right to recall them at election time. We have neither participation nor power in the selection of our judges. The making of laws is best left with Parliament. The courts should be strictly and severely held to enforcing existing laws. The time-honoured Canadian way of dealing with such problems is first demanding that Parliament act on the question and then lobbying furiously for one's side of the question. But if the Government lacks the moral authority for imposing its solution, the question will only reappear and reappear like the slavery question. No doubt, you have thought of many other options, such as referring the decision to a national committee of ethicists; but in the final analysis unless a decision by Parliament, or by a referendum, or by a court, or by any other method or group carries with it a consensus of moral authority the conflict continues to escalate. Moral authority exists when a large majority of the people believe that something ought to be right or wrong, no matter what the law mayor may not say about it. But such majority views must be related to a meaningful conception of morality. Few of us can explain what goes into the formation of our moral convictions. Only a few writers, poets and artists have this skill. Difficult national problems are sometimes resolved when such a person articulates moral convictions in such a way that they find a home in the hearts of the people. In the 18th century a group of men wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." And a nation was born as many people discovered that this proclamation indeed expressed their own deepest feelings about governance. In the 20th century, Martin Luther King gave a short speech that began, "I have a dream" and captured the deepest levels of moral feeling in the USA. It gave new impetus to the Civil Rights Movement. These rare people are moral philosophers. Usually men or women of deep personal faith, without which they would never understand the depth of moral conviction, they were able to cast in simple words moral principles that lay in the hearts of the masses of ordinary people. They succeeded not by challenging or denying our moral convictions, but by calling forth the deepest and best of our convictions. I most assuredly do not claim to be a moral philosopher. My goal is much more modest. I hope to provide a framework for thinking about the problem that will make it easier for a moral philosopher to emerge somewhere, sometime. Today I want to share three fears with you and present three proposals. I begin with the fears because I am used to dealing with fears. I spend a lot of time at a job I did not ask for, but have nevertheless come to appreciate for what it has taught me. I am the Chairman of our hospital's research ethics board whose job is to examine all research proposals of our staff, both nursing and medical, to determine if they are scientifically and ethically useful and sound. Much of our work involves looking carefully at reasonable fears of harm that may come from a given research project involving human subjects. Politicians may well coin slogans like, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself!" but physicians who live that way end up with ethical scandals on their hands. Overturning 2000 years of medical ethical historical tradition has infinitely greater potential for harm than any research project I have ever looked at in about 8 years as a hospital research ethicist.The "Slippery Slope" The first fear is the fear of the slippery slope. The idea of the "slippery slope" in ethics states that there are certain ethical limits that must never be crossed, for if they are, society loses all sense of limits and successive limits are ever more rapidly simply knocked out of the way. The subject of the slippery slope has been both written and talked to death a thousand times so it is worth considering why it is so important to the opponents and also the proponents of death by choice. No doubt you are thinking, no, no! Not the slippery slope again!" Yes, we discuss it because we must discuss it. I quote from the American writer Richard John Neuhaus in a recent conference on Bioethics and the Holocaust: Judgment at Nuremberg was premised on the now frequently derided notion of the slippery slope. Those who deride and dismiss that metaphor are, I believe, rejecting the commonsensical observation that one thing is connected with another and one thing frequently leads to another. If we give ourselves permission to do one thing, we are inescapably inviting the question about permission to do the next thing.1On a slippery slope a single leap from the top to the bottom is always unthinkable, but the individual steps always seem entirely rational and logical. Let me review the possible individual steps on the slippery slope of death by choice for you as I have gleaned them from proponents. If we were to legalize suicide, would not the next rational step be to legalize assisted suicide for those who want it? Well, we did legalize or at least de-criminalize suicide some time ago and the request for physician assisted suicide is being placed before Parliament repeatedly. If we then legalized physician assisted suicide, why should we not legalize voluntary euthanasia, especially for those who could not possibly commit suicide either with or without assistance? Well, the request has already been dealt with and rejected by the narrowest of margins by the Supreme Court. The next step might not seem so plausible at this point, if it were not for the fact that the death by choice groups so consistently use rights oriented language, as opposed to a simple broadening of what a physician mayor may not do within the fIduciary relationship with the patient. Broadening of tolerance is one thing, but rights oriented language implies compulsion. If I have a right to something, then someone can be compelled to give it to me, and everyone must have equal access to that right. If a conscious person has the right to death by choice, then are we not depriving the unconscious person of that right by requiring that only those able to consciously assent to euthanasia may exercise this right? Enter the substituted judgment where someone else chooses death on your behalf. This is mercy killing without consent or request. If we are giving the right to death by choice to only those who are suffering irreversible disease and pain, what about those who by reason of chronic disease or else just psychic pain no longer enjoy a good quality of life? Enter both voluntary and involuntary mercy killing for reasons other than severe or irreversible disease. Do you see how the rights oriented approach changes the view of the slippery slope? Where will it all end? Will the moral centre of not only the profession of medicine but also the nation as a whole eventually collapse when the taking of a human life is so easily negotiated? Will we return to the pre-Hippocratic days when the coming of a physician was feared lest he or she be planning the death of the patient? As an optimist, my first response would be, "Of course not! Don't talk nonsense! All societal trends carry the seeds of excess within them, yet society does not always go to hell-in-a-hand-basket quite that easily. But as a research watchdog, as I am not always kindly referred to at times, my fIrst response must be, "Let's look at any evidence we can find. If we can find any evidence at all that this scenario is a reasonable possibility, then the burden of proof rests on the would-be researcher to prove that these dangers can be avoided, and that proof must take much more