Last week, Thomas Cardinal Collins, Archbishop of Toronto, challenged Justin Trudeau's decision to require candidates for the Liberal Party to support a pro-choice policy. He called on Trudeau to recognize that political authority does not extend to matters of conscience.It may appear that the Cardinal is standing up for personal liberty, but if we look a little closer we see that he, rather than Trudeau, is really the one encouraging politicians to meddle in matters of conscience. Let me explain.Individual rights and freedoms limit government's authority to intervene in our private lives. For example, freedom of speech ensures that I can express my personal beliefs without government interference.While we all enjoy having such rights, the requirement that we also allow others to enjoy them can leave us feeling conflicted. Suppose I detest your ideological views and believe them to be false. Which is more important, my personal feelings about your views or your right to say what you think?Your rights are, of course. As Voltaire famously declared, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire's point is that the most sacred thing to a liberal is the respect for individual rights, even when he/she disagrees with what is being said or done. (I use the word “liberal” to refer to the long tradition of limited government, not the Liberal Party of Canada.)If we allow ourselves to put our personal feelings ahead of our respect for rights, we undermine our commitment to limited government—and along with it, the basis of our own liberty.How a politician deals with these tensions between rights and personal feelings is the real test of whether they are a liberal or a social conservative. Imagine an MP who believes that abortion is wrong and wonders if she should feel free to advocate for or support legislation to prevent it.Some MPs will say yes. They will say that issues like abortion raise objective questions about public morality. Indeed, social conservatives typically believe abortion is wrong in much the same way most people think murder or rape is wrong.As a result, they will say that if your conscience tells you abortion is wrong, you are right to call on the government to act to prevent it. And, like the Cardinal, these people will insist that no party should prevent them from “voting with their conscience.”The point to note here, however, is that when social conservatives say abortion is a “matter of conscience,” they are NOT insisting on their right to treat it is a personal choice, but just the opposite. They are insisting on their right to prevent other people from treating it as a personal choice. As far as I can tell, this is also the position Cardinal Collins is defending.There is another way of looking at the issue. Imagine an MP who is opposed to abortion because of her religious beliefs, but who recognizes that others feel just as deeply that having an abortion is an acceptable choice.The more the MP thinks about this, the more she realizes that her religious views do not provide an objective basis for declaring that those with opposing views are wrong. Her beliefs, after all, are based on faith so there is no way to know or prove that they are right.The MP therefore concludes that the fairest way to deal with the issue is to treat it as a “matter of conscience,” by which she means that each person should make their own decision, based on consultation with their conscience.Now let's note that when this MP declares that abortion is a “matter of conscience,” she is saying something very different from the social conservative. For her it is not a way of stopping others from treating abortion as a personal choice, but just the opposite. She is upholding the personal nature of the decision, which means she believes that the state has no right to intervene.I think this is the philosophical position Justin Trudeau is staking out when he says that future candidates for the Liberal Party should be pro-choice. If so, the position doesn't prevent people who are pro-life from becoming Liberal candidates.Instead, it asks them to decide whether they are liberals or social conservatives about their pro-life views. If they are conservatives, Trudeau thinks they don't belong in the Liberal Party, because its official position is to protect individual choice—whether pro-life or pro-choice—and to oppose state control.On the other hand, an MP who takes the liberal view should be quite comfortable with Trudeau's position. It allows her to retain her pro-life views, while respecting the right of others to make their own choice.Such an MP may even be called upon to defend the Party's pro-choice policy, but this does not mean she is being forced to do so against her conscience. Rather, she should be willing to do so because she believes that abortion really is a matter of conscience.Like Voltaire, she should be willing to take a pro-choice stand, not because she believes abortion is right, but to protect the individual's right to make that choice from the social conservatives' effort to replace it with “objective” community standards.A final point involves the limits of liberal rights and freedoms. As Section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms makes clear, rights always have limits. I assume that the same principle holds for Trudeau's pro-choice position for the Liberals.While he has not been very clear on where these limits lie, or how they would be determined or maintained, I doubt he thinks there are none, anymore than he thinks this about other Charter rights.Dr. Don Lenihan is Chair of the Ontario Open Government Engagement Team and Senior Associate at Canada's Public Policy Forum in Ottawa. He is an internationally recognized expert on democracy and public engagement, accountability and service delivery. Don's latest book, Rescuing Policy: The Case for Public Engagement is an introduction to the field of public engagement, a blueprint for change, and a sustained argument for the need to rethink the public policy process. The views expressed here are those of the columnist alone. Don can be reached at: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at: @DonLenihan