Restore the Bank of Canada to the purpose of funding infrastructure projects in Canada.
Eliminate usurious private lending institutes.
– Abolish Income Tax.
– Re-examine The Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Is “The Charter” a legal constitution or not?
– Eliminate any central bank digital currency.
– Audit the federal government by a consortium of private citizens.
– Paper ballots in all jurisdictional elections, including hand-counts. No ‘voting machines’, no electronic tabulations.
– Investigate thoroughly all covid-19 related activity, including cancelling all vaccine contracts. All colluding with already know criminal cv-19 related activity prosecuted, incarcerated, and de-pensioned.
– No mandatory medical dictates.
– Keep all pharmaceutical company lobbies out of all government and citizen activity.
– Stop the process of codifying vitamins, herbs and all natural health products.
– Allow natural health procedures to serve the people.
– Repeal MAID. People can end their own lives without the taxpayer involved.
– Stop murdering people before they are born – it is a child’s body.
– A 100% moratorium on immigration. Deport all international criminals and illegal entry individuals.
– Stop funding the U.N., and remove Canada from U.N. membership.
– Stop funding the entire women’s lobby to end all unfair advantages to females only.
– Investigate the R.C.M.P.
– Stop the aboriginal money extraction industry. Everyday Canadian tax-payers today should not be forever paying for what the monarchies did hundreds of years ago.
– Investigate aboriginal tribal and band councils regarding where received money was spent. Accountability.
– Allow freedom of speech. Repeal any legislation restricting what can be said or written.
– Stop government expansion. We have enough laws and government departments.
– Continue drilling for oil.
– Keep foreign investment out of local resource extraction. Allow Canadians to develop such industry. -Thoroughly investigate the current majority in Parliament.
Jordan Peterson: Canada is trampling on my God-given right to free speech
Canada’s idiotic pandering and cowardly insistence on group rights set us up for dominance by the meta-Marxists Author of the article: Jordan Peterson, The Telegraph Published Sep 02, 2023 • Last updated 4 days ago • 10 minute read 1538 Comments
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Photo by The Canadian Press
As a professional, practicing clinical psychologist, I never thought I would fall foul of Canada’s increasingly censorial state. Yet, like so many others — including teachers, nurses, and other professionals — that is precisely what has happened. In my case, a court has upheld an order from the College of Psychologists of Ontario that I undergo social media training or lose my licence to practice a profession I have served for most of my adult life.
Their reason? Because of a handful of tweets on my social media, apparently. Yes: I am at risk of losing my licence to practice as a mental health professional because of the complaints of a tiny number of people about the utterly unproven “harm” done by my political opinions.
These complainers — most of whom did not even live in Canada, none of whom were my clients or even knew any of them, nor had any contact whatsoever with the persons hypothetically harmed by my views — submitted complaints to the College of Psychologists of Ontario about what I had said using a handy online form. That supposedly august body had the option not to pursue these complaints, but seemingly decided some months ago that my behaviour did not meet with their approval. I had to agree to their demands to undergo training with one of their self-declared “social media experts” — sessions of indeterminate length, cost and content — and it seems that if I did not I would be dragged in front of a formal disciplinary hearing and, if it concurred in the judgment of wrongdoing, stripped of my licence.
The right of the College to do so has now been upheld by a provincial court, despite their apparent admission that it could infringe on my fundamental rights.
My transgressions? Two tweets criticising Justin Trudeau; one criticising his former chief of staff, who resigned in the aftermath of scandal some years ago; one ironically commenting on the identity of a city councillor in Ottawa, who in my view acted in a particularly unforgivable manner during the famous trucker convoy protest; and one objecting to the actions of the physicians performing mastectomies on perfectly healthy women — often minors — alongside a criticism of a famous actress who received such “treatment” and then advertised its benefits to her unwitting fans. In conjunction, the entire transcript of a podcast I did with Joe Rogan where I expressed doubts, fully justified in my view, about the validity of the idiotic models that economists stack carelessly upon the doom-mongering climate predictions used by eco-zealots and wannabe tyrants to justify extreme policies which will harm millions. Finally, there was a tweet that apparently hurt the feelings of a plus-sized model (according to complainants she did not know) parading herself on the cover of a magazine hypothetically devoted to the celebration of athleticism and health.
Every single opinion was a political or psychological statement; every one devoid of genuinely documentable “harm” — except perhaps to the tender sensibility of certain Canadian moralists in whose mouths butter wouldn’t melt, in a country of fatal niceness and complacency.
Politicization of regulated professions
For context, there are many “regulated professions” in Western countries, including Canada; professions whose conduct is held to be crucial to the public interest, and whose practitioners must therefore uphold certain standards to protect the public. That idea worked for years. In Canada, as elsewhere, these professional colleges, with authority delegated from the government, limited their actions to situations of obvious professional misconduct.
In the last few years, however, such bodies – with their wide and untrammeled potential regulatory and punitive ability – have been weaponised by the same ideological radicals of the Left that have infiltrated and undermined higher education, media, judiciary, law, science and government. Any radical anywhere can submit the kind of complaint that can bring a professional’s life to a halt, and can increasingly rely on these captured colleges and other professional regulatory bodies to uphold and pursue their vexatious, vengeful, petty, spiteful and ideological motivated “complaints.” And this is regardless of how much good the target of their complaint has done — independent of the training, reputation or standing of the target, and accompanied by the deep pockets and infinite amount of time available for the accusers and adversaries, abetted by the resources of the government itself.
Suffice it to say: I appealed the decision of my professional college. But the court has rejected my appeal, ruling that although I had my Charter rights — my constitutional right to freedom of speech — the professional regulatory body essentially has indefinite sway over the determination of what limits they felt fit to impose in their professional context, in whatever retroactive manner they felt fit to impose them. This is a court, by the way, headed by appointees from the very administration I was criticising (and which has been criticised very recently and independently from me for the inappropriate relationships it has established with the judiciary).
Canadians now need to wake up to the fact that the right to freedom of speech in Canada is subject to limitations placed by any level of government, for any reason.
I know perfectly well that many professionals in Canada are cowed to the point where they are forced to lie; they tell me so repeatedly in private. And when professionals have to lie, they can no longer do their job properly, and the public suffers. I know, too, that this is increasingly true across the West. Hence the increasing international interest in the dangerous social experiment taking place in Canada, as we ride the forefront of the wave of woke lunacy threatening to swamp the entire Western world.
The decline and fall of Canada
Why does the situation appear particularly grim, here in Maple Leaf Country? We were, for most of my country’s history, miraculously and thankfully dull: our constitution, ensconced safely under British authority until 1982, enshrined “peace, order and good government” as the most basic principles of our dominion. This was not the clarion call ringing out to rally our good friends south of the border, who aimed at the much more dramatic and libertarian “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was good enough, however, to produce a reliable, safe, secure and free state, conservative in the classic small-c sense, with institutions both predictable and honest, and an economy both productive and generous.
That all started to change in the 1980s. Our dashing prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau — father of the current Prime Minister, our current clown prince — was searching desperately for a legacy and for a solution to the chronic problem posed by the Quebec separatists, who were genuinely threatening the integrity of the country. Quebec was the last feudal country in the West: extremely traditional and dominated by a very small, tight, essentially hereditary elite right until the end of the 1950s. Quebec dumped all that in a few short years in a fit of 1960s freedom, also dropping its birth and marriage rate with exceptional rapidity (both are now among the lowest in the world) and abandoning the Catholic church in favour of a crude nationalism and a more-or-less socialist utopia favoured by those who pushed to also tear apart the country.
Trudeau senior, constitutionally displeased with the fundamental derivation of Canada from Britain, seized upon this opportunity to make his mark in history, and began to agitate to “bring the constitution home.” He did so, rewriting our primary legal agreement, and appending to it his much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, paraded before Canadians as the ultimate guarantee of the freedoms we had enjoyed anyway under the much more reliable aegis of British Common Law. But Quebec put up its middle finger, refusing to become a signatory to the new agreement – even after Trudeau’s government abandoned both its spine and its principles to include a poison pill in the very Charter that hypothetically protected our citizens: the clause in Section 33 of that document, indicating that those very constitutional rights can be abridged more or less at will by any government in Canada, federal or provincial, if inclined to do so.
The Canadian government, in its own documentation, notes with unconsciously ironic understatement that “Section 33 is unique among the constitutions of countries with constitutional democracies.” It is unique because it essentially guts the Charter – and it was designed to do so, to appease the very Quebec that it never did appease and which has never in the 40 years subsequent to the “repatriation” formally signed on to the agreement.
And that is not all. Canada was a very early adopter of the idea of “group rights.” The Quebecois, again, began to obsess about the potential threat posed by English Canada (really, the English West, led by the culturally-dominant Americans) to the language and culture of their province. They had some reason for this: the ascendant US was and is a cultural force to be reckoned with, and even English Canadians were uneasy about the elephant to the south, capable of rolling over at any time, careless of its much smaller northern neighbour, and simultaneously much noisier and more effectively theatrical. To keep the country together, Canada began to prioritise the rights of its so-called founding peoples (the British, the French and the original inhabitants of this land, the native Canadians) and to insist that the groups they composed had rights equivalent to or superseding those of individual citizens. This was a very bad idea then, and it has become a worse idea in the subsequent decades. Canada parades itself as a “multicultural” society, pretending that a brainless tolerance — really, a spineless niceness — constitutes the way forward to peace and tranquility, forgetting entirely that too much multiculturalism often stokes unrest.
This bad situation is made worse by the naïve virtue-signalling of, ironically enough, Pierre Trudeau’s son: an unqualified part-time drama teacher who in a recent poll was found to be the country’s least-popular prime minister of the past 55 years. It was that same Justin Trudeau who famously proclaimed that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” in 2015, insisting that the country has little uniting it except its embrace of cultural diversity and its putative values of openness and respect.
