If you wanna drive a car, you need photo id.Alberta government and Hutterite colony go to top court in battle over photo-free licences
Oct 07, 2008 04:30 AM
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Tracey Tyler
Legal Affairs Reporter
Samuel Wurz's people arrived in Canada to the promise of religious freedom. But 90 years later, they're afraid that freedom could be destroyed in the blink of a digital camera's eye.
As members of a traditional Hutterite community in southern Alberta, they believe being photographed is a sin. But that belief is becoming harder to sustain in a world obsessed with security.
The Alberta government is heading to the Supreme Court of Canada this week as part of its heated legal battle with the Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony over the province's photo driver's licence scheme.
Civil libertarians say the case, which kicks off the court's fall term, will test Canada's commitment to religious tolerance and accommodation.
Alberta wants to force the colony's eligible drivers to comply with its licensing system, invoked in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which made licence photos mandatory and abolished an exemption that enabled people like Wurz to opt out of pictures for religious reasons.
"When we did come into Canada in 1918 ... the government promised ... we could live our religious life the way we feel is necessary," Wurz explained while undergoing questioning earlier in the case.
Lawyers for Alberta's attorney general freely admit that requiring colony members to be photographed as a condition of being able to drive would violate their constitutional right to freedom of religion, but argue the infringement is justified given heightened security threats and the growing problem of identity theft.
An Alberta trial judge disagreed, finding the photo requirement unconstitutional, a ruling upheld in a 2-1 decision by the Alberta Court of Appeal last year.
But the province has shown no sign of giving up.
The province now has the backing of the federal government and several other provinces, which are intervening in the case. The Ontario government is among the intervenors.
While Ontario takes no position on whether Wilson colony members should have licences without photos, the province is concerned that a test laid out by the Supreme Court for religious exemptions in 2004 could mean the transport ministry can no longer rely on its current standards for photo-free drivers' licences.
To be considered for such a licence in Ontario, an applicant must prove membership in a registered religious organization and provide "actual scriptural passages" to support their objection to being photographed. Since 1986, approximately 80 people have applied, but not a single exemption has been handed out.
In 2004, in a case involving Montreal's Orthodox Jewish community, the Supreme Court said religious beliefs do not lend themselves to objective evaluation and limited the rights of governments to inquire into whether they're sincerely held.
If that same reasoning holds true in the case of the Wilson Hutterians, the Ontario government says it could become easier for would-be criminals or even honest citizens with privacy concerns to obtain photo-free drivers' licences by asserting fictitious religious objections.
In court documents filed for today's hearing, Wurz says the mandatory photo requirement is forcing his community to choose between violating the Second Commandment against idolatry – making any "likeness of what is in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water" – or ending their communal way of living, another tenet of their religious practices.
And there are photos of Hutterites on Wikipedia.