solid form than mere bland reassurances." At this point, unpleasant as it may be, we must look at the history of Nazi Germany. That the moral centre of the German nation and its medical community did collapse is beyond question. But two questions remain. Why did it happen? Can it happen again? Hitler did not begin or invent voluntary euthanasia or involuntary euthanasia. These were already firmly in place when he carne to power.2 All he did was adapt them and pervert them to his own purposes. The question we must answer, at least in our minds is, "If the German medical profession had held fIrm to its Hippocratic roots and refused to participate in any kind of killing, no matter how apparently benevolent the motivation, would they have been so easily corrupted?" No one in the many euthanasia movements of which I have read has anything but abhorrence for the acts of Nazi Germany. The question that bothers me is whether the changes in law and practise they seek would make it too easy for another monster to corrupt the medical profession. Will a loosening of laws against death by choice dismantle vital moral defences that every nation and especially their medical communities simply must keep up for eternity? Is the monster of the Holocaust real enough that it is well worth setting the limits a long way from that extreme? Germany today certainly feels that it is worth it, which is why it refuses to even discuss broadening the age-old law on assisted suicide.3 Turning from Germany to Holland, things become easier, historically speaking, for there is no shortage of data. The guidelines for any form of death by choice have been clearly spelled out by the courts together with the Royal Dutch Medical Association. We only need to ask how well these guidelines are being followed. If they are being strictly or at least fairly strictly followed, and if there is no evidence of gradually broadening limits, then, at least in Holland fear of the slippery slope phenomenon is without grounds. The first guideline was that euthanasia may be carried out if the patient has persistently, consciously and of his own free will requested it. According to Attorney-General Remmelink's government-commissioned report, about .8 to 1.6% of all of Holland's annual 129,000 deaths per year are the result of life-terminating acts without either explicit or persistent request. That would be about 1000 deaths a year. If you allow the explanation that in about half of these cases euthanasia was at least discussed or requested beforehand before the patient became comatose, that still leaves about 500 deaths a year where the first requirement or guideline was not fulfilled.4 The second guideline is that suffering must be unbearable with no hope of recovery or improvement. According to the same report, only 46% of requests for euthanasia listed pain as the reason. Of the some 1000 cases of non-voluntary euthanasia, only 30% were done because of uncontrollable pain. The rest were done for reasons such as low quality of life, no prospect of improvement, no useful treatment to offer, or 'failure to die after withdrawal of treatment'.5 The third guideline is that the physician must consult with a colleague about the appropriateness of the request. The Remmelink report did not address this question in any of the English discussions I found. However, when commenting on this requirement at the International Conference on Euthanasia, Wachter (Director of the Institute for Bioethics in Maastricht) felt that it was a complete charade since a compliant colleague could be found so easily.6 In a privately received excerpt of a translation of the Remmelink report, it was noted that about 20% of physicians did not ask for consultation and 40% considered the guideline unimportant. Based on the government's own Attorney-General's report, the so-called 'strict' guidelines for euthanasia in Holland are frequently ignored. What the guests at the Maastricht conference, especially those from America, found most disturbing was the casual ease with which the evidence for widespread endemic non compliance with the guidelines was brushed aside.7 8 Perhaps the most disturbing information to come out of the Remmelink report and two other similar studies done at the same time was the knowledge that very few physicians follow another guideline, which is that every death caused by the physician must be reported as a case of euthanasia. Yet according to the figures derived from the Remmelink report and actual numbers of voluntary euthanasia reported, about 90% of cases of voluntary euthanasia are listed as natural deaths.9 When 90% of all cases of death by choice are simply listed as natural deaths, the Dutch statistics on their experience of euthanasia are clearly of no value. When most physicians practising euthanasia are not only not following the guidelines but are quite unconcerned about their failure to do so, the profession has a serious moral problem. If I followed the Alberta Health Care billing guidelines in that way, I would already be in prison. Doesn't the life of patients deserve greater moral solicitude than my income? The Royal Dutch Medical Association is currently preparing guidelines for terminating the lives of incompetent patients, e.g. severely defective newborns, and comatose and demented elderly patients.10 It seems a foregone conclusion that their guidelines will be readily accepted by compliant courts who see no need to wait for laws to justify such actions, especially since public opinion will likely support them. You might say that Holland is not Canada, but my response is that neither are guinea pigs humans, yet we take very seriously the warnings that animal research gives us.The Repression of Dissenting Opinions The second fear is that the legalization of death by choice will result in the repression of all dissenting opinions. It is very difficult for anyone in Holland to voice publicly any dissenting opinions to the current policy and nearly impossible for opponents of euthanasia to publish their opinions in Holland. Of eleven existing television corporations only one allows opponents of euthanasia to express their views.11 12 When the European Standing Committee for Medical Ethics and the World Medical Association voted to condemn Dutch euthanasia the only publication to report what should have been news of profound importance to the nation was a small pro-life bimonthly.13 The reason for this almost fanatical desire to suppress dissent is simply the result of an imbalance of perceived guilt or responsibility. If you believe that the Edmonton Oilers are doomed to perpetual oblivion in the post-Gretzky era and I believe you are wrong, each of us has about the same amount of face to lose if we are wrong. Not so with a question like death by choice. If I am wrong the most I can be accused of in the court of history is that I have been overly conservative in my view of the sanctity of human life. That doesn't frighten me very much. If the death by choice proponents are judged wrong by the same court, they risk being accused of reckless homicide. That risk will always tend to drive them in the direction of ruthless repression of dissent.The Threat of Coercion The third fear I want to look at is that the freedom of death by choice may extinguish other more precious freedoms. It may bring with it the repression and coercion of those who are either opposed to it or else simply do not want the option of deciding. This coercion involves both the patients and the health care providers. Some coercion is already inherent in death by choice legislation. When death by choice