ROBIN DOUGLAS apologises for not putting on his shirt while giving a sermon to a parishioner via Skype. His listener doesn’t mind; she doesn’t feel well enough to drive the hour from her home to the Church of the Holy Smoke in White Rock, a seaside town near Canada’s border with the United States. So she gets his rambling advice via a laptop.

Even in the Vancouver area, mocked by Canadians from elsewhere as a nest of decadence, Pastor Douglas, as he calls himself, leaves nobody indifferent. His parish office is a wooden house with hand-written signs at the front and old pizza boxes inside. His central place of “worship” is a tatty tent; the main liturgical practice is smoking marijuana.

The rich folk who share the beach-front rejoiced in midsummer when the council told him to fold the tent and put an end to the smoke, garbage and noise. He is unrepentant. “We are a church,” he insists. “We do good works, we help cancer patients with free marijuana. I could be a millionaire if I sold it.”

How strong is his legal case? Canadian courts, like American ones, have been asked whether inhaling intoxicants is a religious practice which merits protection; judges have usually been sceptical. Canada’s indigenous faiths use sage and tobacco in their rites, but not marijuana.

Still, the pastor got a secular fillip in June when Canada’s Supreme Court affirmed that medically prescribed marijuana could be taken in cookies, brownies and teas as well as in dried form. For now, his smoke is still rising.