But what is a country without a central identity? Aimless, and therefore both anxious and hopeless; worse, prone to domination by the fractionated ideas that will fight necessarily for central place in the absence of the centre that must by one means or another be established. That is the shadow-side of the naïve “multiculturalism” that has doomed the world to continuous fractionalism and all its accompanying horrors.
Canada’s idiotic pandering and cowardly insistence on group rights set us up for dominance by the meta-Marxists who insist that the collective take priority over the individual. Canada’s inclusion of the notwithstanding clause to unsuccessfully satisfy separatists gutted the protection of the rights that might otherwise have protected the individual against group-think. Justin Trudeau’s insistence that Canada has no central identity has allowed the ideologically-possessed fools who know nothing of the great British Common Law tradition and who have contempt for the Western tradition to make their postmodern ideas the central axis around which this once-reliable country now by law is required to rotate.
In principle, Canadians enjoy the right to free speech, but the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is severely and fatally limited by the notwithstanding clause, and leaves our rights endangered.
I have been expressing my Charter Rights — though really I view them as God-given, and rooted more in British Common Law — by writing, lecturing, and using social media. Consequently, I have run afoul of the petty authorities in Canada, including at my former place of employment, the University of Toronto, where my opposition to an infamous bill, C-16, made it impossible for me, eventually, to continue as a professor at that cowardly institution, though it also brought my opinions and work to broad public attention. Since then, I have continued to voice my opposition to the current administration in Ottawa, and the destructive ideological idiocy that is threatening my country and the West itself.
As such, I will fight this idiocy all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. I have instructed my lawyers, in the aftermath of the rejection of my appeal, to inform the College that I will not comply with their forced re-education mandate, and to proceed with the disciplinary hearing they have promised will occur. In the past, such hearings have been videotaped and made public. I doubt the College will have the stomach to do the same in my case, although I will make every effort, reasonable and unreasonable, to ensure that every element of these proceedings is open to widespread international scrutiny. I have already posted the relevant documents online, as I am perfectly happy to have everything that I have done assessed in full.
But I know few people are in a position to conduct such a fight: I have the resources necessary to wage a multi-year court battle, ruinously expensive (tens of thousands of dollars a month) though it is. I also have the means of communication at hand to publicise exactly what is going on. I do so on the behalf of those who are unable to do so.
Regardless of the outcome, I have made arrangements with other jurisdictions — Canadian and elsewhere — to re-establish my licence, in a heartbeat, if the authorities in Ontario succeed in purloining it from me.
I’ll leave it to readers to think through what that would mean for free speech in Canada – and, for that matter, in the rest of the increasingly benighted Western world.
He that Hath No Sword, Let Him Sell His Garment and Buy One
Here in the Dominion of Canada, we are now in the eighth year of the federal premiership of Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau to use the unkind slur by which he is often called. He came to power in the Dominion election of 2015 with a majority win for the Liberals and has managed to cling to power ever since with slim pluralities. Despite, however, the fact that he has been in a position of minority government since 2019, he continues to govern like he has a clear, blank-cheque of a mandate, to do whatever he wants, no matter how unjust and divisive his various agendas turn out to be.
Take Bill C-21. Please, take it. This bill was tabled (1) early last year and had finished going through its first two readings around the beginning of summer in June. The bill is the product of all the hot air that has been coming from the Liberal government since the multiple shooting incident in Nova Scotia in April of 2020. Shortly after the attacks, Captain Airhead announced on the Communist holiday that a ban by Order-in-Counsel would take effect immediately on what he called “assault-style” weapons. This was all a lot of smoke and mirrors. Actual assault weapons of the kind that match the way the Prime Minister keeps describing them, i.e., weapons designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a period of time, were already illegal in Canada and had been long before the Nova Scotia shootings. The “assault-style weapons” that he was going after were merely non-military grade rifles that had been made to look like military rifles for those to whom such an appearance had an aesthetic appeal. Captain Airhead then began shooting his mouth off for the last three years about the need to make our streets safe from gun crime, even as he introduced or stuck to policies on everything from border control to mind-altering drugs to bail reform that had the opposite effect. Bill C-21 if passed would amend various Acts of Parliament to enshrine a much broader gun ban than the one of 2020 into statutory law. It would do absolutely nothing about making our streets safe from gun crime because these crimes are overwhelmingly committed with guns that are illegally obtained – as were the guns in the Nova Scotia shootings, incidentally – because they are already illegal. None of these acts of the Trudeau Liberals, from the Order-in-Council of 1 May, 2020 to Bill C-21, have had or will have much of an effect on making Canadians safer from crimes either of the Nova Scotia variety or of the kind that afflicts our inner cities. Those who are most affected by such empty, self-righteous, gestures are law-abiding Canadians who own guns that they acquired legally and have only used legally. Liberals like the Prime Minister, Bill Blair and Marco “the Mendacious” Mendicino think nothing about unjustly and unfairly punishing such people for the crimes of actual gun criminals against whom they are either unable or unwilling to act.
All the criticism of Bill C-21 and its drafters in the preceding paragraph applied to the bill even before it went into Committee consideration after the second reading in the House which is where it presently stands. During the Committee stage, however, the Liberals amended it in a way that made it much worse. The amendment, which was introduced very late in the year, the Liberals apparently hoping to squeak the amended bill through Committee and its third reading before the House adjourned for Christmas and relying upon the amendment having been introduced just prior to the anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre to shield the move from criticism, greatly expanded the list of guns to be banned. While the Liberals continue to shout “misinformation” and “disinformation” at anyone, especially His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, when they point this out, it is quite reasonable to conclude from the amended list of guns to be banned that rural Canadians, especially farmers and hunters, are being targeted here. There are guns on the list that are clearly hunting guns and which are in no way connected to gun crime in Canada. A traditional shotgun made by English manufacturer Webley and Scott for hunting birds is one such example. There are many others. (2) Indeed, if you were to draw up a list of the most common guns used by farmers and hunters, you would find that many of the most prominent guns on the list are included in the amended version of Bill C-21. The Liberal Party under its current management loves to turn Canadians against each other, to reward those who vote Liberal, and rub the noses of those who do not vote Liberal in Liberal laws, but here this backfired against them. At present, as a minority government, they are propped up by the socialist party, the New Democrats, who agreed to support them in Parliament until the next Dominion election. It is not just the Conservatives, however, who have a large rural base but the NDP as well. While the NDP is led by urban socialists, much of their caucus represent northern ridings where reservations in which hunting remains a huge part of the way of life are to be found. When the Assembly held an emergency session in early December and condemned the Liberal bill as an assault on their way of life the NDP had no choice but to join the Conservatives in opposing the Bill in its currently amended form. When this happened, even the few Liberals who represent rural ridings felt free to break ranks with the leadership of their own party over the issue. Call it a Christmas miracle.
While initially when faced with such opposition the government gave signs of being willing to make concessions, when asked a few weeks later about this the Prime Minister indicated that they intended to pass Bill C-21 and doubled down on accusing the Conservatives of “misinformation” and “disinformation” for telling the truth about how the bill would adversely affect law-abiding rural Canadians without doing anything about actual gun crime. How this shall unfold in this New Year remains to be seen.
Earlier last year Captain Airhead made a remark in an interview that is quite revealing about the attitude he brings to this issue. Appearing on an American podcast (Pod Save the World) he defended his government’s gun control policies and contrasted American and Canadian culture saying:
and we have a culture where the difference is, guns can be used for hunting or for sport-shooting in Canada, and there are lots of gun owners, and they’re mostly law-respecting and law abiding, but you can’t use a gun for self-protection in Canada. That’s not a right that you have in the constitution or anywhere else.
It would be interesting to know if he really believes this or if he was just shooting his mouth off without thinking. It is, of course, nonsense. Canadians do indeed have a constitutional and legal right of self-protection and when a right is explicitly spelled out as such in constitution and law the implicit corollary is the right to employ such means as the explicit right may require. Trudeau may be under the mistaken impression that his father’s Charter is the Canadian constitution, a mistake about which I shall have more to say shortly, but even if we limit our discussion of the constitution to the Charter his statement would be wrong. Section 7 of the Charter by spelling out Canadians right to security of the person, recognizes their right of self-protection. Furthermore, the Firearms Act recognizes self-protection as a legitimate grounds for a firearms permit (Section 20) and the Criminal Code (Sections 34, 35) acknowledges the right to use force to protect one’s person and property.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, properly understood, of course, is not Canada’s constitution, but a part of Canada’s constitution that was added in 1982. Even the British North America Act, which, contrary to what many mistakenly think was not repealed in 1982 but renamed (the Constitution Act, 1867), taken together with the Charter, is only part of our constitution. In Canada, we have a constitution that is both written and unwritten, and the unwritten parts are the largest. The Charter itself acknowledges that its enactment does not annul other rights and freedoms than those spelled out it in it, that Canadians had previously enjoyed as part of our constitutional heritage of Common Law and parliamentary monarchy. The right to use firearms in self-protection was already part of that heritage before the American Revolution and was not invented by the United States. The only thing distinctively American about the United States’ version of the idea of the right to use firearms in self-protection is the notion that the right is absolute. That people have the basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and the necessary corollary right to protect the same, and consequently the right to the means to such protection was recognized by both the Tory (Sir William Blackstone) and Whig (John Locke) traditions before the latter gave birth to both the American Revolution and the Liberal Party, which, for all of Trudeau’s yap about American influence on Canada, has always been the party of Americanization.
