“Canadians support freedom of religion because we live in a free democracy. But the reason we support freedom of conscience is because without it, our free democracy would not exist.”
This quote comes from an article I wrote for The Epoch Times. Please click on the link to read the full article. Most of it is posted below.
Thanks so much!
Forced Referral and Freedom of Religion Vs Freedom of Conscience
A recent court decision in Ontario missed the mark when it ignored the impact forced referral has on freedom of conscience.
On May 15, the Ontario appeals court ruled that doctors must give patients a referral for euthanasia, abortion, and other contentious issues, regardless of what an individual doctor thinks about them.
The court battle started after the medical regulator in Ontario, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), created a policy that forced doctors to refer for procedures, regardless of doctors’ deeply held convictions of religion or conscience. Doctors who refuse would risk being fined and/or losing their license to practice medicine.
A coalition of doctors, led by the Christian Medical and Dental Society, the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Societies, the Canadian Physicians for Life, and five individual physicians, challenged the policy in divisional court. The challenge ended with the court reducing the issue to religious beliefs versus medical needs. The court said religious doctors could change specialty to avoid contentious issues, and refusal to refer would harm access to medical care.
Therefore, the court ruled that doctors’ religious convictions should not trump patients’ needs.
The coalition appealed the decision to the Ontario Court of Appeals. They lost in a unanimous decision. Again, the appeals court reduced the issue to nothing more than an attempt to use religious beliefs to block access to medical care.
As expected, media reported this as a war between intolerant religious doctors and suffering patients. It did not help that the doctors’ coalition was made up of white Christians, garnering no intersectional sympathy.
Conscience, not Religion
Most media completely ignored freedom of conscience in this story. Acting as an intervenor in the appeal, the Ontario Medical Association argued, among other things, that the court had not adequately analyzed the impact that forced referral has on freedom of conscience.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as unique “fundamental freedoms.” Freedom of conscience is a broad right that supports an individual making his own decision to act, or not, based on his personal, deeply held beliefs. Freedom of religion is a specific example of freedom of conscience, and the courts have ruled that they are not identical.
The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) agrees. In the landmark 1993 Sue Rodriguez case in British Columbia, Justice Antonio Lamer stated, “(A)n emphasis on individual conscience and individual judgment also lies at the heart of our democratic political tradition. The ability of each citizen to make free and informed decisions is the absolute prerequisite for the legitimacy, acceptability, and efficacy of our system of self‑government.”
More recently, in 2009, Justice Rosalie Abella quoted from a European case: “(F)reedom of thought, conscience, and religion is one of the foundations of a ‘democratic society.’ … [It is] one of the most vital elements that go to make up the identity of believers and their conception of life, but it is also a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and the unconcerned. The pluralism indissociable from a democratic society, which has been dearly won over the centuries, depends on it.”
Canadians support freedom of religion because we live in a free democracy. But the reason we support freedom of conscience is because without it, our free democracy would not exist.
John Carpay, a lawyer and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, one of the intervenors in the case, called the May 15 ruling “a setback for every Canadian who wants her or his conscience to be respected by government authority.”
Important Issues Ignored
Oversimplification always leads to error. The CPSO argued that access would be restricted if doctors refused to refer, but lawyers could offer no examples of access ever being harmed after decades of Ontario having no forced referral for abortion.
The court ignored a number of other important issues: harm to patient care when pro-life doctors and nurses are forced to leave their professions; only a tiny group of doctors agree to perform euthanasia or abortion; forcing referral creates precedent to force other issues in medical care; doctors cannot simply change specialties given tight restrictions and limited training positions; and other countries that offer euthanasia, abortion and other contentious issues have excellent access to services without resorting to forced referral.
Margaret Somerville, professor of Bioethics at University of Notre Dame in Australia, wrote in her book “Bird on an Ethics Wire”: “Progressive-values adherent claim to give priority to respect for individual autonomy when values are in conflict, and pride themselves on their tolerance. Such claims are only tested, however, when ‘progressivists’ do not agree with the stance that another person takes, such as a physician who for reasons of conscience refuses to participate in abortion or euthanasia. In the current controversies, the ‘progressivists’ are not scoring well on these tests.”
