The strong temptation is to respond to a case now before the B.C. Supreme Court by demanding Dying with Dignity and other pro-medical homicide lobby groups stop shoving their immorality down our throats.

Two generations ago, after all, a great liberalizing trend in Canada transformed areas such as sexuality, family life, and particularly State-sanctioned termination of life. It was accompanied by the mantra that people of faith, or even just holders of traditional social views, had to stop forcing their beliefs into progressive gullets.

Well, the worm of liberality has predictably metamorphosed. Yesterday’s permissive ideologues who advanced the culture of death have turned into reactionary fanatics. They can’t change their minds and won’t change the subject no matter how serpentine the logic or effect. Everyone, everywhere, must now, they insist, swallow the poison of medical assistance in dying. 

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The result is Dying with Dignity and other MAiD advocates going before the court to force St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver to permit non-culpable homicide on its Catholic premises. Their casus belli? Wait for it. Canada’s Charter of Rights, which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the 2015 Carter case protects an invented right to medically-induced self-extermination, albeit in strictly confined circumstances and while respecting other Charter guarantees.

The B.C. government, as the constitutional overseer of health in the province, met that balance by upholding St. Paul’s Charter right to refuse an act that violates every jot and tittle of Catholic faith so long as it arranged transfers to facilities where MAiD is carried out. 

Not good enough, cried the medicalized death merchants, seizing on the heart-rending case of a terminally-ill young woman who, though reportedly sedated, suffered agony at the hour of her death during such a transfer. Off to court. To Hell with Charter-protected religious freedom.

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We cannot predict how the lower court will rule, of course, but it’s worth noting that the Supreme Court of Canada has twice over the past two decades handed down decisions broadly favourable to the Charter rights of religious believers and, as importantly, institutions.

In the 2004 Amselem case, a majority of the court, including then Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin, defined religion itself as a set of “freely and deeply held personal convictions or beliefs connected to an individual’s spiritual faith and integrally linked to his or her self‑definition and spiritual fulfilment…(emphasis added).” 

A decade later, the high court was even clearer and more forceful in its 2014 Loyola ruling when it stipulated that “freedom of religion means…no one can be forced to adhere to or refrain from a particular set of religious beliefs. This includes both the individual and collective aspects of religious belief. Religious freedom under the Charter must therefore account for the socially embedded nature of religious belief, and the deep linkages between this belief and its manifestation through communal institutions and traditions.”

It would take a truly perverse turn of social, political and judicial thinking to hold that St. Paul’s Hospital, and indeed every Christian health care centre across Canada, fails to qualify as the embodiment of a communal institution that socially embeds religious belief and traditions. Alas, this is Canada, where the very spread of MAiD testifies that the risk of further perversity is never off the table.

Which is why, rather than falling for the temptation of reviving old slogans and turning them back on the medical death lobby, the approach of a group called Dying for Christ is so laudable and hope-inspiring. As the Register’s Luke Mandato reports in this issue, the program offered online by the Christian Medical and Dental Association of Canada has tutored about 1,900 people throughout the country in the specifics of why the Faith implacably opposes the immorality of health care killing.

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The growth of that number creates a cohort not of activists refighting the battles of yesteryear but of evangelizers for the truth that life itself is a gift we cannot simply discard and, more, that the right to hold, proclaim and act upon that verity must, above all, be respected and legally protected.