is not legal or available, everyone has the right to remain alive by default. If a person makes no decision at all, that person will be kept alive as long as this is reasonably possible. If death by choice is an option, though, he or she is in the awkward position of having to justify his or her continued existence. Even the lay public knows that any kind of terminal care is expensive, even just simple hospice-style care. The presence of the option of death by choice already creates pressure to opt for it 'for the public good'.14 Does this kind of pressure exist in any verifiable way? In one survey of Dutch nursing homes 93% of inhabitants were opposed to the practise of euthanasia and 95% were opposed to legalizing it. 50-60% of these same inhabitants were fearful of involuntary termination.15 16 These are very sobering statistics. Do they have reason to be afraid, or are they just paranoid? Yes, they have lots of reason to be afraid. Both voluntary and involuntary euthanasia are broadly supported by the Dutch public, i.e. by those who are not old and ill. The Dutch literature is full of opinion polls citing broad support among students, ordinary citizens, and even physicians for involuntary euthanasia for a variety of reasons ranging from old age through incurable illness and, yes, even simple economic expediency.17 18 19 Does it apply in North America? How I wish I could be certain, but I have to use the best evidence available. All the writings by the various proponents of death by choice that I read were very reassuring about the absolute need to guard the conscience of the conscientious objector. Would they stick to this agenda once they found legislation going their way? I don't know, but none of the evidence I can find elsewhere is reassuring. Soon after the recent California referendum on death by choice a few years ago, a TV station repeated the poll but categorized the responses. I quote from the New York Times report, "Polling showed support for Proposition 161 lowest among women, older voters, Asians and blacks. It was highest among voters under 30 and those with postgraduate education and incomes over $75,000."20 Another poll found the same result.21 This raises a question that absolutely demands a straight answer; "Who is in favour of death by choice for whom?" If those who stand to gain most by legalized death by choice are in favour of it for those who stand to lose most by it and who also constitute society's least articulate and least able to defend themselves in the public forum, how can coercion possibly be avoided? The message of the rich, young and favoured to the less favoured and especially the elderly is very clear: "We think you old people should get out of the way." In the well-justified national discussion of sexual abuse of women patients by physicians much importance is given the great power imbalance between a male physician and his female patient. What about the power imbalance between the young and the old? I would like to share three proposals for your consideration with you. Each of these is aimed at answering a specific question. The first question is, "Who favours death by choice?" Is it really mainly the young, the rich, the healthy, the wealthy or is it truly the old, the handicapped, the poor and the disadvantaged? Yes, I know you would have no trouble collecting case histories such as the well-publicized case of Sue Rodriguez. Remember that it is just as easy to collect case histories for the other side of the question. My proposal is that you seek to answer it by polls reliably conducted by third parties at a very long arm's length from any of the interest groups, including my own. This means that polls conducted by organizations such as Dying with Dignity as well as those conducted by the various right to life groups can have no validity. Indeed they must even be prohibited from writing the questions for another agency. As a research ethicist, I can assure you that it is not difficult to write any questionnaire to obtain whatever result you desire. The second question is, "Assuming that there are truly large numbers of people who want the right to death by choice in some form or another, why do they want it?" If my experience as a physician who sees very many dying people reflects the general population, then the majority of them want it because they fear pain and they fear being abandoned. Their fears are real and their requests are modest. They want to be cared for and they want human companionship. My proposal is that you begin immediately to look for ways of encouraging the hospice movements and the palliative care facilities in the nation. Patients who feel they will be cared for, will have their pain relieved and will not be deprived of human companionship seldom express the wish for death. I know that much leadership for these twin goals should be coming from my profession, and I accept the responsibility for talking to them and inspiring them at any opportunity. The third question is; "How will you guarantee that the boundaries of any form of death by choice will not shift as soon as they have been laid down as they have done everywhere else?" Remember that many who have written extensively on the subject in North America have given every indication that they have no intention of stopping with voluntary forms of euthanasia.22 23 24 This will require not only a carefully crafted law that absolutely cannot be manipulated by compliant courts, but also a rock solid moral consensus among physicians that there are limits which must never be crossed. Right now, the closest thing we have to such a moral consensus is the Hippocratic tradition of medical ethics which has as its core a reverence for life embodied in the injunction, "I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan". Companion to this core of ethics was the concept that this was a covenant not with the government of the day but with the gods as the Greeks knew them. This meant that this was a covenant that could not be broken, not even by an edict of government or the will of the majority. That is what I mean by a rock solid moral consensus on ethical limits. If you legalize death by choice you will have eliminated the last of the Hippocratic tradition. What can you offer to replace it as a guarantee that the new boundaries of reverence for life will not shift? My last proposal is quite simply that you ask the medical profession for such a declaration of binding moral limits and evidence that they will not shift. If we cannot provide it, then do not remove the last remaining limit.Notes 1 Caplan, Arthur L.: When Medicine Went Mad 1992, Humana Press N.J. USA, p 2252 Alexander, L.: Medical Science Under Dictatorship, New England Journal of Medicine 1949; Vo1.241: pp 23 Schone-Siefert, B.; Rippe, K.: Silencing the Singer, Antibioethics in Germany Hastings Centre Report 1991; :204 Maas, P.J. van der; Delden, J.M. van; Pignenborg, L.; Looman, C.W.N.: Euthanasia and Other Medical Decisions Concerning the End of Life The Lancet 1991; 338:669-{j745 Have, H.A.M.J. ten; Welie, J.V.M.: Euthanasia, Normal Medical Practice? Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22:366 Wachter, M.A.M. de: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22:25.7 Have, H.A.M.J. ten; Welie, J.V.M.: Euthanasia, Normal Medical Practice? Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22:38.8 Capron, A.M.: Euthanasia in the Netherlands, American Observations Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22: 319 Wachter, M.A.M. de: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22:2310 Wachter, M.A.M. de: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22:2511 Fenigsen, R.: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Issues in Law & Medicine 1990; Vol. 6: pp. 233.12 Bostrom, B.A.: Euthanasia in the Netherlands: A Model for the United States? Issues in Law & Medicine 1989; Vol.4: pp 48013 Fenigsen, R.: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Issues in Law & Medicine 1990; Vol. 6: pp. 23314 Brock, D.: Voluntary Active Euthanasia Hastings Centre Report 1992; 22: 17.1815 Bostrom, B.A.: Euthanasia in tbe Netherlands: A Model for the United States? Issues in Law & Medicine 1989; Vol.4: pp 47716 Fenigsen, R.: A Case Against Dutch Euthanasia Hastings Centre Report, Special Supplement 1989; :2617 Bostrom, B.A.: Euthanasia in the Netherlands: A Model for the United States? Issues in Law &: Medicine 1989; Vol.4: pp 483- 484.18 Fenigsen, R.: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Issues in Law &: Medicine 1990; Vol. 6: pp. 237-23919 Fenigsen, R.: A Case Against Dutch Euthanasia Hastings Centre Report, Special Supplement 1989; :2520 The New York Times; 14 February 1993, Section 4, p. 1 Help for the Helping Hands in Death.21 Thomasmaa, D.C.: The Range of Euthanasia American College of Surgeons Bulletin August 1988; 73: 1022 Hollander, R.: Euthanasia and Mental Retardation: Suggesting the Unthinkable Mental Retardation April 1989; 27:6023 Van Der Sluis, I.: The Practice of Euthanasia in the Netherlands Issues in Law &: Medicine 1989; Vol.4: pp 45724 Wennberg, R.N.: Terminal Choices; Euthanasia, Suicide and the Right to Die 1989 W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.; pp. 206210

Doug Koop of Christian Week interviews President Michael Van Pelt on education and cultural change:HAMILTON, ON—Michael Van Pelt has yet to celebrate his 40th birthday, but he’s keen to involve younger people in meaningful work. As president of the Work Research Foundation (WRF), an economic think tank based in Hamilton, he issued a press release celebrating three of his junior staff members who recently graduated from nearby Redeemer University College.“I would love to identify more solid, bright young people who have completed university and give them opportunities to become active in the public square,” he says. “My generation is a facilitator generation; the next one will be a much stronger influencer. They are very capable of promoting Christian views in sophisticated and credible ways.”The Redeemer grads helped the WRF relate with donors, develop its website (www.wrf.ca) and promote its “To Change the World” project featuring University of Virginia professor James Davison Hunter. “We look forward to developing this kind of partnership with institutions of higher education across Canada,” says Van Pelt.Although he earned his degree (history) at McMaster University, Van Pelt attended Christian schools, including Redeemer (“which profoundly influenced my thinking”) and considers himself “a product of Christian education.”He believes that the best leaders will be those who are deeply familiar with the Bible and the way Christianity has developed its significant impact on human civilization, an education typically best delivered by institutions like Redeemer (“or Regent College or Trinity Western University or any of a number of others”).This kind of education is foundational, insists Van Pelt. “Someone who is solidly versed in the tenets of the Christian religion, and is well-read in the interaction of Christian religion throughout history, is able to grasp onto things quickly and not be easily swayed by fads and trends.”With these basics in place they can more easily pick up the specialized knowledge their particular jobs might demand and understand it in its context, he says. They are better equipped to understand consequences of ideas and to apply knowledge in practical ways.While Van Pelt admires and seeks to encourage “top-of-the-line academics,” he has gained much of his own education in the business world. He says he learned a tremendous amount while working as a district manager for the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses in the late 1980s and 1990s.“I interviewed CEOs and leaders of small businesses—thousands of them—and because of the credibility of the organization I worked with, I got to talk to incredible people who opened up to me. I could get in the door of a couple of CEOs a day and get their sense of policy and business.“At the time I didn’t realize the generalist education I was getting, but entrepreneurs are intrinsically interesting.”He later became general manager of the Sarnia Chamber of Commerce. This meant working with many big corporations, adding larger corporate considerations to the repertoire of small business concerns in which he was already well versed.Van Pelt sees in these kinds of business groups—as well as in institutions like family and church—the seedbed of sound social development, the environment where “civic social entrepreneurs” can prosper.“The Chamber of Commerce is one of the business institutions that with the benefit of a 100-year history has the ability to influence national, provincial and municipal policy. I’m not sure how many people realize that. It’s seen as a service and lobby organization, a networking facility, but it’s way bigger than that for influence and impact at all kinds of levels.”All of which is good training for Van Pelt’s current role at WRF, where he manages a Christian organization—an economic and public policy think tank—that strives to integrate constructive ideas from the academic worlds on the front lines of civic and social application.He is dedicated to equipping able practitioners with ideas developed through rigorous thinking in order to stimulate effective action that produces social good. The job, he explains, is to seek and discover “civic social entrepreneurs” who are soundly based—or, in other words, innovative and creative Christians with an ability to apply their faith to work and public life in wholesome, authentic and eminently practical ways.“I have to understand the public policy world and also how to communicate to the public square,” he explains. “I often need to ‘travel with’ brilliant academics to lend more weight to their ideas. A think tank represents intellectual capital, but I’m only a small part of that. I take a small part of an idea and try to increase its weight on the front line.“I see brilliant people with a lot to offer, and try to broaden the context of those brilliant people and their ideas,” says Van Pelt.He envisions an important ongoing role for the church in the renewal of society—as the seedbed of the kind of “creative class” required to reverse economic and social decay. “Many churches are dying, but where you see emerging, lively churches growing, you will also find the seeds of good development in urban planning,” he says.These kinds of ideas must be passed along in an endless variety of innovative and creative ways. Van Pelt says he would love to see more leaders in organizations intentionally taking time to mentor “bright young talent who are solid in their understanding of Christian things and thoroughly committed to it.”And he is quick to point out that even the savviest formal training available is useless if it isn’t tested and applied in everyday environments.“Real education happens among family and among peers as well,” he says. “If that informal side is missing, there’s a good chance those players will not be leading. They are not likely to find their place in future leadership if they’re not seriously testing their ideas with their peers and the culture around them.”

