The Bruno Cherry Sunday festival may not happen this year, as the Saskatoon Roman Catholic Diocese is balking at a new requirement for federal summer job funding.

“Unless there is some kind of summer jobs program available to us, I don’t know how the annual cherry festival would proceed,” said Vicky Serblowski, executive director of the St. Therese Institute of Faith and Mission, which puts on the event.

The August festival has been a major attraction for the Town of Bruno for the past 14 years.

Federal funding in the form of a summer job grant is crucial given the amount of work that goes into organizing it, Serblowski said. The funding has also been used to landscape the St. Therese orchard, for Canada 150 programming, and for heritage displays.

In December the federal Liberal government introduced a new requirement to access that funding - an attestation that the summer job and the organization’s core mandate respect the rights within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as a woman’s right to a legal and safe abortion. This conflicts with the church’s view on abortion.

“We feel that no one should be denied government funding resources because of a certain set of beliefs," said Myron Rogal, the justice and peace coordinator for the Saskatoon Roman Catholic Diocese.

"As we know, what is legal is not necessarily moral and people at any time can freely decide whether they agree with a certain law or not, and have their own opinions on that without necessarily challenging that law.”

The government says the attestation isn’t about the group’s beliefs - only to their primary activities.

A faith-based organization with anti-abortion beliefs would be eligible for funding to hire students to serve meals to the homeless, for example.

An organization whose primary activities are focused on removing or actively undermining existing women’s reproductive rights would not be eligible.

Rogal interprets the attestation differently. Regardless of whether the government says the attestation is about a group’s actions rather than its beliefs, checking it is in effect a statement of belief, he said. 

A secondary problem is the attestation's commitment to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, “which would be up to each person’s conscience and how they read that. So it’s not asking for something specific, whereas the first one is,” Rogal said.

The diocese has sent a strategy to leadership in its parishes, he said. Parishes are asked to print off the funding application, not check the attestation box and send the application along with a template letter from the diocese to Employment Minister Patty Hajdu, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and their local member of parliament.

And if that doesn’t work?

“It would make me feel sad that Bruno, known as the cherry town of the Prairies, wouldn’t have a cherry festival,” Serblowski said.