There is a tendency in some Christian circles to misinterpret the teachings of Christ in way that is parallel to how Trudeau misinterprets the Canadian constitution and law. These misguided brethren have the idea that not merely the use of guns but self-protection in general is forbidden believers by Jesus’ teachings (the Sermon on the Mount specifically), and example (He allowed Himself to be arrested, falsely accused, tortured, and crucified without resisting). In an extreme form that is associated with the tradition of the far left radical wing of the continental Protestant Reformation this interpretation of Jesus’ teachings and example is taken to mean that Christians cannot serve as policemen, soldiers, or in any other office of the state that requires the use of force.
With regards to the Sermon on the Mount this misinterpretation arises from the basic error of failing to give due weight to Matthew 5:17-19 or to note how these verses apply to what immediately follows in the remainder of the chapter. These verses are the warning not to think that Jesus had come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them. They come before Jesus’ saying that one’s righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and His expansion upon what that entails with a series of six contrasts in which one variation or another of the words “ye have heard that it was said to them of old time” introduces a quotation from the Old Testament, and then Jesus introduces the other side of the contrast with “but I say to you”. These latter words are ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν in the Greek. δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν means “but I say to you” without the ἐγὼ and ἐγὼ like all other nominative case personal pronouns in Greek is only used for emphasis. By emphasizing the first person pronoun in this way, in this sort of contrast, Jesus declares His Own authority in speaking to be on par with that of the Old Testament Scriptures. This format could easily suggest to some minds that Jesus was telling His followers to disregard the Old Testament and listen to Him instead. Verses 17 to 19 warn His hearers against taking His words in that manner.
With regards to the first two contrasts, in which the Old Testament quotations are taken from the Decalogue, there is less need of such a warning since what follows the “but I say to you” intensifies the meaning of the quoted commandment. The third and fourth contrasts, however, could easily be taken as contradicting the Old Testament commandments. The quotations come from the civil portion of the Mosaic Law, the instructions with regards to divorce and swearing oaths. Jesus tells His followers that anyone who divorces his wife except for the cause of fornication causes her and anyone who marries her to commit adultery, and tells them not to swear at all. Verses 17 to 19 tell us that this is not to be taken as annulling the civil provisions of the Mosaic Law. Therefore, when Jesus said “swear not at all” this had nothing to do with the courtroom, as those sects whose members won’t take the oath before testifying in court wrongly think, but with oaths in common conversation. Swearing on a Bible to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” does not violate Jesus’ instructions. Saying “by gum” in casual conversation does. (3)
The same principle applies to the last couplet of contrasts. In the first of these, the Old Testament quotation is the Lex Talionis “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”. In the second the quotation is the Second Greatest Commandment, to love your neighbour. Note that in this final contrast, in addition to the Old Testament quotation there is added the words “and hate thine enemy”, a false extrapolation from the Old Testament commandment, and it is this false extrapolation to which Jesus speaks with His “but I say to you” which here directly contradicts the unscriptural add-on with the instruction to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”.
It is Jesus’ “but I say to you” remarks in this last couplet of contrasts that is taken by some to mean that Christians are not allowed to protect themselves against violence. What do verses 17 to 19 tell us about Jesus’ instructions to turn the other cheek?
The first thing to note, is that clearly verses 17 to 19 tell us that Jesus was not setting aside the Lex Talionis as the standard of criminal justice to be applied in a court of law. Since that is the case, the extreme interpretation that says that Jesus’ followers are not serve as officers of law enforcement or any other state office the duties of which require the use of force is a twisting of the meaning of this passage.
The second thing to note is that just as clearly “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” cannot be speaking about protecting oneself against the violent attacks of others. This is because the right of self-protection was established in the Mosaic Law. Exodus 22 is the operative passage. If somebody breaks into another person’s house in the middle of the night, that person – the homeowner not the burglar – is not guilty of a crime if he uses lethal force against the housebreaker. It was a limited right – it lasted only to daybreak after which the homeowner would be guilty, presumably because other options than lethal force would then be available – rather than an absolute right, but it is there and therefore, we can conclude from Matthew 5:17-19, that the instruction to turn the other cheek does not forbid such self-protection. Indeed, this should be apparent from Jesus’ very words. The verb translated “smite” is ῥαπίζω and while this word did originally mean “strike with a stick” – it is derived from a noun meaning “stick” or “rod” – or “cudgel” or “thrash”, it later came to be used as shorthand for the phrase ἐπὶ κόρρης πατάξαι which more or less means “knock upside the head” and in writings contemporaneous with the New Testament generally means a “slap in the face”. This is what it means here in the Gospel where the right cheek is specifically mentioned. This particular combination refers not to an attack on the security of one’s person, but to an insult, the kind of insult that affronts one’s honour and challenges one to a duel. To accept that challenge is to take a situation in which a confrontation has been building up in words and escalate it into violence, potentially lethal violence. The response prescribed by Jesus, however, is one that would defuse such a powder keg. It is quite perverse, therefore, to take Jesus’ words here as forbidding you from taking measures to protect yourself in situations that are already violent.
This brings us to Jesus’ Own example. There are a number of important observations to be made. The first of these is that Jesus clearly did not believe that the use of force is never called for in any situation. Had He thought that way He would not have overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove the merchants out of the Temple. The second, is that prior to His meekly submitting to arrest He commanded His disciples to procure for themselves the means of self-protection by selling their clothes if necessary (Luke 22:36, from which the title of this essay is taken). The third is that His submission to being arrested, falsely charged, falsely convicted, tortured, and crucified was necessary because it was through these events that He fulfilled the purpose for which He came into this world in the first place, to offer Himself up as the propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.
Related to this last observation is one that can be made about Jesus’ early followers, both in the New Testament and in the early centuries of post-New Testament Christian history. While it is true that the early Christians submitted to being tortured, imprisoned, and killed for Jesus’ sake, the most important words here are “for Jesus’ sake”. Jesus had warned His followers at various times, such as in the Olivet Discourse and in the earlier original commissioning of the Twelve Apostles (and later the Seventy), that thy would be persecuted in this manner because of His name and told them that they would be blessed and rewarded for this. The early Christians rejoiced at the opportunity to suffer for Christ in this way. All of this, however, had to do with their being treated in this way because they were Christians, because they publicly confessed and proclaimed Christ. If a disciple were walking down a street in ancient Corinth and were pulled into an alley and beaten and robbed of everything he had on him and left to die, not because he was a Christian but because the robber who neither knew nor cared what his religious beliefs were wanted some quick cash, this did not make a martyr out of that disciple. When the early Christians qua Christians, were persecuted, tortured, and killed in the name of the Christ they confessed, by submitting to such treatment they bore witness to that Christ, and by doing so persuaded many others of the truth of their faith. Just as good came out of the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, in that His death paid for the sins of the world and made salvation available to all, so good came out of the martyrdom of His followers which contributed to the spread of the Gospel throughout the ancient world. The willingness of the early Christians to submit to martyrdom or rather to embrace it – St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, is said to have yearned for martyrdom his entire Christian life and mourned when he survived earlier persecutions than the one in which he finally attained it – should not therefore be taken as evidence that they thought they needed to submit without resisting to any and every act of violence. While the death of Jesus Christ accomplished the salvation of the world and the martyrdom of the early Christians helped the Gospel to spread like wildfire, most types of violent deaths – robbing someone for his wallet, murdering someone in a fit of rage, the cold-blooded assassination of your business or political rivals, killing someone in a drunken or drug-induced brawl, etc. – accomplish no such good. To submit to such acts can indeed do evil to others. If you give in to the demands of a bully, for example, he will generally not be satisfied and leave you alone, but will continue to bully you more and demand more of you, and will be emboldened to bully others, until someone stands up to him. This applies to other forms of violent aggression as well. Those who erroneously think that the teachings and example of Jesus and His early followers tell us that we ought to submit in non-resistance to every sort of violent crime are telling us that we should be content to allow our neighbours to suffer from society being overrun by violent crime. That is an odd way of loving one’s neighbour. The Second Greatest Commandment, of course, is to “love thy neighbour as thyself”. If someone’s idea of loving himself is that he should allow everyone and everything to walk all over him, submit to every sort of affront to his human dignity, and let every imaginable sort of violent crime be perpetrated against himself, I would not place much stock in his love for his neighbour.
(1) This terminology might confuse readers from the United States if they are not aware of the difference between their usage and ours. In the Commonwealth to “table” a bill means to introduce it in parliament for consideration, i.e., to “put it on the table”. In American parlance it has the opposite meaning, to remove a bill from consideration, or to “take it off the table”.
(3) This is, of course, where the word “swearing” in the negative sense of the term comes from. Originally, “swearing” in the negative sense meant the use of oaths outside of a courtroom. Some older Canadians may still remember a time when they would be reprimanded for swearing for saying any of the various sorts of “by this or that” casual oaths. Ironically, as the word came to take on the generic meaning of “language you shouldn’t use” so as to include cursing, which Scripture is also against, and barnyard or gutter slang about which the Scripture is silent, the sorts of phrases it originally and literally described, dropped out of what most people think when they hear the word. — Gerry T. Neal
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Don Mclean, American Pie
It is very hard to maintain one’s composure when speaking to ordinary Canadians about the disaster in the making that is Canada today. I have engaged personally and via email over the last two years with literally hundreds of my fellow countrymen from all walks of life on the subjects of the national debt, the deficit, the sunsetting of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the draconian and illegal Covid and vaccine mandates and the turbo maladies that flow from them, the various repressive bills sieving through Parliament, the vicious and lying government and media campaign against the Trucker Freedom Convoy, and the unconscionable behavior of the most vindictive, incompetent and unpatriotic prime minister in the history of Confederation.
With precious few exceptions—“precious” is a key word here—I have come away in a state of profound depression. Some readers of my writings as well as everyday interlocutors have accused me of pessimism, which may be true. I recall a remark of Leonard Cohen’s: “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain. Me, I’m already wet.” Sometimes I feel completely drenched.