Over the past five years, the value of Canadian exports to the United States averaged $338.2-billion per year, while U.S. exports to Canada were $291.3-billion, making total export trade between the two countries roughly $1.7-billion per day. More than 26% of U.S. exports went to Canada, and more than 80% of Canadian exports went to the U.S. As the late Social Credit leader Robert Thompson famously put it, "The Americans are our best friends . . . whether we like it or not."Canada's challenge is to maintain and expand the infrastructure necessary to keeping itself accessible to the world and, especially, the U.S. In its 2004 Throne Speech, the Government of Canada noted that "Canada has always been a trading nation, but never more so than today. It is vital that we secure and enhance our access to markets, both in North America and the world."The Canada-U.S. trading relationship is by far the largest in the world. To understand its nature, it helps to understand "trade corridors." These are streams of products, services and information moving through communities in geographic patterns according to a "culture" of trade agreements and treaties, statutes and delegated legislation that guide trading relationships, institutions and structures.Trade-corridor language recognizes that Canada's trade with the U.S. is regionalized, whether it be auto manufacturing, wood products, energy or services. The auto industry is concentrated principally in the Great Lakes region. A dynamic trade corridor has been constructed over the past 100 years to move steel, auto parts, assemblage, and finished products back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border in that region. The physical infrastructure of highways, rail, and the seaway; the legal infrastructure; "just in time" supply agreements; telecommunications; banking services; union contracts; customs and duty and "Smart Border" arrangements; and a host of other particulars constitute what we could call the Great Lakes trade corridor that makes the North American auto industry “go."Competition for trade can be framed in terms of trade corridors. Europe is now pouring money into the construction project known as the Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia. With 100,000 kilometres of road, TRACECA hopes to boost volumes in this trans-Eurasian corridor from 1.9 million tonnes in 1997 to 34 million tonnes by 2010.Similarly, Asian nations are planning an Asian Highway network, AH 1, also known as "the New Silk Road. " This network will span some 140,000 kilometres of road stretching across Asia to Europe.Although Canada and the U. S. possess a trading relationship second to none in the world, we cannot take it for granted, at risk of being left behind.Here are the next steps that Canada and the U.S. should consider:- Recognize the integrated, Canada-U.S. trade economy is organized on trade corridors -- half a dozen, more or less -- that generally follow natural, regional geography. Infrastructure decisions must support this reality.- Map Canada-U. S. trade corridors. This requires an enormous interdisciplinary commitment to co-ordinate data, project trade flows, anticipate infrastructure demands, and interface regulatory and government jurisdictions.- Commit resources -- financial and otherwise -- to building public infrastructure needed to move trade through trade corridors. Simply put, get on with public-private partnerships that will supply the investment needed, enact statutory and regulatory regimes, and hammer out bilateral agreements.- Encourage the culture of trade. Anti-Americanism is at its least helpful when it proposes to bite the hand that helps feed millions of Canadians. The Americans are Canadians' most important trading partners, and vice versa. When we need to, we can surely disagree without being disagreeable.On April 25, House Leader Tony Valeri will chair a landmark roundtable meeting of government officials, industry and business leaders, and thinkers from Canada's leading "think-tanks" with a view to moving forward with trade corridors to further Canada-U.S. trade.At the beginning of the 19th century, the U.S. was little more than a trade backwater to trade and commerce that centred in Europe and connected with the Caribbean basin. At the beginning of the 20th century, Canada was likewise a backwater to the great transatlantic commerce between Europe and the U.S. eastern seaboard.Today, these two former backwaters are international trading powerhouses, sitting between the two great trading blocs of Europe and Asia. Whether Canada and the U.S. are more than a geographic centre of trade in the 21st century and beyond is up to us.Financial Post  Michael Van Pelt is president of the Work Research Foundation and chair of the Trade Corridors Partnership.

