How God was forgotten on Remembrance Day

How did prayer get banned from Remembrance Day? It wasn’t overnight.

When the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into force in 1982, Section 2(a) promised freedom of conscience and religion. Yet, that provision itself has been systematically and progressively used to strip traditional religious expression from public and official life. The public square has been scrubbed of religious language and practices that once animated Canadian civic life.

The trajectory is clear: from the 1985 striking down of the Lord’s Day Act, through the banning of municipal prayers, to the recent elimination of prayer and religious language at Canadian Armed Forces ceremonies, including Remembrance Day services. What began as protection against state coercion has evolved into a doctrine of state neutrality so rigorous that it functions as exclusion.

In R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd. (1985), the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the federal Lord’s Day Act. The federal law had prohibited most commercial activity on Sundays. The Court held that its purpose was to enforce Christian Sabbath observance and therefore violated freedom of religion. Justice Dickson’s majority opinion emphasized that the state cannot coerce individuals to conform to the religious practices of the majority.

How did these judges conclude that a provision for religious freedom had to excise any echo of it in civic practice? It’s especially strange given that the constitution acknowledges that its contents are based on a primary idea: “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God.” 

It does not seem plausible that when the premiers and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau hammered out the political compromise that resulted in the constitution, that the elimination of Sunday rest was what they had in mind. 

Nevertheless, the 1985 legal precedent began to require the active removal of religious markers from the public domain. This logic reached municipal government in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City) (2015). For years, the mayor of Saguenay had opened council meetings with a prayer, making the sign of the cross and invoking the Trinity. An atheist resident challenged the practice. The Supreme Court ruled that the prayer breached the state’s duty of religious neutrality and discriminated against non-believers. The Court held that the state must neither favour nor hinder any belief system, including non-belief. 

The problem is that the ban of any religious expression does encourage non-belief. Furthermore, the freedom of the mayor of Saguenay to do anything publicly religious was stripped from him due to the complaints of one person. The logic is hard to defend. If we held that any set of ideas and practices should be banned from civic life if they offended or ran contrary to someone else’s, there would be no government left.

Orwell’s governmental slogans from his novel 1984, “War is peace” and “freedom is slavery” have their unfortunate echo in Canadian public life: no religion is religious freedom.

Lately, this strange doctrine has reached the Canadian Armed Forces. In recent years, and reinforced by a July 2026 Military Personnel Instruction, chaplains and members delivering remarks at official public events are directed to offer “spiritual reflections” rather than faith-specific prayers. Explicit references to God or language particular to any spiritual or faith tradition are prohibited in these settings. Traditional chaplain stoles bearing religious symbols have been restricted in public contexts. Exceptions exist for Indigenous practices (framed as cultural and reconciliation-related) and for private or family-led events such as funerals. 

But here is the asymmetry: religious language rooted in the historic traditions of most CAF members and of the nation is treated as exclusionary, while other forms of spiritual expression are accommodated. Prayer has been replaced with non-theistic reflections. Chaplains are kept present but with the symbols and expressions of their faith publicly muzzled. How bizarre.

True religious freedom does not require the public square to be emptied of religious language. It requires that no one be forced to participate in another’s faith. Post-Charter Canada has done something else and effectively established non-religion as the default public posture.

The result is not the robust protection of conscience promised in 1982, but a thinner, more brittle public culture in which traditional religious expression is tolerated only when safely privatized. That is not the preservation of religious freedom. It is its quiet inversion.

The freedom that Canadian soldiers supposedly died to protect has been supplanted. How ironic that the greatest proof of this comes at ceremonies done to preserve the memory of their sacrifice.