Please read the rest of the article on The Epoch Times site.
Thank you for continuing to expand this important discussion, Shawn.
Few doctors escape dealing with death, or the prospect of death in our patients everyday lives. We expect our medical regulator to be a tolerant multi-denominational pulpit which reflects the nature and diversity of our own as well as societal and democratic values.
This CPSO Policy …. enforced referral for MAiD …. achieves none of the above.
Exactly. They have lost any sense of value for the peaceful coexistence of strong divergent opinions. This is the basis of our liberal democracy. When we compromise this using compulsion and force, we have nothing. Freedom is not the default state for humans. It takes effort. Enforced referral is a huge step backwards.
I made the “denominational” edit you wanted.
Thanks again for sharing a comment!
Well thought out and written. Remarkable how our current infatuation with pluralism and diversity is so intolerant to dissenting consciences. In the 1990’s physicians were pressured into letting patients determine their own opioid doses since they should know their own needs better than the doctor. The pressure to participate in taking human life feels like a replay.
Very interesting. I was in medical school in the 1990s, so I was not aware of this. Thanks for sharing it!!
I don’t recall the allowing of patients to govern their own opioid dosages in the ‘90’s…it sounds crazy in retrospect…as Orwell put it “there are some ideas so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them”….the trouble is that our SJW “ intellectual” medical elitists keep on churning them out , imposing them by force on unwilling medical foot soldiers and then having the hutzpah to blame the innocent troopers for their inevitably negative consequences.
Where the war on opioids in Ontario is concerned…the same powers that be fed the fires of opioid usage in the 90’s as noted by Shawn , only to switch gear when the unintended consequences of their actions, the narcotic faeces hit the proverbial fan , to declare war on opioid use by frightening medical doctors into refusing to properly medicate their pain patients.
Such is their sense of misguided self confidence amongst these hubristic medical central planning “elites” , that they step over the wreckage of previous their policy disasters as if nothing had happened , to impose their latest bright idea , such as Primary Care Reform, on the innocent.
Whatever happened to “I may not agree with what you say (think or believe), but I will defend to my death your right to say it!”
Precisely, Connie.
We lose the essential fabric that holds our society together when we do not speak out about attacks on liberalism. It will be something else next time. We need to speak up no.
Thanks for taking time to read and post a comment!
“They step over the wreckage of previous policy disasters as if nothing had happened…”
Great point, Andris. No one carries responsibility for policy failures. If it were a private business, the customers would crush it by going elsewhere.
“There are some ideas so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them…” Another great quote. Thanks so much for sharing it!
Sad to see the eagerness of the Kantians on the Medical Post thread running Shawn’s articles, to encourage the utilization of force to bend those that they disagree with to their will …one of the editors? joining in stating “ those doctors who refuse to carry out their duty should be forced to carry out the state policy or be forced to quit medicine”.
German National Socialist doctors were forced , given the “ duty”, by the state, to identify “defectives” in German society …the blind, the deaf, the diabetic, the schizophrenic , the malformed, the subhumans, those with genetic disorders for extermination including thousands of German Jewish doctors…the Chinese Communist Party orders its doctors to carry out their “ duty” to the state to harvest organs from prisoners and deviants such as members of the Falun Gong…North Korea’s Medical doctors also carry out their ” duties” including involuntary human experimentations much like their ideological Nazi cousins did….god knows what they did to Otto Warmbier to reduce him to a vegetable.
In a civilized society force should be expelled from social interactions.
Connie is right to quote Voltaire’s “ I disapprove of what you say…but I will defend to the death your right to say it”…quite appropriate….but it does not go down well in this increasingly easily offended snowflakey Kantian western world that we live in .
Excellent comments, Andris. We do not read history, so we cannot even forget what we did not know at the start. Thanks again for sharing this.