The other evening in Montreal, my friend Russ (an American) and I watched the second of the US Presidential Debates. If there was any doubt about which was the candidate to avoid, this debate made the matter clear for me. I would no more vote for John Kerry than mate with a goat. Here is why. If there is one thing that the contemporary age has done that deserves our deepest contempt it is this—to try and accord "respect" to someone else's "feelings." Years ago on the trendy left coast Island my family and I then inhabited, my wife shocked an assembly of mothers by telling one of our small-fry, who had come to her crying about some playground unfairness and complaining about somebody "hurting my feelings", by saying "I don't care about your feelings alone . . . . . . what happened?" My wife, being well educated (in Scotland) was taught how to think about such things as "feelings" and they did not count beside such things as "facts." Unfortunately, in the contemporary argot, "feelings" are, all too often, a stand-in for thought and so we can distance ourselves from substantive propositions by raising the flag of feelings up our personal identity flag posts. My wife and I have refused to be co-opted into this horrific form of unreality speak. It is not so, unfortunately, in the culture—in our Western cultures as a whole. That is where Kerry comes in. Twice during the debate, Senator Kerry was asked questions that came from what could be called a "pro-life" perspective (those who fear such language might substitute the meaningless language of "choice" and say such people were "anti-choice" if it makes them feel better). On both occasions Kerry responded with what his "handlers" had well scripted him to do: he said "First, let me say how much I respect the FEELINGS of the questioner. . ." then he went on to offer some ridiculous non-answer to the point being made. My concern is not with the non-answer as such (though that is also a bad thing) but with the supposed "respect for feelings." How can someone respect the "feelings" of a person who believes that an unborn human being should be accorded the sanctity of life and then use law and politics to kill the innocent? What has such a disagreement to do with "feelings" at all? Kerry and those who discuss like this have not got past the playground "wah, wah, wah" of human disagreements. To focus on "feelings" and ignore the debate itself is what Kerry and his kind are doing. I'd rather they hurt my feelings on such matters but dealt with the arguments. Nowadays it is the failure to deal with the arguments that poses the greatest threat to the most important subjects of the day (whether it be abortion or the nature of marriage). Is someone who uses the "feelings" arguments to avoid the real arguments a person we should trust with the most powerful political office in the world? If you say you "respect my feelings" then murder my mother, I can call you a liar and a bad man. On this reading Kerry is a bad man. If you say you "respect my feelings" and then dash the heads of my children against rocks, you have both a strange conception of feelings and children. Kerry is such a person. In all his Frankensteinian (he can't blame his looks but, my goodness, the man only lacks neck bolts to make him the perfect nightmare) smoothness, Kerry is a chilling representative of the false logic of the day. None of this, it should be noted, means that I like the alternative either—I hold no brief for "W" but I must say, that on the questions he did not stoop to "respecting feelings" whilst trashing the logic of argument. It is a tough choice the Americans face but for my money I would never vote for a Feelingstein like Kerry. Now where is that goat?

“Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there’s no way to look at what’s happening over there and it’s effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance.”–Bono of U2, Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004. ARRIVED in Canada on January 1, 1998, having flown as far from Johannesburg in South Africa as it is possible to fly before turning back around the curve of the globe. I came to Canada because I was broken and needed a break, but the way in which I was broken were as nothing compared to those that I had spoken on behalf of others in the previous two years.I had worked for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by a saint with the foibles of a saint, Desmond Tutu. The Arch, as we all called him, would hug us as we came out of our booths at the end of the day, and once, in a red-dirt town where an angry mob danced their vengeful anguish, surging hurricane-like around the hall in which the hearings were being held, he prayed through the noon hour in my booth, seeking and finding guidance to bring peace – or at least calm – to the situation. My job was not a lofty one; I was not a commissioner or a lawyer or an investigator; I was a simultaneous interpreter.We interpreters were a small but dedicated crew. We bounced three or four languages among one another to enable an audience to hear the testimony of a survivor or a perpetrator of gross human rights violations – abduction, torture, murder – in their own language within two to four seconds after it was spoken in the language of the witness or applicant for amnesty. Many of us drank hard; some of us found harder ways of numbing the pain and horror we spoke every day. For me the worst was the phone calls late at night between me in my hotel room and my young wife at home, when, exhausted – she after a day in the valley of the shadow of the diapers and I after a day of a woman telling of relentless violation or a man telling of testicles and bare electric wire or a mother telling of the sweaters of her infants scarlet with gunshot or a father telling of finding only a scrap of skin after three days of looking in the place where a mine shredded his son – we would curse and slam down the phone, too tired to listen and too worn out to care.When I came to Canada I thought I would be going back. Soon. Maybe after four or five years, with another academic degree certifying me for the ministry of word and sacrament in my home church. Eighteen months later the strange configuration of calling and debt moved me into the work I do now with delight and an assurance that it is what I should be doing. Africa faded, slowly. Asked some months later if I would not help found a leadership school back in South Africa, I collapsed into a profound vocational crisis – perhaps the most profound yet. What are my duties to Africa? Should I abandon the work I do here in North America – holy work, as far as I can tell – and turn to the cries of the beloved country? Should I return with my wife and young daughters to a country that at the time had the highest incidence of rape as reported to the police of any Interpol member country?My Africa problem is not whether there is something wrong with Africa, or whether something should be done about it if there is. Both reliable research and my own direct experience assures me that something is indeed very wrong with Africa, and I have no doubt that something should be done about it. My problem has to do with what should be done, and by whom. More particularly, what is my own personal responsibility toward Africa, and how does that responsibility weigh up against my other responsibilities?I grew up in an all-white residential neighbourhood where I was told during my childhood that black people could only live in the outbuildings if they had an employment document as a house servant or a gardener, and that a sunset to sunrise curfew for black people kept our streets safe. I was told that people in my neighbourhood enjoyed a quality of life unequaled in the world, except perhaps in Sweden. Health care was excellent by the standards of the time. The streets were paved, and regular watering kept the parks green and filled with flowers, even though our city was on the