I’ve found the great majority of my correspondents do not know the difference between the debt and the deficit. They draw a blank when I mention the Charter or the Nuremberg Code, let alone Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and the Great Reset. None have researched the deception or willful ignorance among our politicians regarding the Covid mandates and not one has examined the harmful and even lethal nature of the vaccines and booster shots. None I’ve spoken to have even heard of SADS—Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, which emerged post-vaccine.
Bills like C-4, C-11, C-12 and C-18, which are dictatorial measures designed to muzzle and censor the average citizen, are little more than arcana unworthy of consideration. Most people are indifferent to, or approving of, the push for legislated mask mandates, “a result of a compliant populace,” Cory Morgan writes, “willing to shrug their shoulders and give up personal liberties with little complaint.” The government and medical profession’s targeting of parents who resist the sickness of transgenderitis in order to provide a normal life for their children does not appear to move many Canadians.
For the most part, they are not clear on the frivolous invocation of the Emergencies Act and tend to agree that the government was right in acting against the peaceful and legitimate truckers’ demonstration, to freeze bank accounts and to imprison Convoy organizers on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Nor are they aware that Canada’s chief justice, Richard Wagner, a Trudeau appointee, has violated the principle of judicial neutrality in condemning the trucker protest, thereby putting himself, so to speak, out of court. They have taken the false flag operations against the truckers at face value and naïvely fall for the profusion of spurious Internet “fact-checks” demonizing the convoy—those “typical blue-collar folk, doing real work for a living,” writes Rex Murphy, “a representative group of Canadian citizens with relevant and pressing concerns.”
Nor are they familiar with the Liberal finessing of the related Commission of Inquiry. Convoy lawyer Brendan Miller, for example, was removed from the Inquiry after asking embarrassing questions of the government and objecting to its redacted documents. And as expected, the hearing ended with the government presenting no relevant information, justifying its position, and relying on what Director of the National Citizens Coalition Alexander Brown wittily called, adapting a famous phrase from Hannah Arendt, “the banality of bureaucratic abuse.” The entire operation was an exercise in futility.
They do not know that Justin Trudeau has bought off the press with handsome tax rebates and emoluments, and most have declared their intention to vote for him again. Rampant inflation is laid at the door of Vladimir Putin rather than at Trudeau’s reckless economic policies, energy shutdowns, pandemic over-spending, skyrocketing carbon taxes, anti-farming animus, and record borrowing. They believe in the canard of global warming and they are still convinced that the unvaccinated are viral shedders, though we now know that the vaccinated are the major transmitters. And they are proud to be Canadians, “the best country on earth,” as all too many have proclaimed.
Aspects of what I regard as citizen failure are, of course, to be found almost everywhere, but rarely to the extent that we observe here. Ontario MPP Joel Harden put it in a nutshell on Canada’s Remembrance Day, November 11: “The most formidable check on all politicians are active and engaged citizens who are the lifeblood of any democracy.” We still have our heroes, but they are a visibly shrinking minority. The lifeblood is seeping away. In the words of John Mac Ghlionn at The Epoch Times, “the environment that Trudeau and his colleagues have created [is] one steeped in paranoia and suspicion. They have managed to turn a once respectable country into a surveillance state.”
In some respects Canada under Trudeau is gradually becoming a vassal state.
In thrall to the globalist agenda, Ottawa will introduce legislation to achieve net-zero GHG (greenhouse gasses), at a prohibitive cost to both energy and agricultural production. Yet, according to government statistics, Canada generates merely 1.5 percent of global GHG emissions. Needlessly decarbonizing the productive sector will eventually impoverish the country, as it did Sri Lanka, which seems increasingly to be the prime minister’s ambition. (The fascinating theory of abiotic oil, of course, is dismissed out of hand.)
Another of the scandals we are presently facing is called MAID or Medical Assistance in Dying. This new euthanasia program, which the World Medical Journal describes as “normalizing death as ‘treatment’ in Canada,” is affecting not only the disabled but the elderly, the poor and the homeless as well. Euthanasia, as Stephen Green writes in PJ Media, “the weeding out of undesirables by official means, has been a tenet of progressive ideology from the very beginning,” a system that “encourage[es] suicide over treatment.”
Canada has become the contemporary poster boy for this outrageous regime. Put bluntly, people who no longer recognize the country they grew up in have only two options: to leave or to die.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that Canadians are abandoning the countryin ever-growing numbers. Remaining in Canada depends on whether one considers it to be politically salvageable. For those who have settled elsewhere, the answer is a clear No. For these emigrants, this is not a question of weakness or moral defeat but of simple clarity. It can be said, to adopt George Grant’s injunction, that they are living with courage, for it takes courage to leave everything behind and begin anew in unfamiliar surroundings. They have taken the measure of the situation and do not expect a supine and stupefied citizen body to awaken to the reality of its condition.
Canada is now an immigrant-ridden and fissiparous country, the majority of its people wallowing in obliviousness and proud, it would seem, of their deference to authoritarian dictate. Perhaps the only solution, if there is one, is prairie secession, the goal of the Wexit movement, which appears to be gathering some momentum. The prairie provinces would make a viable and prosperous independent country. Admittedly, it’s a long shot, but discontent is mounting.
Whether or not the movement prospers, there are encouraging signs of pushback against federal government ordinances. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular have served notice they intend to resist Trudeau’s energy policies, the threat of a digital ID rollout, and the likelihood of renewed vaccine mandates and passports. Once the energy and agricultural backbone of the nation, and presently under the enlightened leadership of Danielle Smith and Scott Moe, respectively, these two provinces currently represent a silver lining in a massively dark cloud.
But one thing should be obvious by now: we cannot go back to the status quo ante. The levee is dry.
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. His most recent volume of poetry, The Herb Garden, appeared in 2018 with Guernica Editions. His manifesto, Reflections on Music, Poetry & Politics, was released by Shomron Press in 2016. He has produced two CDs of original songs: Blood Guitar and Other Tales and Partial to Cain on which he was accompanied by his pianist wife Janice Fiamengo. His latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House, London, 2019.
April 17, 2022, will mark the 40th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms becoming part of Canada’s Constitution. The Charter reduced the sovereignty of Parliament by giving judges far more power to strike down laws as unconstitutional.
Prior to 1982, courts could strike down federal laws for violating provincial jurisdiction, and strike down provincial laws for violating federal jurisdiction. But apart from enforcing the proper division of powers between two levels of government, court rulings that invalidated legislation were exceedingly rare. Prior to 1982, Canadians who disagreed with a law essentially had only one recourse: using the democratic process to change or repeal the law which they deemed to be bad. With the Charter, Canadians could, in addition to using the democratic process, try their luck at challenging a law in court, by arguing that the law violated one or more of the fundamental freedoms of conscience, religion, expression, association and peaceful assembly, or other Charter rights and freedoms.
It all sounds wonderful, of course. But section 1 of the Charter has proven repeatedly to be a rotting fly in the ointment of the intended civil liberties medicine. Section 1 permits politicians to trample on Canadians’ Charter rights as long as the government’s lawyers can concoct a justification which will thereafter persuade a court that the violation was “reasonable” in a free and democratic society. As the Judicial Freedom Index makes clear, some judges trust politicians and admire governments a great deal, while other judges are more sympathetic to individual freedom.
Canadians who assert their Charter rights will typically have to wait for years before a court rules on whether the government’s violation is “reasonable.” Long waits are caused primarily by Canada having too few courts and too few judges. During the years that it takes to litigate a case, governments typically continue on their merry way of violating citizens’ rights and freedoms. Armed with easy access to billions of tax dollars, governments lack the incentive to obtain rulings quickly. The shortage of judges and courtrooms further enables governments to delay a speedy resolution of Charter claims. Justice delayed is justice denied.
All constitutions claim to protect the rights and freedoms of citizens.
The 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union is only one example. As a workers’ paradise, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was so wonderful that the communists made it illegal to leave and move to another country. Article 50 guaranteed citizens “freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.” Article 51 enshrined “the right to associate in public organizations that promote their political activity and initiative and satisfaction of their various interests.”
Article 52 guaranteed “freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda.” Article 55 guaranteed the inviolability of the home: “No one may, without lawful grounds, enter a home against the will of those residing in it.” Article 56 exalted “the privacy of citizens, and of their correspondence, telephone conversations, and telegraphic communications” while article 57 declared that “citizens of the USSR have the right to protection by the courts against encroachments on their honour and reputation, life and health, and personal freedom and property.”
It all sounds wonderful, of course. But the Soviet Constitution severely limited citizens’ rights “in accordance with the aims of building communism” (Article 51).
The Constitution explained that the citizen of the classless communist society must be “moulded.” Article 39 specified: “Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state” as determined by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Article 6).
The utopian goal of communism and the utopian goal of a world with no Covid: both ideologies have been used to trample human rights and constitutional freedoms into the ground.
Canada’s federal and provincial politicians should be embarrassed to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Charter on April 17. No provincial premier has actually apologized for the repeated and flagrant violations, since March of 2020, of citizens’ freedoms to move, travel, associate, assemble, worship, and exercise control of their own bodies by deciding what medical treatments they will or will not receive. Federally, Parliament’s Liberal-NDP majority imposes unscientific discrimination against the “misogynist, anti-science, racist, extremists” who have not received two Covid shots, in spite of the fact that vaccinated Canadians get the virus and spread the virus.
Our Charter at 40 has not prevented us from moving rapidly towards a tyrannical system in which Canadians are slaves of the state. More and more, Canadians are managed and controlled by politicians and bureaucrats in ways similar to how farm animals are managed and controlled by the farmer. Ultimately, Canada’s survival as a free society that respects the dignity of every human being depends not on the Charter or on how courts interpret it, but on the extent to which Canadians truly cherish our freedoms, and are willing to suffer and sacrifice for them.
