From the Fr0ntier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Judges struck down one-year minimum prison sentences for child pornography possession. Meanwhile, the chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee publicly stated that religious scriptures condemning homosexuality are “hateful.” Lee Harding says the 1982 Charter has led to an inversion of Canadian values.

Light sentences for child-porn possession collide with federal signals that biblical texts could be prosecuted as hate

Was Canada’s 1982 Charter meant to condemn the Bible as hate literature or to weaken sentencing for child pornography? Like it or not, that is the direction post-Charter Canada is moving.

For Halloween, the black-robed justices at the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a one-year mandatory sentence for accessing or possessing child sexual abuse materials amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” The judgment upheld a similar ruling from the Quebec Court of Appeal.

A narrow 5-4 majority leaned on a hypothetical. If an 18-year-old received a sexually explicit image from a 17-year-old girlfriend, that image would technically be child porn. If prosecuted, the recipient could face a one-year minimum sentence. On that basis, the judges rejected the entire minimum sentence law.

But the real case before them was far more disturbing. Two Quebec men possessed images and videos that were clearly the result of abuse. One had 317 unique images of child porn, with 90 per cent showing girls aged three to six years old forced into penetration and sodomy by adults or other minors. The other had 531 images and 274 videos of girls aged five to 10 engaged in sexual acts, including anal and vaginal penetration and, in some cases, multiple children.

The sentences were light. The first offender received 90 days of intermittent imprisonment, served concurrently, plus 24 months of probation. The second received nine months of imprisonment and the same probation period. How is this acceptable?

The judgment did not emerge without warning. Daniel A. Lang, a Liberal campaign chair appointed to the Senate by Lester B. Pearson, saw this coming more than 40 years ago. On April 23, 1981, he expressed concerns that the new Constitution could be used to erode basic decency laws. He pointed to the U.S. experience and predicted that Canada could face a wave of cases challenging laws on “obscenity, pornography and freedom of speech,” leading to the “negation of federal or provincial legislation.”

His warning has come true. If Parliament wants to restore mandatory minimum sentences, it can do so by passing a new law that removes the obscure scenario judges used to strike them down. Section 33, the notwithstanding clause, gives elected officials the power to override court rulings for up to five years at a time.

This reflects Canada’s own system. In the British tradition Canada inherited, Parliament—not the courts—is the ultimate authority. British common law developed over centuries through conventions and precedents shaped by elected lawmakers. Section 33 protects that balance by ensuring Parliament can still act when judges disagree.

There is a democratic check as well. If a government uses Section 33 and voters believe it made the wrong call, they can remove that government at the next election. A new government can then follow the judges’ views or let the old law expire after five years. That accountability is precisely why Section 33 strengthens democracy rather than weakening it.

Yet today, Ottawa is working to limit that safeguard. In September, the Carney Liberals asked the Supreme Court to rule on new limits to how legislatures can use Section 33. Five premiers wrote to Carney to oppose the move. Former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Brian Peckford, the last living signatory to the agreement that produced the 1982 Constitution Act, has also condemned the attempt as wrongful.

The judges will likely approve the new limits. Why would they refuse a chance to narrow the one tool elected governments have to get around their rulings? For decades, the Supreme Court has made a habit of striking down laws, telling Parliament it is wrong and forcing political change.

And while minimum sentences for child-porn offenders fall, the Carney cabinet is focused on something else entirely: prosecuting Bible believers for alleged hate.

The quiet part was said out loud by Montreal lawyer Marc Miller, former minister of immigration and citizenship and chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee. On Oct. 30, he told the committee, “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans, there’s other passages, there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals.”

The former minister added, “There should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges … [T]here are clearly passages in religious texts that are clearly hateful.”

That is the former minister’s view. Instead of Bible thumpers, we now have Charter thumpers who use their “sacred” document to justify whatever interpretation suits their cause and wield it against their ideological opponents. When wokeness hardens into dogma, disagreement becomes heresy. And we know what happens to heretics.

A country that lets child-porn offenders off easy while it hunts down Bible believers for fines and possible prison has lost its way. Most Canadians would reject this trade-off, but their rulers do not, whether in cabinet or on the judges’ bench. A dark shadow is settling over the country.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine caused ‘life-altering damage’ to Catholics and other religious groups by denying them exemptions to its COVID shot mandate, and now the school must pay a hefty settlement.

The University of Colorado’s Anschutz School of Medicine must pay more than $10.3 million to 18 plaintiffs it attempted to force into taking COVID-19 shots despite religious objections, in a settlement announced by the religious liberty law firm the Thomas More Society.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in April 2021, the University of Colorado (UC) announced its requirement that all staff and students receive COVID jabs, leaving specific policy details to individual campuses. On September 1, 2021, it enforced an updated policy stating that “religious exemption may be submitted based on a person’s religious belief whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations,” but required not only a written explanation why one’s “sincerely held religious belief, practice of observance prevents them” from taking the jabs, but also whether they “had an influenza or other vaccine in the past.”

On September 24, the policy was revised to stating that “religious accommodation may be granted based on an employee’s religious beliefs,” but “will not be granted if the accommodation would unduly burden the health and safety of other Individuals, patients, or the campus community.”

In practice, the school denied religious exemptions to Catholic, Buddhist, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical, Protestant, and other applicants, most represented by Thomas More in a lawsuit contending that administrators “rejected any application for a religious exemption unless an applicant could convince the Administration that her religion ‘teaches (them) and all other adherents that immunizations are forbidden under all circumstances.’”

The UC system dropped the mandate in May 2023, but the harm had been done to those denied exemptions while it was in effect, including unpaid leave, eventual firing, being forced into remote work, and pay cuts.

In May 2024, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked the school for denying the accommodations. Writing for the majority, Judge Allison Eid found that a “government employer may not punish some employees, but not others, for the same activity, due only to differences in the employee’s religious beliefs.”

Now, Thomas More announces that year-long settlement negotiations have finally secured the aforementioned hefty settlement for their clients, covering damages, tuition costs, and attorney’s fees. It also ensured the UC will agree to allow and consider religious accommodation requests on an equal basis to medical exemption requests and abstain from probing the validity of applicants’ religious beliefs in the future.

“No amount of compensation or course-correction can make up for the life-altering damage Chancellor Elliman and Anschutz inflicted on the plaintiffs and so many others throughout this case, who felt forced to succumb to a manifestly irrational mandate,” declared senior Thomas More attorney Michael McHale. “At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith during what Justice Gorsuch has rightly declared one of ‘the greatest intrusion[s] on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.’ We are confident our clients’ long-overdue victory indeed confirms, despite the tyrannical efforts of many, that our shared constitutional right to religious liberty endures.”

On top of the numerous serious adverse medical events that have been linked to the COVID shots and their demonstrated ineffectiveness at reducing symptoms or transmission of the virus, many religious and pro-life Americans also object to the shots on moral grounds, due to the ethics of how they were developed.

According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used fetal cells derived from aborted babies during their COVID shots’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design and development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and even the left-wing “fact-checking” outlet Snopes have also admitted the shots’ abortion connection, which gives many a moral aversion to associating with them.

Catholic World Report notes that similarly large sums have been won in other high-profile lawsuits against COVID shot mandates, including $10.3 million to more than 500 NorthShore University HealthSystem employees in 2022 and $12.7 million to a Catholic Michigander fired by Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2024.