edge of an arid semi-desert. Schools did a fairly good job, and music lessons – if you wanted them – were virtually free, because they were offered as a normal, albeit optional, part of the education system. (I learned to play the viola, poorly.)In my teens, after my cataclysmic conversion to biblical Christianity (as distinct from the racist pseudo-Christian heresy of my childhood and the Buddhism Lite of my early teens), I became involved with an avowedly apolitical youth evangelism group in my home town that for all its intended denial of politics nonetheless had an enormous political influence on me and my friends. This group was the only inter-racial Christian youth group we could find in the city, and its evangelistic outreaches and youth camps brought me face-to-face with people of my own age who lived in very different circumstances from my own.My black teen friends lived not ten minutes by car from where I lived. Their neighbourhood had no electricity and only cold running water made available at public water taps, each shared by four residential blocks. Their streets were not paved, and night waste was removed by a truck that came by every few days. The schools were poorly supplied with books and hardly supplied with anything else. As one of the architects of this racially based political system – Hendrik Verwoerd – had explained some years before I was born:“When I have control of Native education I will reform it so that Natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them … People who believe in equality are not desirable teachers for Natives. When my Department controls Native education it will know for what class of higher education a Native is fitted, and whether he will have a chance in life to use his knowledge.” Many of my black friends, but especially their parents, managed to strain considerable dignity and a simple beauty of life out of the sordid circumstances into which they had been pressed. But to my young eyes the inequality between them and us was obvious, and obviously a grave injustice.I remember discovering – with shock that turned into deep conviction – the prophecy of Isaiah 58.“… day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. … Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? … Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”My friends and I poured ourselves into the resistance against the apartheid regime. Our involvement in that resistance was no great shakes – we were very young, we had no idea what we were doing, and our connections into the existing resistance movements were very weak – but it was enough to get us into tepid water. I was invited to go and discuss my activities with the security police a few times, where it became clear that they had reliable information from one of my good friends, and my parents were reminded by someone or other that my activities might have negative repercussions for their careers. But nothing like the hot water that the black teens in our circle endured: 90-day detentions without trial, beatings with sand-filled nylon-stoking tubes, disappearances, and as we discovered years later, worse.We thought we would spend our lives on resistance against a racist tyranny. We struggled terrifically to understand the connection between our deepest loves (for God, for one another) and our duties as citizens. We read – Ron Sider and John Howard Yoder, at first; later Francis Schaeffer and Bob Goudzwaard; eventually Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, John Calvin, and Augustine of Hippo. We argued. We prayed. At first we became pacifists and therefore understood our political duties to demand non-violence. I served three and a half years of a six-year community service assignment as a religious objector against military conscription. Later, toward the end of the 1980s, some of us turned to Just War doctrine and tried to figure out an understanding of just resistance against a tyrant. We never got very far theoretically, but we persuaded ourselves that the ever more vigorous violent oppression practiced by the then Botha government demanded from us as Christians armed resistance.We never got around to doing something about that conviction, because just as we stopped being pacifists the new De Klerk government announced that it would release all political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, unban all banned political movements, and begin a process of negotiation towards a Democratic South Africa. That all happened what is now almost half my life ago, but it remains perhaps the most decisive historical event to have a direct impact on my life. Suddenly I had no idea what my life was supposed to be about. If I was not to expend my life in the struggle against apartheid, then into what would I invest myself?I floundered. I wrote an MA dissertation (on “Christian philosophy and the transformation of African culture”) and a PhD thesis (on “The Ethics of Public Welfare”) in an effort to try to figure out what I should do in the aftermath of apartheid. I joined political movements, and with a friend, Mark Manley, I tried to put together a network of evangelical Christians active in post-apartheid South Africa. I worked on language policy and the constitutional rights of language groups with another friend, Theo du Plessis. I worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I went slightly crazy. But I still had no idea what to do with my life now that I had nothing big and evil and obvious to be against.The first democratic elections of 1994 were astonishing, with the nation teetering at the edge of the abyss of civil war (not white vs. black, but something complex that could be over-simplified into Zulu vs. Xhoza) and then pulling back – a peaceful result partly due to nation-wide prayer, it seemed to many of us. Standing for hours in the long line snaking into a school hall to cast our ballots next to people of all tongues and races was perhaps the highest point in my political life. South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament provoked a surge of shared patriotism that drew the people of the country together into a moment of common celebration the likes of which were not seen before, or since.But post-apartheid South Africa was a disappointment. Along with my other work, I spent a few days every month interpreting for the provincial parliament of what was once known as the Orange Free State province. It was a dismal affair. The plenary sessions were displays of the small-minded mediocrity of the provincial politicians of all parties. The committee sessions were displays of venality and petty power games. A tinge of backlash racism marked the operations of the new provincial government. A friend of mine, the finest development economist in the province and a long-time opponent of apartheid, raised funding internationally for the research and design of an economic development approach in the province, but because he was white the provincial government mocked and ignored the potential of his contribution. Hints of corruption and self-enrichment were everywhere – the new provincial cabinet members drove shiny Mercedes Benzes or BMWs, while the common people sank into ever greater poverty. Many of my most idealistic friends sank, not into poverty, but into a sour and depressed cynicism and pessimism about the future of the beloved country.The political efforts in which I involved myself were bearing little or no fruit. Most Christians involved in politics did not want to think christianly about their political duties, prefering instead a simplistic para-marxism or a vulgar nationalism. Those Christians who were willing to think christianly about their politics tended to fall for a triumphalistic imported version of the politics of the American religious Right – but since their numbers were small, their efforts were ineffectual. Networking Christians who were biblically thoughtful about political life in South Africa in