The charter that defends rights, but also tells government how to quash them
Not everyone is inclined to cheer the charter as a bulwark of liberty. ‘We are less free today than 40 years ago,”’ said John Carpay, president of the JCCF Author of the article: Tristin Hopper Publishing date: Apr 15, 2022 • April 15, 2022 • 7 minute read • 91 Comments
The notwithstanding clause is how provincial governments can consistently maintain legislation, such as Quebec’s Bill 21, that are a pretty obvious curb on fundamental freedoms. Photo by Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia/File
The decision was a surprise to Canadians, where any number of similar challenges had failed.
Time after time during the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian governments imposed extraordinary public health measures that seemed to be naked infringements on Canadians’ charter rights. Mandated church closures that violated protections on “freedom of religion.” Bans on gatherings that curbed “freedom of association.” Border and travel strictures that undermined charter guarantees on mobility rights.
But the courts didn’t care. Whenever a pandemic case hit the docket, courts “erred too far on the side of deferring to government,” Joanna Baron, the executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, told the National Post.
Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of Canada repatriating its constitution, a process that included passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The charter has often been praised as one of Canada’s leading modern accomplishments and its “gift to the world.” But it’s also one of the world’s only constitutions that explicitly gives the state a roadmap on how to quash the very “fundamental freedoms” it cites. It’s why, four decades in, not everyone is inclined to cheer it as a bulwark of liberty.
“I cannot think of any freedom … that the charter has brought to us,” said John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a group that has been particularly active in challenging pandemic mandates and defending the organizers of Freedom Convoy. “We are less free today than 40 years ago,” he said.
If governments are looking to do an end-run around charter-enumerated rights, there are two primary sections of the document they turn to. Section 1, which is literally the first line of text in the charter, explicitly states that rights and freedoms are protected in Canada only to “reasonable limits.”
According to an official government of Canada guide to the charter, the purpose of this section is to remind Canadians that “rights can be limited by law so long as those limits can be shown to be reasonable in a free and democratic society.”
The notwithstanding clause allows provincial governments to knowingly pass legislation that treads on a fundamental freedom.
If such a legislative override had existed in the U.S. Constitution, many of the most iconic Supreme Court decisions of the civil rights movement might not have mattered. Brown vs. Board of Education — the 1954 decision that struck down school segregation — could simply have been ignored by states invoking the notwithstanding clause.
In Quebec, it’s how provincial governments can consistently maintain legislation that are a pretty obvious curb on fundamental freedoms. Bill 21, a provincial law passed in 2019, bars government employment to any Quebecer who wears religious garb such as turbans or hijabs. Any charter challenge against Bill 21 would likely be a slam dunk on the “freedom of religion” clause, but Quebec would simply be able to soldier on with the law by invoking the notwithstanding clause.
Don’t miss these important dates!And Remember to bring two friends with you! PENTICTONEVENTS & INITIATIVESThank you, Vlado Z. for the photos in Penticton on April 17thhttps://photos.app.goo.gl/nUtZYBWqPG8ki4vC6Planning Meeting Dates will be announced soon.Rallies at Richard Cannings’ office – Every Tuesday at noon
Meet at his office 301 Main Street (Nanaimo Square). ——————- o0o ——————- PENTICTON RALLY – EVERY SUNDAY
Miss a week and you miss a lot! – This Sunday’s speaker: To be announced in our Weekend Update edition on Friday. OTHER ATTRACTIONS Come visit our friendly volunteers at the tables. Informative handouts. Druthers and other independent journals. Check out the other cool items at our table – books, bumper stickers, key chains and… Pocket size Canadian Charter and Bill of Rights and Freedoms booklets. Fits purse or pocket, easy reference right at your fingertips! The local chapter of Action4Canada will have its own tables there for information, too. RALLY LOCATION –Meet in the parking lot at the NE corner of Main St and Warren Ave across from Tim Hortons. BRING TWO FRIENDS! Lots of extra parking at BCAA garage, the strip mall adjoining our regular parking area, Winners (across the street), or overflow mall parking opposite the Warren Avenue entrance to Cherry Lane Mall
OK FALLS – Saturday, April 23, 11:30 AM across from the Esso Station
OLIVER EVENTS- Saturday, April 23 Town Hall 12 Noon Oliver Town Hall
OSOYOOS EVENTS- Saturday, April 16 Town Hall ***NEW TIME 11 – 12 NOON KELOWNA EVENTSKelowna C.L.E.A.R. MEGA Rally @ Stuart Park at the Bear 12:00 noon- followed by a MEGA March and highway rallyBecause it ain’t over!Guest speakers:Ted Kuntz – Vaccine Choice CanadaChris Schaefer – world expert on masksDavid Lindsay – CLEAR (Common Law Education and Rights)Emcee : Jacquelyn Rose
OTHER INITIATIVES
Please share with family and friends!
Mama Bears Presents a six-part Mental Health Program to help our youth and parents navigate through the challenges of life, especially the difficulties faced over the last couple of years. Please join us for the first session hosted by Eric Kussin and Theo Fleury Founder and Celebrity Alliance Founder of the SameHere Movement. They will show us how the beauty of life is not how perfect it ‘should be’, but what can emerge after coming through a difficult time. The most unfortunate variable is when the victim is a child or teen, as it is difficult for them to understand this enough to seek help – even if they live in a loving and safe environment. Learn how to start the conversation with your child to understand how they are feeling and why, and most importantly how you can help them feel better.
Brian Peckford, last living signer of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms speaks to a Trucker Freedom Rally in Victoria. The former Premier of Newfoundland explains how the courts and control-hungry politicians have abused the Charter and departed from its intent. He knows: He was there at the creation.
Technocracy Triumphant — Manitoba Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had
Taking the attitude “who am I to judge” is, under many circumstances, appropriate and admirable. There is one circumstance, however, when it is extremely inappropriate and reprehensible. That is when you are a justice of Her Majesty’s bench before whom one person or group has brought another person or group, complaining that the latter has injured them in violation of the law and asking you for redress of their wrongs. If you happen to be in that situation then your job – your only job – is to hear the case, weight the evidence, and issue a ruling, in short – to judge. To plead humility as an excuse for not doing so is to abandon your duty.
Earlier this year, in the late spring, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba heard evidence that lawyers representing the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented on behalf of the Gateway Bible Baptist Church in Thompson, along with six other congregations, two ministers and one other individual in two related but distinct constitutional challenges to the provincial bat flu public health orders. (1) One of these challenged the sweeping powers with insufficient accountability that had been given to the Chief Public Health Officer. The other challenged portions of the public health orders themselves on the grounds that they violated the fundamental freedoms named in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as could not be justified by the “reasonable limitations” clause of the Charter’s Section 1. The evidence in these challenges was heard in May. After taking the summer to deliberate or take a vacation or go for the world’s record in thumb twiddling or whatever, last week on the twenty-first of October Chief Justice Joyal finally ruled in these cases. For the purposes of distinction the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of the powers of the Chief Public Health Officer will be called “the first ruling” and the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of portions of the orders will be called “the second ruling”.
The Chief Justice ruled against the applicants in both cases. In one sense, however, the second ruling could be called a non-ruling. In paragraph 292 we find the following:
I say that while recognizing and underscoring that fundamental freedoms do not and ought not to be seen to suddenly disappear in a pandemic and that courts have a specific responsibility to affirm that most obvious of propositions.
This is very good and right. The problem is that the next sentence begins with a “but.” Apart from the bad grammar involved – Chief Justice Joyal is old enough to have still had the rule never to begin a sentence with a conjunction like “but” drilled into him in grade school – buts have this nasty habit of leading into material that completely negates everything that precedes the “but”. Here is what followed:
But just as I recognize that special responsibility of the courts, given the evidence adduced by Manitoba (which I accept as credible and sound), so too must I recognize that the factual underpinnings for managing a pandemic are rooted in mostly scientific and medical matters. Those are matters that fall outside the expertise of courts. Although courts are frequently asked to adjudicate disputes involving aspects of medicine and science, humility and the reliance on credible experts are in such cases, usually required. In other words, where a sufficient evidentiary foundation has been provided in a case like the present, the determination of whether any limits on rights are constitutionally defensible is a determination that should be guided not only by the rigours of the existing legal tests, but as well, by a requisite judicial humility that comes from acknowledging that courts do not have the specialized expertise to casually second guess the decisions of public health officials, which decisions are otherwise supported in the evidence.
This constitutes an abdication of the very responsibility he had just acknowledged. If fundamental freedoms still exist in a pandemic, and it is the court’s special responsibility to affirm this, this means that the court cannot defer to the public health authorities, the medical experts, on the question of whether their own measures are reasonable and justified. If civil authority A is accused of trampling on the public’s fundamental freedoms, and the court defers to the expertise of civil authority A on the question of whether the latter’s actions are reasonable and justified, this translates into “civil authority A can do whatever he sees fit, there are no limits on his powers to which the court will hold him accountable”. Indeed, saying that courts should be guided not just by the “rigours of the existing legal tests” but a “humility” that forbids them to “casually second guess” the decisions of public health officials is tantamount to saying that medical science is a higher authority than the law. (2)
In the sections of the ruling that immediately follow the paragraph from which we have quoted, we see what this “judicial humility” looks like in practice. In these pages Chief Justice Joyal considers the question of whether the public health orders meet the standards of the Oakes test. The Oakes test was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 to determine whether legislation or other government action that infringes upon Charter rights and freedoms is nevertheless permitted under the “reasonable limitations” clause. To pass, the infringement must first be shown to serve a “pressing and substantial objective”. Second, the infringement must be show to be proportional, which means that it must a) be shown to be rationally connected to the objective, b) be shown to only minimally impair the right(s) and/or freedom(s) in question and c) be shown to provide a benefit to the public that is greater than the harm done by impairing the right(s) and/or freedom(s). (3) For each of the stages of this test, the Chief Justice essentially takes the position that because Brent Roussin decided, after weighing all the information available to him, that each public health order he issued was what was necessary at the time, therefore the orders meet the standards of the test. Such a ruling in effect declares that Brent Roussin, as Chief Public Health Officer, is above the law insofar as he is acting in the capacity of his office. If the court defers to him as to whether his actions in the capacity of his office meet the standards of constitutionality set in the Oakes test or not, then he is above the Oakes test and the Charter and cannot be held accountable to either.
