The French philosopher Albert Camus in 1951 wrote “If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” Camus was prescient as he was also describing the condition of Canada today relating to faith, the hastening of death, and the value of unborn babies.

According to LifeSiteNews on September 30th, the Canadian Armed Forces has issued guidance to its chaplains that curtails specific religious devotion and prayer at upcoming Remembrance Day events in November. For example, they are to “avoid SFT-specific (Spiritual/Faith Tradition) words, actions and symbols, including metaphysical references.” This is a stark contrast to the late Canadian Prime Minister W.L. Mackenize King, who at the start of World War II broadly stated “The forces of evil have been loosed in the world in a struggle between the pagan conception of a social order which ignores the individual and is based upon the doctrine of might and a civilization based on the Christian conception of the brotherhood of man, with its regard for… the sacredness of human personality.” Would 1939 Canada recognize its country’s “social order” today?

Also, the current directives remind those to “Understand language boundaries. In the context of military ceremonies, the principle of religious neutrality applies.” One wonders how many of the Canadians bravely storming Normandy on D-Day in 1944 believed the eternal words of perhaps the most unneutral person in history, Jesus Christ, when He asserted that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13). To believe is to be. In Canada now, neither seems possible.

What does seem more possible in Canada is the opportunity to choose euthanasia (also soothingly called Medical Aid in Dying, or MAID). As The Atlantic notes in an August 11 article, doctors in Canada are “struggling to keep up with demand” for it. Since its legalization in 2016, “safeguards have failed to materialize” according to a Cardus Health report in September. As it goes on to note, those “requiring disability services” have died at an increased rate via MAID, and persons with mental illness are dying by MAID at “disproportionate rates” according to Catholic News Agency. And as the New Hampshire Coalition for Suicide Prevention writes on its website, “physician assisted suicide” deaths in Canada are “outpacing even deaths from Alzheimer’s and diabetes.” Whatever compassionate-sounded rationale was first given to this new death regime, it morphed and expanded to much worse, as far-left aims usually do.

This morbid tailoring of life also goes on with abortion in Canada. Published research in 2016 suggested that certain communities participate in higher rates of abortions solely on the basis of the sex of the baby. In 2021, a Conservative Party-backed bill failed 248-82 in the Canadian Parliament to ban such abortions. Tabitha Ewert, a Canadian lawyer advocating for the bill, said at the time that “This is an ugly reality in Canada, where girls are aborted simply because they are girls.” Such acts are a form of gender-based violence, according to the United Nations. For all the Left’s grand talk of gender equity, one must assume they only mean those girls getting the chance to be born.

What these policies amount to is a systematic distrust of the individual. This distrust manifests itself when the state believes one’s faith deserves not approbation but repudiation, that the defenseless child is subject more to whim than dignity, and that one’s own concept of death gives way to a coercive collective demand. Such characterizations would be deemed by progressives as uninformed or inattentive to compassion and autonomy. But it is precisely those values which Canada has cruelly stripped down. One also wonders if its Liberal government (or sizeable parts of its population) would gladly be relieved of individual responsibilities, weighty as they are with the virtues needed to thrive as citizens in a free society. This also does not bode well for the rest of western culture.

Alan Loncar is an attorney in Macomb County, Michigan.

Image: AT via Magic Studio