In a ruling that should shake the very foundation of Ottawa's COVID regime, the Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board has found that the National Research Council — a federal agency — violated the Charter rights of Christian employees by denying them religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

This story, first broken by Blacklock's Reporter, is a damning indictment of everything the Trudeau Liberals claimed to stand for: inclusion, tolerance, and respect for diversity. Apparently, that diversity stops the second your faith clashes with their ideology.

The Board ruled in favour of two federal employees — one a Catholic meteorologist, the other a Pentecostal IT analyst — who were both suspended without pay after refusing to take COVID vaccines developed with fetal cell lines from aborted babies.

One woman told her boss she would rather die than violate her conscience. The other said he hadn't taken any vaccines in over 20 years, choosing instead to trust the immune system God gave him. Both were ignored. Both were punished.

Let me be perfectly clear: These were not anti-science radicals. These were devout Christians exercising their Charter right to freedom of religion, rights the federal government is constitutionally bound to uphold.

Instead, those rights were steamrolled.

The same Liberal government that insists you can be a faithful Catholic while championing abortion, cheering on gender transition surgeries for minors, and mandating Pride flags over every public building somehow saw fit to judge the sincerity of actual practising Christians.

That's right. The Trudeau Liberals, the same gang that tried to:

• Strip charitable status from pro-life churches and charities,
• Ban Christian summer camps from receiving job grants unless they swore allegiance to radical gender ideology by forcing Canadians to sign ideological attestation forms just to access public funding

Those are the people who suddenly got very interested in theological consistency.

They appointed themselves the gatekeepers of orthodoxy. They decided which beliefs were "real," which Christians were "sincere," and who deserved a paycheque during the pandemic.

And for what? Control. Ideological conformity. A message to every Canadian that you are free to believe anything, as long as you never act on it.

Thankfully, adjudicator Patricia Harewood wasn't buying it. She cited the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Syndicat Northcrest v. Amselem, which makes clear that the state has no business being the arbiter of religious dogma. The role of the courts is not to decide what someone believes, only that their belief is genuinely held.

And according to Harewood, suspending someone without pay for a sincerely held religious belief is not a minor inconvenience — it's a "significant interference" with their fundamental freedoms.

It gets worse.

According to government data tabled in Parliament, of 2,042 federal employees who applied for religious exemptions during the vaccine mandate, only 540 were approved. That's just 26 percent.

Three out of four were rejected — treated like frauds or heretics — by a government that sees faith as a threat to its authority.

This labour board ruling won't undo the harm. It won't restore the lost income, the reputations destroyed, or the trust shattered. But it's a start. It's an official admission — from the government's own labour tribunal — that what happened was illegal, discriminatory, and unconstitutional.

And this is just the beginning. According to the Board, there are over 350 similar cases pending. If even a fraction succeed, the Trudeau government will have a legal and moral catastrophe on its hands.

The Liberals' COVID legacy isn't one of compassion or public health — it's one of coercion, punishment, and ideological persecution.

They owe these workers more than back pay.

They owe them an apology. And they owe the rest of us a reckoning.