WATERLOO, Québec (LifeSiteNews) — A Canadian court has upheld a ticket that was given to a man who was fined for volunteering for suicide prevention group Le Groupe Jaspe by going door to door to spread the message of life.
The case concerns Le Groupe Jaspe founder Claude Tremblay, who in 1999 founded the group after the suicide of his son. Tremblay was eager to spread a message of hope to those with suicidal thoughts. One of his goals was to knock on every door in Quebec’s 1,000 cities and towns.
Since this time, he and his team of 70 volunteers have knocked on doors in over 770 towns thus far in the province.
On October 30, 2024, however, the city of Waterloo gave a ticket to one of Le Groupe Jaspe’s volunteers for soliciting door-to-door without a permit. According to the city, the volunteer had violated a bylaw mandating a permit for solicitation.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom (JCCF) helped Le Groupe Jaspe challenge the bylaw ticket, by saying the volunteer’s religious rights were violated under 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court case was heard by the Municipal Court of Waterloo on February 10, 2025.
As for the City of Waterloo, it claimed that since Quebec’s 2019 passing of “Loi sur la Laïcité de l’État (Act Respecting the Laicity of the State),” which affirms the state’s religious neutrality, the ticket should stand.
The JCCF in a statement noted that, on May 26, the Municipal Court of Waterloo concluded that a bylaw it had could be enforced against the Le Groupe Jaspe volunteer.
Constitutional lawyer for the JCCF Olivier Séguin, who was the person arguing the case, was disappointed in the ruling.
“This decision suggests that municipalities can suppress peaceful religious expression in the public square through permitting rules – something the Charter is meant to prevent,” he said.
“This ruling stands in tension with prior court decisions that affirmed the right to share one’s faith publicly. It raises serious concerns about the future of religious freedom in Quebec.”
The court did find, however, that the “Loi sur la Laïcité de l’État” does not give the state unlimited power to limit the activities Le Groupe Jaspe was engaged in.
Part of suicide prevention in Canada means shedding light of the nation’s legal euthanasia regime, which has been legal since 2016.
Activists have long been pushing for expansions in the nation’s euthanasia program, specifically advocating for the practice to allow the killing of so-called “mature minors” and those suffering solely from mental illness. In fact, the expansion of euthanasia for the mentally ill is slated to become law in 2027 as a consequence of the 2021 passage of Bill C-7.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, documents show that Health Canada has been funding a university research project concerning “youth views” on euthanasia that included a brief discussion as to whether children with severe autism would ever be allowed to qualify for death under the nation’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) program.
The most recent data show that MAiD is the sixth-highest cause of death in Canada, with Health Canada reporting in 2022 that 13,241 Canadians died by MAiD lethal injections. That figure accounted for 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country that year and represented a 31.2 percent increase from 2021, the first year euthanasia was available to those who were not terminally ill.
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