The ramifications of this extend far beyond the issues pertaining to the public health orders and the pandemic. What it means is that while we remain in form the country that we were, governed by a parliament under the reign of a constitutional monarch, in which Common Law and Charter nominally protect our rights and freedoms, in actual practice we have become a medical technocracy.
Anyone inclined to think that this is a good thing, or even a tolerable thing, is invited to consider the words of C. S. Lewis:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. (God in the Dock, 1948)
This description fits the rule of medical technocrats to a tee.
That a de facto medical technocracy is inimical to the freedom that permeates our parliamentary form of government, our constitutional monarchy, and the Common Law is the real issue at the heart of the other challenge. This was the challenge to the constitutionality of the provincial legislature’s having named Brent Roussin dictator, with Jazz Atwal as his Master of Horse, for the duration of the pandemic, which had to be framed, of course, as a challenge to the sections of the Manitoba Public Health Act (2009) which provided for this situation. These are sections 13 and 67. Section 67 empowers the Chief Public Health Officer to take special measures if he “reasonably believes” that “a serious and immediate threat to public health exists because of an epidemic or threatened epidemic of a communicable disease” which “cannot be prevented, reduced or eliminated” without the special measures. Section 13 allows him to delegate his own power under the Act to a deputy.
Chief Justice Joyal ruled that this two-fold delegation of power, first from the legislature to the Chief Public Health Officer, second from the latter to his deputy was constitutional. In the course of explaining his decision he made a number of statements that suggest a troubling sympathy with the technocratic impulse of the age. He gave his approval to the province’s claim that with the “emergence of new threats such as SARS, West Nile, monkey pox and the avian flu” it was important that the government focus on the “modernization of the PHA”. The modernization of the Public Health Act, that is to say, bringing it in line with contemporary trends around the world, means making it more technocratic. In this context the Chief Justice asserted with regards to the centralization of the public health system in the person of the Chief Public Health Officer that:
the act sets out the powers afforded to public health officials to address communicable diseases and importantly, it also constrains those powers so as to ensure an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health (first ruling, 12).
Does it ensure such an appropriate balance? As this is the quod erat demonstrandum, this forthright assertion of it would seem to be a classic example of petitio principia, especially when we consider the weakness of everything that was then put forward in support of the assertion. After providing quotations from speeches in the legislative assembly at the time the new Public Health Act was being debated that show that the legislators acknowledged the need for such a balance, the Chief Justice finally specified the constraints this Act supposedly places on the powers it gives to the Chief Public Health Officer (first ruling, 17). Not a single one of these is a real check that prevents the office of the Chief Public Health Officer from being corrupted into a medical technocratic tyranny by the excessive emergency power vested in it.
The first of these is that the official must believe there is a public health emergency that requires special measures to be taken. The third is that the orders require the prior approval of the Minister of Health. The fourth is the stipulation in section 3 of the Public Health Act that the restrictions on rights and freedoms of the special measures be as few as possible, the equivalent to the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test. In practice, the attitude of deferral to the specialized medical expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer on the part of the Minister of Health ensures that none of these constitutes a real constraint. The sixth, which is that the Chief Public Health Officer must be a physician, is a limit on who the Minister of Health can appoint to the office not a limit on use of the powers of that office by the officeholder. The seventh and final “constraint” pertains only to the secondary matter of the sub delegation of the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers to his deputy. This leaves the second and fifth, both of which warrant special comment and so have been reserved for last.
The second “constraint” is that under subsection 2 of section 67 “the types of orders that can be made are clearly delineated”. This is true, but the types so delineated are so extensive that this is not much of a limitation even without taking into consideration how much further deferral to the expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer would stretch them.
The fifth is the stipulation in subsection 4 of section 67 that “an order requiring a person to be immunized cannot be enforced if the person objects.” Although this looks like a real constraint on the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers, for several months now he has gotten away with making a total mockery of this stipulation by doing everything short of strapping objectors down and forcing the needle into them to compel them to be “immunized”.
Therefore, quite to the contrary of what Chief Justice Joyal claims (first ruling, 18) these constraints provide no real protection against the danger of the powers the Public Health Act confers upon the Chief Public Health Officer in a public health emergency being used to run roughshod over our rights and freedoms. Whatever the intention of the legislators in 2009, the Public Health Act fails to provide an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health. Instead, it places all the weight on the side of the latter.
It needs to be stated here that the need for an appropriate balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the public good on the other is a truism. The art of statecraft – politics in the best sense of the word – could be said to reduce to finding just this balance. The problem, at least in Canada, is that for decades now we have only ever seemed to have heard this truism trotted out whenever someone is insisting that individual rights and freedoms need to make cessions to the public good. Balance requires that there also be cessions from the public good to individual rights and freedoms. Indeed, since the vast majority of decisions that need to be made in any complex society have to do with the good of individuals and small groups, rather than the good of the society as a whole, and it is individual rights and freedoms that ensure that those making such decisions are the ones most competent to do so, which with only rare exceptions means the individuals and small groups directly concerned, balance arguably requires far more cessions to individual rights and freedoms from the public good, than the other way around.
The basic assumption of technocracy is contrary to all of this. This is the assumption that technical knowledge – the kind of specialized knowledge in any field that qualifies one as an expert – renders one competent to make decisions for other people if the expert’s field at all touches upon those decisions. This assumption is laughably false – technical expertise in one field does not translate into technical expertise in another field, much less all fields, and it is rare that a decision requires information from only one field. The most technical knowledge ought to qualify an expert for is to advise people in the making of their own decisions, not to make those decisions for them. Indeed, were we to assume that the greater an individual’s expertise is in one specialized field, the greater his ignorance will be in all others, and the more utterly incompetent he will be at making decisions for himself, let alone other people, our assumption would be wrong, but a lot less wrong than the assumption inherent in technocracy.
Technocracy is odious enough when it takes the form of the army of civil servants, passing the endless regulations that boss people around and tell them what to do in their own homes and how to run their own businesses, by which Liberal Prime Ministers have so effectively circumvented the constraints of our Crown-in-Parliament constitution in order to impose their will upon Canadians. A medical technocracy enacted in a public health emergency is far worse. Throughout history, mankind has been much more often plagued by tyranny than by insufficient government power, by too many rules than by too few, and the exploitation of emergencies, real or manufactured, and the fear they engender in the public, is the normal means whereby a tyrant seizes unconstitutional power. For this reason it is imperative than in any emergency, those empowered to deal with the emergency be subjected to even greater scrutiny and held to even stricter accountability, than in ordinary circumstances. This is the opposite of the attitude of deference that Chief Justice Joyal contended for in 281-283 of the second ruling, and which he reiterated in the first sentence of 292, “In the context of this deadly and unprecedented pandemic, I have determined that this is most certainly a case where a margin of appreciation can be afforded to those making decisions quickly and in real time for the benefit of the public good and safety.” (4)
This deference is fatal to the court’s role as the guardian of fundamental freedoms. Chief Justice Joyal acknowledged (284), as, in fact, did the province, that these freedoms were violated, and that therefore the onus is upon the government to justify the violation. (5) When the court gives this “margin of appreciation” to “those making decisions quickly and in real time”, however, is it possible for the province to fail to meet this onus in the court’s eyes?
Consider the arguments that the province made that it met the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test. Chief Justice Joyal reproduced (303) the reasons the province offered in support of this contention from paragraph 52 of their April 12, 2021 brief. Reason c) begins with “Unlike some other jurisdictions, there was no curfew imposed or a ‘shelter in place’ order that would prevent people from leaving their home other than for limited reasons”. That you cannot validly justify your own actions by pointing to the worse actions of someone else is something that anyone with even the most basic of training in logical reasoning should immediately recognize. The same reason includes the sentences “It was still possible to gather with family and friends at indoor and outdoor public places, up to the gathering limit of 5 people” and “An exception was also made for people who live on their own to allow one person to visit.” Offering these as “reasons” why the public health order forbidding people to meet with anyone other than members of their own household in their own homes for over three months only “minimally impaired” our freedoms of association and assembly is adding insult to injury. That is called throwing people crumbs, not keeping your infringement on their freedoms to a minimum. “Minimally impair” is not supposed to mean to impair the freedom to the point that it is minimal.
Reason e) which pertains to freedom of religion is no better. The province declared that there was an “attempt to accommodate religious services”. The first example of this that they gave is that “Religious services could still be delivered remotely indoors, or outdoors in vehicles”. It seems rather rich of the province to offer the latter up as proof that they tried to only minimally impair freedom of religion when, in fact, the churches that offered such services had to fight to obtain that concession.
Had Brent Roussin forgotten that he had initially banned drive-in services when he ordered churches to close in the so-called “circuit break” last fall?
Or rather had he remembered that it was Chief Justice Joyal who on the fifth of December last year had ruled that drive-in services were in violation of the public health orders before he, that is Roussin, amended the orders to allow for these services?
Either way it is rather disingenuous of him to make this allusion in this context.
