ELLIOTT: Keep Your Government-Mandated Values Off My Conscience
In Canada, we are constantly being dragged into a phony war over religious freedom. The political class, from the self-proclaimed champions of "Canadian values" on the right to the equality crusaders on the left, all fundamentally miss the point. They see religious freedom as a bargaining chip or a right that must be balanced against others.
They’re wrong. Religious freedom is the purest expression of individual liberty, and it is a benefit to all Canadians precisely because the government has no business touching it.
The Right to Think: An Absolute
The core of this debate isn't about church sermons or religious schools. It’s about the freedom of conscience. This is the one right that is absolutely beyond the state's reach.
The government cannot mandate what you genuinely believe. It cannot punish you for your sincere convictions. Any attempt to force you to hold a specific belief, or declare your own belief illegitimate or illegal, is an act of pure, unadulterated tyranny. The state’s legitimate authority ends at the boundary of your mind and your skin. Period.
Whether it’s a politician demanding immigrants pass a "values test" before being allowed entry, or a bureaucrat attempting to regulate how you practise your faith in private, both are an aggressive overreach. The right-wing argument is nothing more than the state attempting to pick and choose which beliefs are "Canadian enough" to be tolerated. A free country welcomes people regardless of their internal convictions, so long as they don’t initiate force.
The Only Limit: Don't Hurt People
The great moral firewall of libertarianism is the Non-Aggression Principle. You are free to act on your beliefs until those actions involve initiating force, fraud, or physical harm against an innocent person or their property.
This is the only line that matters.
When religious freedom is debated in Canada, the left consistently tries to substitute "offence" or "dignitary harm" for actual physical aggression. They argue that a person's religious practice must be curbed because it makes someone else feel bad, excluded, or discriminated against.
Sorry, but feelings are not a crime. The government's job is not to protect your psychological comfort. Its job is to protect your body and your property from aggressors. If a person or a group, acting on religious belief, tries to steal, assault, or physically coerce others, they have committed a crime and should be stopped. But if they are just saying things you don't like, or choosing who they associate with, that is entirely within their moral right.
Property Rights: The Ultimate Shield
This is where the entire debate should end. Religious freedom is meaningless unless it is protected by strong individual property rights.
For a group to practise its faith, it needs space, a church, a school, a charity headquarters. These are private properties, built with private funds. Forcing a private, faith-based organization to hire people who actively work against its core mission, or forcing a private baker to use their labour and property to create a product that violates their deeply held conscience, is a straight-up act of aggression.
It’s theft. The state is stealing the right to control your own property and labour through the threat of fines or jail time.
The moment the state dictates who a religious school must hire, or who a private business owner must transact with, that is the moment the state becomes a bully. The freedom to associate is utterly worthless without the corresponding freedom not to associate.
Religious freedom is a benefit to all Canadians, no matter their faith or lack thereof, because it affirms this fundamental moral truth: The government serves the individual, not the other way around. It guarantees that you, the individual, have the ultimate moral authority over your own mind, your own body, and your own property, so long as you do not violate the moral space of others.
The debate is simple: keep the government out of the relationship between a person and their conscience. Anything less is a move toward theocracy or authoritarianism, and neither belongs in a free Canada.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Provincial Times or Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.
