It was a Conservative campaign promise meant to promote religious freedom worldwide.

The promise, the Tories said, was to give a Canadian foreign policy focus to oppressed religious minorities in places such as Egypt, Pakistan, China and Iran.

But in the months since the federal election, when the Office of Religious Freedom first appeared on the Tories’ platform, the foreign affairs department has released few details about how the new body will operate or when, exactly, it will come into being.

Last month, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called freedom of religion a linchpin of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom and Bill of Rights. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has also touted the new office, hoping Canada would step forward as a major champion of international religious rights.

At an hour-long interfaith meeting in Toronto on Wednesday, participants Abdul Hai Patel, of the Canadian Council of Imams, and Rev. Bhante Saranpala, of the West-End Buddhist Cultural Centre, said Baird noted the “office doesn’t have any teeth.”

But Baird spokesperson Joseph Lavoie said the minister was referring to the office’s legislative influence around the world.

“At the end of the day, we can’t force another government to do anything,” Baird said in a later interview.

The new entity — which will cost $5 million, employ five and, Lavoie said, launch in early 2012 — has rankled a number of Canadian religious organizations, human rights groups and academics, who remain unsure of what it hopes to achieve and whose interests it will serve

Muslim groups especially have lamented the lack of information. Wahida Valiante, past president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said it was self-defeating for the ministry to stand behind a “wall of secrecy,” since religious issues are often racked with controversy.

“We know very little,” echoed Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations. “There is concern over how this is going to operate and what its methodology is going to be.”

The office will open on the heels of an August 2011 study by the influential Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found 32 per cent of the world’s population living in countries that severely restrict open religious practice.

But it remains unclear just how religion will act as a guiding light in Canadian foreign policy. The fog surrounding the office has heightened concerns that the initiative will not take an ecumenical approach to addressing religious interests abroad, and unleashed a broader skepticism over the supposed fusion of church and state affairs.

Amnesty International Canada executive director Alex Neve expressed worry the ministry might now give short shrift to other human rights causes, such as women, gays and freedom of expression.

“It’s very important that this office be structured and operate in a way that’s not going to avoid and ignore . . . other human rights imperatives,” he said.

Critics have also posited the office will serve only Christian interests — indeed, the Tories pointed to the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians and Pakistani Christians when the office was first proposed.

A closed-door consultation between Baird and roughly 100 religious leaders and politicians, held in Ottawa on Oct. 3, drew criticism over the ministry’s invited speakers list: representatives from major Christian and Jewish organizations participated, while members of Eastern religions, like Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, were left out.

Lavoie called that criticism “unfounded, based on hypotheticals and simply not true.”

Shimon Fogel, executive director of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, called the criticism “cynical,” noting the government has strong relations with Hindus and Sikhs, as well as his own constituency.

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“(The office) is simply Canada using religion as a bellwether to address the general comportment of a regime and its attention to human rights,” said Fogel, adding that the CIJA might direct the office’s attention toward Jews in Venezuela and the former Soviet Union, where anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise.

Also present at the October consultation was Thomas Farr, first director of the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom, a component of the U.S. State Department since 1998. Farr’s involvement signaled to some that the Canadian office would be heavily modeled on its American counterpart. That body was originally pushed by the evangelical Christian lobby, said University of Toronto law professor Karen Knop, who has studied the American legislation.

Susanne Tamas, director of governmental relations for the Baha’i Community of Canada, rejects the notion that the office will be Christian-centric. She said combating religious persecution with partisan behaviour would be entirely un-Canadian.

“It could be argued that a secular government is well-positioned to (promote religious freedom abroad) because it doesn’t have a vested interested in any particular community,” said Tamas, who attended the October consultation. Baha’is face persecution in a number of Muslim countries, including Iran.

Indeed, on Wednesday, Baird met with Hindus, Buddhists, Falun Gong and various denominations of Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Regardless, some argue the government has entered a minefield by explicitly injecting religion into a secular foreign policy. Human rights issues routinely butt against economic interests abroad, a conflict that could be exacerbated under the office.

“It’s setting itself up to be accused of hypocrisy and at odds with its own foreign policy,” said Marci MacDonald, author of The Armageddon Factor: the Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada.

MacDonald points to Harper’s trip to China next month. While Harper has criticized China’s commitment to human rights in the past, the country remains one of Canada’s largest trading partners, with $13.2 billion in exports and $44.5 billion in imports in 2010.

MacDonald said it is “absolutely inconceivable” that the Tories will speak out against China’s well-documented persecution of Christians and the Falun Gong. In October, Baird voiced support for China’s Christians and Falun Gong, as well as its oppressed Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Lavoie acknowledged religion is sometimes a testy topic, but “we always balance diplomacy with tough, direct talk in the course of frank discussions.”

“We will not go along just to get along,” he said.

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