The next sentence is even worse. “As well, individual prayer and reflection was permitted.” So, because he didn’t ban people from praying by themselves in the privacy of their own homes, which even officially Communist countries never attempted, he is to be credited for only “minimally impairing” our freedom of religion by forbidding us to obey God’s commandment to forsake not the assembly of ourselves, forbidding us to sing God’s praises as a community of faith, and forbidding us from partaking of the Holy Sacrament? Indeed, what this sentence tells us is that the person who wrote it thinks a) that individuals need the permission of government to pray and reflect in private, b) that it is within the powers of government to withhold such permission and forbid private prayer and reflection, and c) government’s not having done so means that their violations of our freedom of religion and worship have been minimal and reasonable.
Any sort of cognitive filter that allows a Chief Justice to look at this sort of nonsense and conclude from it that the province has met its onus of justifying its impairment of our fundamental freedoms as the minimum necessary under the circumstances is clearly a dysfunctional filter that ought to be immediately discarded.
Indeed, the province’s arguments illustrate the point made above about technocracy being inimical to freedom, constitutional government, and the balance between individual right and public good. Technical knowledge or specialized knowledge in a field of expertise, as stated above, does not translate into expertise in another field, much less expertise in all fields. Indeed, it tends towards a certain kind of deficiency in general reasoning that could be regarded as a sort of tunnel vision. It is called déformation professionelle in French and is similar to what is called the Law of the Instrument, illustrated in Abraham Maslow’s proverb about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A physician’s technical expertise is in the field of medicine – treating sickness and injury and promoting health. He will therefore be inclined to subordinate everything else to the goals of his profession. In an epidemic or pandemic, this inclination will be all the more exaggerated. To a medical expert in such a situation, the answer to the question of what public health orders constitute the minimal necessary restrictions on fundamental freedoms will look very different than it does to those who do not share this narrow focus.
Consider the words that George Grant in his important discussion (Technology and Justice, 1986) of the implications of the increasing technologization of society identified as encapsulating spirit of technological thought, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “when you see that something is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” The significance of these words is that the technological mind is inclined to reject external limitations, such as those of ethics, that stand between it and the actual doing of whatever it finds itself capable. Modern medical thinking is thoroughly technological and Oppenheimer’s thought, translated into that of a physician and epidemiologist overseeing a pandemic, would be “when you see that you can slow the spread of the disease by doing A, you go ahead and do A”. A might have a thousand other effects, all negative, but the mind that prioritizes slowing the spread of an epidemic over all other concerns can acknowledge this and still come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm, demonstrating that its ability to make calculations of this sort is seriously impaired. (6)
It is absolutely essential that those charged with the duty of protecting our fundamental rights and freedoms and holding government to its constitutional limits, recognize how the very nature of medical expertise tends towards the skewing of the medical expert’s perspective in this way and that therefore he is the last person to whose opinion government ministers and judges should defer in determining whether public health orders infringing upon fundamental freedoms are constitutionally justified out of necessity.
For the courts to fail to recognize this is for the courts to shirk their duty and acquiesce as our country succumbs to the tyranny of technocracy. (7)
(1) The applicants were the churches: Gateway Bible Baptist Church (Thompson), Pembina Valley Baptist Church (Winkler), Redeeming Grace Bible Church (Morden), Grace Covenant Church (Altona), Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden, Bible Baptist Church (Brandon); ministers: Tobias Tissen (pastor of Church of God, Restoration in Sarto, just south of Steinbach) and Thomas Rempel (deacon of Redeeming Grace Bible Church); and individual: Ross MacKay.
(2) Tom Brodbeck’s editorial commenting on these rulings for the local Liberal Party propaganda rag – or paper of record, depending upon your perspective – was given the headline “Case Closed, Science Wins”.
(3) There is an unfortunate tautology here in that proportionality is the term used for both all three stages of the second step of the test taken together and the third stage of the same.
(4) The pandemic is “unprecedented” only in the sense that the measures taken to combat it have been unprecedented in their extremity. The Spanish Flu which ended about a century before the bat flu pandemic began killed between 25-50 million people. The bat flu has killed about 5 million over the course of a similar span of time. Not only is the total of the Spanish Flu much larger than that of the bat flu, it represents a much larger percentage of the world’s population which was considerably smaller at the time. It took place at a time when health care and medical treatment options were far more limited than they are today, and yet public health orders never came close to what they are today, despite the earlier pandemic having started in a time of war when people were already accustomed to emergency restrictions.
(5) Many of the news articles reporting on these rulings have been extremely misleading. Several have reported that the Chief Justice ruled that no Charter rights were violated. This is true only in the sense that there is a distinction between rights and freedoms and that the Chief Justice ruled against there having been a violation of Section 7 and Section 15 rights. With regards to Section 2 fundamental freedoms, however, he ruled – and the province admitted – that these had been violated, and that therefore there was a burden of justification on the government to prove these violations to be constitutional in accordance with Section 1. As the discussion of Section 2 was by far the most important part of the case, to summarize the entire ruling as if it were all about the Sections 7 and 15 challenges, is to utterly distort it.
(6) Suppose that a virus is spreading which, if unchecked, will cause 10 000 deaths. The public health officer, if he takes Action B, can prevent the epidemic and all of those deaths. However, Action B will itself cause 10 000 other deaths. The number of deaths will be the same whether action is taken or not. Should the public health officer take this action or do nothing? It would be odious to attempt to resolve the dilemma by comparing the value of the 10 000 lives lost the one way, with the value of the 10 000 lives lost the other. The person who makes the case for the public health officer’s taking Action B, therefore, would have to reason along the lines that since it is the public health officer’s duty to combat epidemics and save lives threatened by disease, and the intent behind Action B would be to save the 10 000 threatened by the epidemic not kill the other 10 000, Action B should be taken and the 10 000 lost to it considered collateral damage. The person who would argue the other side would point out that the 10 000 lost to the epidemic would die of natural causes, that the 10 000 lost as a result of Action B would die as the direct consequence of human action, and that the human moral culpability for taking an action that directly results in a death is greater than the human moral culpability for not taking an action that would prevent a death by natural cause, ergo it is worse to take Action B than to not do so. Which of these two arguments is the most persuasive. I would suggest that for people who are both normal and capable of rational, human, moral thought, the second of the two arguments is likely to be the most persuasive, and that those persuaded by the first of the two arguments are most likely to be found among medical experts.
(7) That technological science was leading us to a universal technocracy which would be the worst of all tyrannies was a warning sounded frequently throughout the Twentieth Century by such thinkers as Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954, Perspectives on Our Age, 1981), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, That Hideous Strength, 1945), and René Girard (I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999). In Canada, George Grant played the role of Cassandra on this theme, which runs through his entire corpus of work from Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) to Technology and Justice (1986). It was central to the thesis of his 1965 jeremiad Lament for a Nation that by succumbing to the technologically driven capitalism of America, Canada was losing the pre-liberal traditions that informed her founding, and would be drawn like the rest of the world into the “universal homogenous state”, a technocracy that the ancients had predicted would be the ultimate tyranny. Technological science, as he argued in the first essay of Technology and Justice, begins as man’s mastery of nature, but progresses into man’s master of himself, which translates into his mastery of other people. He did not shrink from implicating modern medicine along with other more obvious culprits in this.POSTED BY GERRY T. NEAL
I have never thought very highly of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was added to our constitution in 1982. Note the wording there. The Charter is not itself our constitution but merely a part of it and a late addition at that. Those who make the mistake of calling the Charter itself our constitution have bought in to the American superstition that a constitution is a piece of paper that keeps a government from going bad through its magical powers. A constitution is a country’s system of law and government, the institutions that comprise it, and the traditions that inform their motions. The largest part of it is unwritten and this is true even in the American republic. Documents like our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the one the Americans call their Constitution are merely parts of the Canadian and American constitutions respectively. They are the laws that define and set limits to the power of government institutions. They have no power to keep government within those limits apart from the loyalty of those who hold public office in obeying them, the willingness of the courts to uphold them, and the faithful vigilance of the public.
My low estimation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not because I don’t like the rights and freedoms that are listed in that document. With a few exceptions, such as the “equality rights” written in Animal Farm style doublespeak in Section 15, these are rights and freedoms that I consider to be among the most valuable elements of our Common Law tradition. It is rather because the Charter has made these rights and freedoms less secure rather than more. In part this is due to flaws in the Charter itself such as the “notwithstanding clause” in Section 33 and the broad loophole in Section 1 which effectually nullify the Charter as far as the whole point of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, that is to say that they are supposed to limit what the government can do so as to protect us from the abusive exercise of its powers, goes. The Charter’s loopholes and exceptions protect the government instead of us and for this reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was right to say that it is not worth the paper it is written on. It is also, however, because the Charter has encouraged a way of thinking about our rights and freedoms in a way that is the fundamental opposite of that which has historically belonged to our Common Law and traditional institutions of constitutional monarchy and parliament. It encourages us to think of our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by government to be limited or taken away by government freely as it sees fit, rather than our own property.
The consequences of this way of thinking having become pervasive have been most evident over the course of the last year. Section 2 of the Charter identifies four freedoms as being fundamental. The first of these is freedom of conscience and religion. The third is the freedom of peaceful assembly. The fourth is the freedom of association. The whole point, remember, of having the Charter designate these freedoms as essential is to place limits on government power, to tell the government that it must keep its hands off of these things. Yet ever since the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Wuhan bat flu to be a pandemic last March, our provincial governments have treated these freedoms as if they were completely non-existent, much less fundamental and protected by constitutional law and the Dominion government has constantly been urging the provincial governments to clamp down on us in violation of these freedoms in even more severe ways.
