A Jewish cabbie in Montreal is ordered by the taxi bureau to remove religious
icons from the dashboard of his car. And in Toronto, officials decide that a
piece of playground equipment in a park depicting the story of Noah's Ark
should be removed. In both these cases, the concern appears to be that such
public expressions of religious beliefs are, or may be, offensive to those who
do not share them. Or, as a Toronto alderman explained in justifying the
removal of Noah's Ark, such displays are \u201cinappropriate\u201d because they go
\u201cagainst the city's general policy of inclusiveness.\u201d

No doubt it is the courts, guided by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that will ultimately adjudicate the issue of what limits, if any, can be imposed on religious expression in a secular society that also claims to be democratic.

But in the meantime, practical folk and elected officials accountable to them
would do well to contemplate the extent of the wrecking ball operations that
would be required if Canada were to seriously attempt to remove every
vestige of its spiritual heritage \u2013 in particular its Judeo-Christian heritage \u2013
from the public square.

Starting in Quebec, for example, one presumably would have to take the
wrecking ball to all the publicly visible buildings and institutions with a
religious history or vocation. More than 4,000 of these were identified as
worthy of preservation by a committee of the Quebec National Assembly in
its 2006 report Believing in Quebec's Religious Heritage.

Moving to Ottawa, the first target for the wrecking ball would obviously be the Peace Tower, the most prominent feature of our Parliament buildings. If displaying religious material on public property at the centre of the universe is \u201cinappropriate\u201d because it goes against Toronto's \u201cgeneral policy of

And while we are in the nation's capital, would it not also be logical to take
the axe to the Canadian coat of arms, the national anthem and the
Constitution itself?

Canada's coat of arms appears on all denominations of our paper currency
and on Canadian passports. It is displayed by most courts, including the
Supreme Court, and it's used in the Canadian Forces as a symbol of rank.
These uses would obviously have to go since our coat of arms bears the
inscription A Mari Usque Ad Mare \u2013 meaning \u201cfrom sea to sea,\u201d taken directly
from Psalm 72:8.

unseemly references to \u201ccarrying the cross\u201d and a \u201cvalour steeped in faith,\u201d while the third verse of the original English version is, from start to finish, an unapologetic prayer to the \u201cRuler Supreme.\u201d

And the Charter could not escape unscathed since its preamble
acknowledges the supremacy of God, while its opening clauses seek to
guarantee the freedoms of religion and expression, which the wielders of the
wrecking ball seek to restrict.

Time and space permit only a small sampling of the other obvious targets if
the object were to remove every visible vestige of religious belief from the
public square in our country. These would include many of the secular
universities of Atlantic and Central Canada, most of which had their roots in
religious institutions and still bear many of the hallmarks of that heritage.
Trinity College at the University of Toronto, for example, would have to go
since the Trinity referred to is the sacred Trinity, not the Three Amigos, as
would much of the property of my alma mater, the University of Alberta,
since it bears the inscription Quaecumque vera (\u201cWhatsoever things are
true\u201d) taken from the writings of the Apostle Paul. And further west, the axe
would need to be taken to all the totem poles and publicly displayed religious