the mid-1990s foundered on the rocks of non-biblical ideology, simplistic biblicism, and a general lack of interest. Increasingly I became persuaded that South African Christians were not ready for political responsibility because we lacked a thoroughly Christian understanding, not just of politics, but of culture in general. The ground in which my friends and I were trying to sow the seeds of Christian political action lacked compost and had not been plowed over. For a Christian politics to flourish in South Africa, Christian political activists needed to take a step back. The soil needed to be tilled, and compost needed to be worked into the fields. The most important political work in South Africa, I came to believe, was that of proclaiming the gospel. The proclamation of the gospel of the creation and redemption of all things in Christ was needed before Christian political action could become viable.With that in mind I began to consider the ministry of Word and sacraments in my home denomination, then the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. If a Christian politics in South Africa was for the time being impossible – or at least limited to education – then perhaps my calling was to do the work of preparing Christians for a Christian politics in the generations to come? Perhaps I could preach the Word and serve the sacraments in ways that would help cultivate discernment and conviction with regard to the duties of citizenship, Biblically understood?Things did not turn out that way. I spent 18 months in Vancouver, British Columbia, thinking that I was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry in South Africa. Our family went through its own little post-traumatic stress episode, whacked on top of consumer culture shock of the first degree, ameliorated by living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world (ah, the float planes drifting in over the bay against a gilt and russet sunset) and being embraced by Regent College, which turned out to serve us more as a therapeutic community than as a place of professional advancement. And then I was offered work with the two organizations in which I still find myself following the call of God today. We left Vancouver for Toronto, and with that decided that if we were to return to live and work in Africa, it would be after our children went to college, if ever.But is this the right thing to do? What Would Bono Do? Consider Africa today. While South Africa has not collapsed into failed statehood, as many people feared, it is one of the most criminally violent places in the world. In contrast, the neighbouring Botswana has relatively little crime – but it suffers from one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Zimbabwe is governed by a caricature dictator whose comic ridiculousness is rivaled only by his malevolence. Further up, in the Sudan, another genocide looms, perhaps on the same scale as that achieved in Rwanda. Everywhere Africa is plagued by disease, poverty, crime, and political situations that seem to allow a choice only between tyranny and anarchy. And yet this is a continent where people continue to choose the Christian faith over their native paganisms, where churches thrive and grow, where despite an ecstatic strain of piety among the mass of people, church leaders seem to have a bent for sound doctrine. Ever so slowly – as at the outer fringes of the Roman Empire from the fifth century to the twelfth century – Christianity seems to be working itself into the soil of African culture. The Christian transformation of African culture seems likely to be a 500-year project. What can I do to help it along?Writing this meandering memoir has brought me no closer to a personal vocational answer than the nights of prayer and tears of a few years ago. The comfort of my present sense of calling has never been so cozy that it requires an exercise of this kind to be shaken. A few weeks ago I sat next to a philosopher and a new friend, who quietly but passionately asked me, “But how can you be here and not there?” For now my retort is, that is not only my problem. It is ours.

Joe Couto of Christian Week interviews Michael Van Pelt on the challenge of religion and secularism in Canadian public life.TORONTO, ON-Tim Hollaar’s high-powered job as a vice president for the Canadian subsidiary of Australian-owned mining giant WMC Resources Limited sees him engaged in the cutthroat international mining business, where huge profits are made and lost everyday.But as a Christian, Hollaar finds it difficult to act in a "life-changing way” as demanded by his faith.That’s why Hollaar took time out of his schedule, including catching an early flight from Calgary, to take in controversial American sociologist James Davison Hunter’s first ever address to a Canadian audience on June 17 in Toronto.Hollaar said he was attracted by the University of Virginia professor’s unique views on how North American Christians can change culture and hoped for "takeaways” he could use to integrate faith and business.Hollaar was among a diverse group of 100 business people, church leaders and social workers who gathered at the Ontario legislature to hear a view on cultural change that challenges traditional Christian evangelism and outreach methods.While Hunter, department chair and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, took aim at the "commercial/entertainment” world’s "energetic but superficial” culture, he also confronted "creedal communities,” which he believes have become increasingly marginalized."U.S. evangelical influence on the culture is minimal,” said Hunter. "Many [churches and denominations] are self-aggrandizing institutions-visionless, unsophisticated, naïve and out-of-touch with the world around them.”Fundamental to the church’s failure in influencing our culture is the view about how culture is actually changed. Hunter argued the prevailing view-that by convincing individuals to adopt the "right values” culture will be influenced for the better-is simply wrong.The proof is in the fact that while faith communities have always and continue to dominate North American society numerically, business, law and government have moved steadily toward secularism, said Hunter.He also argued that numerical size is not necessarily a guarantee of influence. For example, America’s homosexual community-at best three per cent of the population-has made extraordinary gains in visibility, legitimacy and legal rights during the past several decades.Instead, Hunter told his audience, cultural change depends not just on changing hearts, but on developing networks that promote change. Furthermore, he argued that "elites” are the ones that drive culture."Such power arises from overlapping networks of leaders and overlapping resources, all operating in the centre of institutions,” he said. "Change happens when elites overlap.”The message seemed to resonate with people such as Paul Weigel, president of the Ontario-based Forerunner radio ministry. "I thought Hunter has a very perceptive and realistic view of the way culture is formed in western society even if it is radically different than most of our current perceptions,” said Weigel."It has been a paradigm shift that has left me trying to adapt all that he said into the many different areas in which we are involved.”Michael Van Pelt, president of the Work Research Foundation, believes Hunter’s challenge to the traditional view of cultural change is needed at a time when public debate about public life has never been greater."We wanted to bring Hunter here to challenge us about public life and the influencing of culture,” said Van Pelt, whose economic think-tank helped organize Hunter’s address.Van Pelt said that by bringing together "diverse leaders with diverse callings,” his organization hopes to inspire Christian leaders from a wide variety of fields to be "change agents challenged to think about influence in every aspect of their lives.”