Ruling takes wider view on faith freedom
Lawyers Weekly (Cristin Schmitz)
March 30, 2015
Lawyers predict the Supreme Court’s rejection of Quebec’s narrow formulation of religious freedom in education will reverberate in other cases, including perhaps Trinity Western University’s litigation to create Canada’s first evangelical Christian law school.
The March 19 ruling in Loyola High School v. Quebec (Attorney General) [2015] S.C.J. No. 12, under reserve for a year, amounts to a qualified victory for the appellant Loyola, a Jesuit-run high school in Montreal.
Reversing the Quebec Court of Appeal below, the top court ruled 7-0 that, as part of a provincially-mandated course on the culture of world religions and ethics, the boys’ school can teach Catholic doctrine and Catholic ethics from a Catholic perspective.
However, the judges split 4-3 to hold that Loyola must teach about the ethics of other religions from a neutral perspective.
This content has been updated on March 30, 2015 at 08:48.