Canada’s Day of Rest Awakens Critics

PUBLIC POLICY

The shopping mall parking lots are empty every Sunday in Toronto, Canada, and the concept of a day of rest for clerks and salespeople remains largely intact.

But in Vancouver, British Columbia, 2,500 miles away on that nation’s west coast, Sunday has become almost like any other in the world of retail commerce. And experts say Toronto and other cities in Ontario may soon allow Sunday shopping. So far, Christians are giving little more than token support to preserve what is described in legalese as a “common pause day.”

The issue has warmed up in Ontario, particularly, because the provincial government has introduced “local option” legislation, which would shift decision making on Sunday opening from provincial to municipal jurisdiction. Passage of the legislation is awaiting public hearings.

Domino Effect?

The flaw in the legislation, according to Hudson Hilsden, one of the vice-presidents of the Coalition Against Open Sunday Shopping (CAOSS), is that municipalities would face unbearable economic pressures once neighboring communities opened stores on Sunday.

Hilsden, who is social concerns director for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (the Canadian equivalent to the Assemblies of God), says raising Christian support for the issue has not been easy “because there is a perception that Ontario Premier David Peterson will do whatever he wants” about Sunday opening. Peterson’s Liberal government was elected with a massive majority last fall and is currently enjoying unprecedented popularity.

Hilsden notes that CAOSS is fighting Sunday opening as a family issue. The biblical one-day-in-seven rest concept is meant to enhance not only worship but family togetherness, he maintains. CAOSS has printed two million bulletin inserts distributed to churches throughout Ontario. The insert calls for Sunday to be a family day and notes, “People are much more than economic entities.”

The Sunday-opening issue first emerged in the prairie province of Alberta in 1984, when a Calgary store was charged with violating the Lord’s Day Act, the legislation that governed Sunday opening at the time. The Supreme Court of Canada threw out the act, claiming it violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom by favoring a Christian-initiated pause day.

What followed were various forms of action in Canada’s ten provinces, all seeking to fill the vacuum left by the Lord’s Day Act’s demise. In Alberta, for example, the provincial government set up a system under which residents of a city could petition for a referendum to decide the issue locally. Cities in which petitions were not successfully advanced, including Calgary and Edmonton, were left with virtually wide-open Sundays.

Profiting From Service

British Columbia has also experienced a trend toward Sunday shopping, and some observers blame this on the Christian community. In fact, Jim Pattison, a household word in the retail service community there and an avowed evangelical, set the pace by opening his own chain’s megamarkets on Sunday.

To Pattison, the issue is corporate responsibility to provide service to the public. In one interview, he said the biblical concept of servanthood was a sound argument for opening on Sundays, in the evenings, or at any other time there is a public demand for service. Pattison allows, however, that Christians and others not wanting to work on Sunday, Saturday, or any other recognized rest day should be protected by law from discrimination.

And, indeed, Christians in different parts of Canada see it from different perspectives. In Toronto, for example, Christians who want a Sunday pause day have had to be careful that their viewpoint was not seen as anti-Semitic. Toronto has a Jewish population of close to 150,000, and many of the businesses wanting Sunday opening are run by Jewish people for whom Sunday work is not a matter of conviction.

For that reason, many who argue for Sunday closing propose that in areas where Jewish influences dominate, the day of closing should perhaps be Saturday.

The irony of that argument is that Ontario’s local-option proposal would permit such geographic logistics. And any Toronto Christians not bound by a conviction to refrain from Sunday shopping would only be a short driving distance from the places where they could exercise their freedom.

By Lloyd Mackey.

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