Two Hutterite communities in southern Alberta are weighing their options after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled last month not to support their bid to be exempted on religious grounds from having their images on driver’s licences, the Calgary Herald reported.

Members of the Three Hills colony northeast of Calgary and the Wilson colony near Lethbridge have resisted having their photos taken because they believe to do so would violate the Second Commandment’s prohibition on the making of “any graven image.”

But in a narrow 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the government’s requirement that every driver in the province carry a valid licence with his or her photo on it was a reasonable limitation on freedom of religion.

When Alberta first mandated driver’s licences with photo identification in 1974, it exempted those who objected on religious grounds. That exemption was lifted in 2003 amid growing concerns about identity theft.

“The goal of setting up a system that minimizes the risk of identity theft associated with driver’s licences is a pressing and important public goal,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote for the majority. “The universal photo requirement is connected to this goal and does not limit freedom [of] religion more than required to achieve it.”

Sam Wurz, manager of the Three Hills colony, is hoping they can meet with the provincial government to see whether they can reach a compromise that would satisfy both sides. But they have also not ruled out leaving Alberta – or possibly even Canada – if they feel they have no other choice.

“We want to work with the government,” Wurz told the Herald. “. . . But we can’t just throw our religious principles aside and do what the government says.”

Commentators are divided on what the ruling means for Canadians’ freedom of religion.

To Father Raymond de Souza, writing in the National Post, the outcome is a “violation of religious liberty.” The Alberta government, he said, “is compromising [the Hutterites’] ability to live peaceably their faith.”

But in a case analysis, Evangelical Fellowship of Canada vice-president Don Hutchinson said that while “we would have preferred a different result,” the ruling as a whole appears to set a positive precedent for future religious freedom cases.

“[It] provided,” he wrote, “some encouraging and strong language in regard to the concept of the ‘collective aspect’ of the right to freedom of religion in Canada . . . , advancing it significantly beyond the almost passing reference it was given in a 1986 decision of the court.”

As Colby Cosh also noted in the National Post, by not treating religious freedom as “a seamless whole” as it has done in the past, this ruling “will hopefully give future courts the ability to defend core rights of conscience and expression more strongly by placing them in a conceptual compartment apart from ‘reasonable accommodation’ issues.”