In 1986 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the case of R v Oakes. David Oakes had been arrested with drugs in his possession and under what was then Section 8 of the Narcotics Control Act was presumed to be guilty of trafficking. He challenged the constitutionality of Section 8 on the grounds that it violated the presumption of innocence, a civil right spelled out in Section 11 (d) of the Charter and which had been long established as part of the Common Law tradition. That the provision of the NCA being challenged did indeed violate the civil right in question was easily demonstrated, but the Court then had to decide whether the violation was justifiable under the “reasonable limits” loophole in Section 1 of the Charter. The Court’s ruling established what has ever since been the litmus test for this question. The Court ruled that for a law which violates a Charter right or freedom to be justifiable under the “reasonable limits” clause, it first had to have a “pressing and substantial” goal. Second, it had to meet the three qualifications of a) being “rationally connected” to the goal of the law, b) only impairing the rights and freedoms in question minimally, and c) not overwhelming the benefit hoped to be achieved with its negative effects.
It is quite obvious that the public health measures fail to meet the second of the three qualifications of the second part of the Supreme Court’s Oakes’ test. When the public health officer tells you that you cannot have any visitors to your home, even if you meet outside, as is currently the case in Manitoba, he is clearly not trying to only “minimally impair” your freedom of association. What he is doing is disregarding freedom of association entirely. The provincial legislature is not allowed to do this constitutionally, nor can it delegate to the public health officer the authority to do so. The legislature cannot delegate what it does not legitimately possess itself. When the public health officer orders churches, synagogues, and mosques not to meet for the largest part of a year, cancels the most important festivals of these religions, and only permits re-opening at a severely reduced capacity that requires churches to betray the tenets of their own faith and turn worshippers away, he is similarly disregarding freedom of conscience and religion rather than making sure that his orders only “minimally impair” this freedom. There is also plenty of evidence that the public health orders fail to meet the third qualification of the Oakes’ test as well. The costs of lockdowns, measured in the destruction of lives due to the breakdown of mental health and the rise in substance abuse and suicides, the erosion of community and social capital, and the devastation of businesses and livelihoods, has been tremendous and far exceeds any questionable benefits of these insane, unjust, evil and oppressive restrictions. Indeed, I believe the case could be made that the public health measures fail every single element of the Oakes’ test.
The provincial governments have gotten away with all this stercus tauri because they have until fairly recently met with only minimal resistance on the part of the Canadian public. This can be attributed to a number of causes. One of these, of course, is the hysterical and irrational fear generated by the mainstream corporate media that have been deceitfully and despicably portraying a virus that produces no to mild symptoms in most people who contract it, from which the vast majority of people who actually do get sick recover, and which in many if not most jurisdictions has an average age of fatality that is higher than the average expected lifespan of the general public, as if it were the second coming of the bubonic plague. Another cause is the new attitude which has been encouraged among Canadians, especially by the Liberals, since 1982, of regarding our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by the government in the Charter rather than what they are, our lawful property as free subjects of the Crown which it is the government’s duty to respect.
The assault on our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have come from the provincial governments. At the same time the second of the four freedoms designated as fundamental in the Charter has come under attack from the Liberals who are in power in the Dominion government. This is the freedom of “thought, belief, opinion and expression”. Whereas our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have never been this besieged before in Canadian history, our freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression has taken hits every time the Liberal Party led by a Trudeau has come to power in Ottawa. It has been less than ten years since we finally got rid of one of the vilest elements of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy, the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. While the entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 is, in fact, an affront to freedom of thought because, despite its title, it has nothing to do with protecting our rights either as Canadians or human beings from government abuses, but is instead all about prohibiting the crimethink of discrimination on the part of individual Canadians, Section 13 was the Act’s worst provision by far. By defining any electronic communication of information “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination “to hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination it in effect forbade all negative criticism of groups protected against discrimination or individuals belonging to such groups, regardless of the truthfulness or justice of the criticism in question.
Section 13 was finally abolished during the premiership of Stephen Harper thanks to a private member’s bill repealing the foul section that received enough support from Conservative MPs and Liberal MPs of the pre-Trudeau variety – these had not yet been purged from the party – to pass Parliament. Neither Stephen Harper nor his Minister of Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, who is currently overseeing the throwing of pastors in gaol and the barricading of churches in Alberta, had much to do with this for although they had spoken out against Human Rights Tribunals and their unjust infringement upon freedom of thought and speech on their road to power, in office they betrayed most of what they had once stood for, apparently having sold their souls to get there. The demise of Section 13 has long been lamented by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, and when he became Prime Minister in 2015 he dropped a number of hints that he would be seeking to revive it. The appeal of Section 13 to Captain Airhead was based on more than just the fact that it had been originally introduced when his father was in power. More than any previous Liberal leader, Captain Airhead has been of the mindset that once a progressive goal has been attained, all debate about it ought to cease. This was evident even before he became Prime Minister when he purged the party of its pro-life members. More than any previous Liberal leader, he has enthusiastically endorsed fringe progressive causes that could not possibly achieve widespread popular support on their own merits without measures that intimidate and suppress dissenters. More than any previous Liberal leader he has been prone to tell Canadians who disagree with him that they are not welcome in their own country. He has used the expression “there is no place for X in Canada” far more liberally than any previous leader and with a much wider range of Xs. (1) In all of this he has demonstrated the sort of sick, censorious, mindset to which something like Section 13 appeals. In December of 2019, after he won re-election in the sense that he managed to squeak out a plurality despite falling majorly in the polls from where he had been four years previously, he instructed his Cabinet that fighting online “hate speech” would be one of their priorities in the new session of Parliament. Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was specifically charged with finding a way to force social media platforms to remove what the Liberals consider to be “hate speech” within twenty-four hours of being told by the government to do so. This would be Section 13 magnified to the nth degree.
In response to this directive, Guilbeault came up with a bill that pursued the same goal as Section 13 through a different avenue. Last November he introduced Bill C-10, or “An Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act” into Parliament. This bill if passed would place internet media under the same regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as older electronic media such as radio and television broadcasters. By going this route, Guilbeault could maintain that his goal was not to censor what individual Canadians post on the internet, but to ensure that the companies that make shows and movies available through online streaming follow the same Canadian content guidelines as other broadcasters, a goal consistent with his portfolio as Heritage Minister. That having been said, the Bill as originally drafted would have given the CRTC regulatory authority over individual Canadians’ user-generated content on social media. When objections to this were raised the Bill was amended to include an exception for individual user-generated content, but this exception was removed in committee late last month around the same time that the government moved to shut down debate on a motion that the Conservatives had introduced calling for a review of whether or not the bill violated the Charter. None of this inspires much confidence in the Heritage Minister’s claim that the aim of this bill is cultural protectionism and not censorship of thought. On Monday, faced with backlash over all of this, Guilbeault promised that they would make it “crystal clear” that the user-generated content will not be subjected to the same sort of regulatory control as television programming. Needless to say, he ought not to be taken at his word on this. Indeed, Michael Geist, the law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been one of the foremost critics of Bill C-10, has already said that the amendment the Heritage Committee proposed on Thursday evening fails to follow through on Guilbeault’s promises.
It is worth observing here that with Bill C-10, Captain Airhead and Steven Guilbeault have returned to the very first thing the original Trudeau Liberals did to control the minds of Canadians and limit their freedom of thought. At the very beginning of the first Trudeau premiership the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker pointed out how the Liberals were threatening freedom of thought through the powers of the CRTC. In a speech entitled “The Twilight of Liberty”, the second included in the collection Those Things We Treasure (Macmillan, 1972), Diefenbaker said:
The Trudeau Government seems to be dedicated to controlling the thinking of Canadians. Through the power being exerted by Pierre Juneau, as Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, (2) private radio and T.V. station proprietors in Canada are frightened to speak, fearful of being subject to the cancellation of their licences. One such station was CKPM in Ottawa, which dared to have an open line program critical of the Government. Pierre Juneau did come before a Committee of the House and he uttered lachrymose words in reply to the criticism leveled at him that he wishes to determine what Canadians shall hear, and to deny them the right to listen to what they will. His attitude was different when he spoke to the Association of Private Broadcasting Companies and in effect stated: “When I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” Under him the broadcasting network owned by the people of Canada is allowed to broadcast what he permits.
Diefenbaker’s warning of decades ago has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because the CRTC’s official raison d’être is cultural protectionism which appeals to a much broader range of Canadians than its more covert purpose of limiting freedom of thought. Certainly right-of-centre Canadians of the more traditional variety, such as Diefenbaker himself or this writer, would have no objections to the idea that Canadian culture ought to remain Canadian. It needs to be pointed out, however, that the CRTC has been a total failure in this regards. Fifty-three years later, the Canada of 2021 is far more Americanized culturally than the Canada of 1968 was. Indeed, much of what Canadians regard as distinctly “Canadian” culture today, is merely Hollywood culture with a maple leaf stamped on it. Read the novels of Mazo de la Roche and Robertson Davies if you want a taste of the more authentic pre-CRTC Canadian culture. Since the CRTC failed in its official appointed task, probably because its real purpose was thought control all along, there is hardly grounds here for extending its reach over the new online media. Indeed, the scarcely disguised agenda of censorship and thought control behind the move to so extend its reach, is sufficient reason why this bill, amended or otherwise, must never be allowed to pass. It is also more than sufficient reason for voting the Trudeau Liberals who dreamed it up in the first place out of Parliament and never allowing them to resume power again. For as Rex Murphy pointed out earlier this week, “What is more galling and more threatening that the bill itself, however, is the set of mind behind it”, and that won’t go away even if the bill itself does.
(1) Disturbingly, the leaders of the other parties – including the present leader of the Conservatives – have taken to aping his example in this.
(2) The full name of this agency was changed into the awkward and absurd redundancy that it is now in 1976, but the acronym remains the same. Posted by Gerry T. Neal
