The Rev. Dr. Canon Dean Mercer of Toronto and The Rev. Catherine Sider-Hamilton,a Ph.D candidate at Wycliffe College have called the Anglican Church of Canada to refuse to sign the Anglican Covenant because to do so would be to lie about where the Canadian Church stands.
Their opinion piece is posted on the Anglican Journal website:
“[T]he Covenant offers the Anglican Church of Canada an opportunity to be honest before the world about its commitment to same-sex blessings and its willingness, in the name of its own standards of justice, to walk apart from the universal church. Why can the church not adopt the Covenant? It cannot because the Covenant insists on a primary commitment to the universal and apostolic church, a commitment that the movement for same-sex blessings rejects as opposing its standards of justice.
To approve the Covenant is to approve its insistence on the wider voice of the church in our own deliberations about same-sex blessings in Canada. It is to take seriously the inherited teaching of the church on scripture, in this case with regard to marriage. To approve the Covenant is therefore to refuse to proceed unilaterally with same-sex blessings.
Since we are already proceeding with same-sex blessings in three dioceses, it would be self-contradictory, if not dishonest, to approve, still less adopt, the Covenant.
The Covenant offers the Anglican Church of Canada, instead, an opportunity to be prophetic. The call to same-sex blessings has been a call to the standard of justice of Canadian church leaders. It has declared scripture and the church’s teaching on marriage to be oppressive and outdated.”
From here.