  Adding rewriting to a proof assistant based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism,
such as Coq, may greatly improve usability of the tool. Unfortunately adding an
arbitrary set of rewrite rules may render the underlying formal system
undecidable and inconsistent. While ways to ensure termination and confluence,
and hence decidability of type-checking, have already been studied to some
extent, logical consistency has got little attention so far. In this paper we
show that consistency is a consequence of canonicity, which in turn follows
from the assumption that all functions defined by rewrite rules are complete.
We provide a sound and terminating, but necessarily incomplete algorithm to
verify this property. The algorithm accepts all definitions that follow
dependent pattern matching schemes presented by Coquand and studied by McBride
in his PhD thesis. It also accepts many definitions by rewriting, containing
rules which depart from standard pattern matching.
