During his town hall tour across Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has given explicit notice to pro-life Canadians that their beliefs on abortion make them second-class citizens.

HuffPost Canada reported that:

At a town hall at McMaster University in Hamilton Wednesday, Trudeau was asked by a first-year Mac student if he views freedom of speech as important. The student charged that ‘leftists’ often call critics who disagree with them racists or bigots. ‘If you’re pro-life then you are ridiculed and insulted, but if you’re pro-choice then you are praised,’ the student said, sparking some applause. The prime minister responded that he has “demonstrated time and time again that defending rights and freedoms is at the core of who I am and quite frankly at the core of what Canada is.”

Yet, Trudeau said there is a difference between holding personal beliefs and acting on them. According to the article, Trudeau warned that “an organization that has the explicit purpose of restricting women’s rights by removing rights to abortion, the right for women to control their own bodies, is not in line with where we are as a government and quite frankly where we are as a society.”

According to Trudeau, his tongue-lashing of pro-life groups was prompted by responses to a change to who can receive grants as part of the Canada Summer Jobs program. “Under new rules introduced last year, employers must sign an attestation vouching that their organization upholds human rights and Charter values, including reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of, among other things, sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.”

This change has angered pro-life groups, and they have been pushing back. More concerned with scoring cheap political points while pushing a far-left agenda, Trudeau is using his town hall tour to create a government-sanctioned hostile environment in Canada for pro-lifers.

As Al Mohler wisely pointed out,

The most troubling part of the Prime Minister’s statement in recent days was his elimination of a pro-life position as having any place whatsoever in Canada’s public conversation. Furthermore with a student jobs program, he has indicated his own willingness and the willingness of his government to use government coercion in order to make this point. … This should remind Christians of the argument made by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni just a couple of years ago when he argued that religious liberty when especially it comes to an issue like the morality of homosexuality would protect the rights of American citizens to hold those beliefs in their hearts and in their homes and in their pews but not in public. Now you have the Canadian Prime Minister making a very similar argument but applied to the question of abortion. And we should note that a New York Times columnist has the power to influence and make an argument, but the Canadian prime minister has the authority and political power to create policies that would bind the Canadian people.

Our neighbors to the north are quickly having their freedom to publicly express views that contradict the government taken away. Unfortunately, America probably isn’t too far behind Canada’s gag order on conservative Christians.