Carney Gov't CONFIRMS Remembrance Day Prayer Ban | Bridgehead Briefing Ep. 81

Now, the very political language that he uses there and the very calm sort of blase way he delivers his response disguises just how extreme his statement actually is.

And so I want to break down what he's saying here and then give a little bit of context.

We've covered this story twice before in the past because this story has been developing essentially since 2023.

So let's take a look first at what he specifically laid out and then get into some of the context for this which some of you may be familiar with.

So David McGinty starts off by saying that the Canadian Armed Forces is strengthened by its diversity, traditions, backgrounds and beliefs of its members, which is a nonstatement statement, because essentially what he's being asked by the conservative MP from Parkland is.

Are chaplains allowed to reference God? Are they allowed to give Christian prayers at public military events? This would include commemorations of the Battle of Britain.

This would include, of course, most notably Remembrance Day, where hymns and prayers and scriptural passage readings have been normative since 1919, when Armistice Day was first instituted.

And so he's not actually answering the question.

He just saying these beliefs strengthen the members, but of course doesn't address whether or not we can say these things publicly.

He then moves on to say that policies that support diversity are a moral and ethical responsibility of the Royal Canadian Chaplaincy Service and the chief of the defense staff and CAF leadership.

So he's willing to actually beckon to a moral and ethical responsibility, but refers to diversity as a moral and ethical responsibility.

So he's making a moral statement while denying that there can be any objective morality at all.

This is, of course, not immediately noticeable when you listen to his statement because his language sounds good, right? There's a moral and ethical responsibility, okay, to support diversity.

So where does that moral responsibility come from? Is there an objective morality? How do we determine what that objective morality is? It's just nonsense words strung together into a sentence in the hopes that it sounds compelling.

And so...

He emphasizes here that they have made the decision.

Presumably he's speaking about the chief of defense staff and CAF leadership, but it seems like he's trying to emphasize that he himself was not involved in the decision-making process because he says it twice.

They have made a decision that the spiritual health and well-being of CAF members is vital to operational effectiveness.

So the spiritual health and well-being of CAF members, including presumably the Christian members of the armed services, but the prayer ban also includes people from other faith traditions, that this spiritual health is necessary to operational effectiveness, so presumably to war fighting, but public prayers would somehow violate this because they have, of course, he says, as if this is something that is obvious, broaden guidelines.

And then his last line here is so indicative.

Broaden guidelines which do not ban personal or private faith.

So broaden guidelines.

And you'll notice that when they make a statement confirming that something is being banned, they will never admit that they're banning something.

They'll never admit that there are restrictions, that Christian chaplains can no longer pray to God, that Christian chaplains can no longer, as they used to do, read prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, since many of the chaplains are often Anglican, which is a tradition very predominant in what was once Upper Canada.

Instead, this is about broadening it.