Remote control: a history of the regulation of religion in the Canadian public square

The modern Canadian state is secular, but it is not a neutral state. It is a liberal democracy in which the prevailing value system has shifted. The shift has been from a culture in which a commonly held religion was accorded a special place in the development of law and custom, to a culture in which religious pluralism is recognized and an institutionalized secularism obtains. The assumption would be that this would betoken a new tolerance for diversity, and in some ways it does. In other ways, the modern state behaves with an understanding of pluralism that is just as consensus oriented as the Protestant Culture that dominated in Canada until the middle of the twentieth century, and with the same illiberal tendencies. In historical terms, the effect that can be charted is one of repeating hegemonies, where respect for freedom of conscience or religion remains an incomplete ideal. How do we assess respect for religious freedom? One way is through an evaluation of the developing jurisprudence in the manifold areas in public life where religious freedom is contested. Another is through an exploration of one of these contested facets of the public square. That is what this dissertation attempts to provide. The case study is that of broadcasting: more specifically, the regulation of religious broadcasting in Canada from the time that it began until the last decade of the twentieth century. For explaining the Canadian historical approach to religion, it benefits from an easy comparison with the United States, where a very different set of circumstances evolved. John Moir once characterized Canadian religion since its disestablishment in the mid nineteenth century as that of a “legally disestablished religiosity”. In contradistinction from the United States, the implication is of a greater level of control over religious expression. For the purposes of this dissertation, it is an apt description for how and why the state has alternately suppressed, supported and enjoined Canadian religion in an important area of public life, one whose span straddles the shift from a Christian to a secular culture. In the regulation of broadcasting, both public and private, we see that the management of religious expression has worked from the start to affirm the dominant religious prejudices of the majority of Canadians. Our case study also suggest that such privileging was managed through the advice and support of the mainline churches. It suggests that the discourse of “balance” through which broadcasting was controlled, particularly since the decade of the nineteen sixties, constituted a self-serving defense of discriminatory regulation. As well, the case study provides an argument for the existence of a Canadian civic religion of nation building, for the idea that this civic religion is as old as European settlement itself, and for the promise that in recognizing its existence we can move beyond a pattern in our past of marginalizing non-conforming value systems and those who hold them. This paper operates on three levels. On one level it provides an historical argument for the idea that the modern liberal state is repeating the practices of hegemonic value systems of the past. On another level it provides a philosophical argument that this cycle is fed by the assumption that a healthy public arena is empty of irreconcilable views, and that this idea sustains a perpetual inability of the mainstream to respect true diversity in first order questions. Finally, it is a case study in one area of the Canadian public square—radio and television broadcasting—through which the merits of both of these points can be evaluated.

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