Where each party stands on life, family, and freedom
CitizenGO legally cannot tell you which party to vote for, and we cannot tell you which candidate to vote for.
We will, however, say that it’s very important that you let your voice be heard on Monday, and do what you can to vote for the candidate that best represents your values.
It’s been the aim of CitizenGO from the very beginning to fight for the common good and for the dignity of every human person. We strive to protect life from conception to natural death, the recognition of family and the most basic and natural unit of society, and freedom.
For this reason, we think it’s important to break down the platforms of each federal party, so that you know how each party winning could affect our country when it comes to issues of life, family, and freedom:
Plans to revoke charity status to pro-life organizations, including crisis pregnancy centres who provide care and counseling to women who have chosen life
Plans to penalize provincial governments who refuse to fund abortion outside of hospitals (such as in the case of New Brunswicks’s Clinic 554)
Plans to give legal protection to any business or organization in Canada that demands that all their employees be vaccinated
Plans to ban all forms of conversion therapy, banning the work of groups such as Courage International, who non-coercively help people ro live chaste lives in accordance with the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality
Also…
Almost every Liberal Party MP voted for Bill C-7, which radically expanded Canada’s euthanasia law, allowing euthanasia for reasons of mental illness alone, and for the incompetent who cannot provide consent but have signed an advanced directive (Source)
Every Liberal Party MP (in attendance) voted against Bill C-233, which would have banned the barbaric practice of sex-selective abortion (Source)
The Trudeau government introduced Bill C-10 and Bill C-36, both of which aimed to censor Canadians on the internet (Source)
Plans to repeal Bill C-7, a bill which expanded Canada’s euthanasia law, allowing euthanasia for reasons of mental illness alone, and for the incompetent who cannot provide consent but have signed an advanced directive
Plans to ban conversion therapy, but clarifies that non-coerceive conversations will not be criminalized
Though the platform claims to support the conscience rights of medical professionals, Erin O’Toole has since clarified that he believes in effective referrals. This means that if a patient wants to be killed through euthanasia, but a medical professional objects to killing them, the medical professional must still violate their conscience by referring their patient to a doctor who is fine euthanizing the patient (Source)
Also…
O’Toole says that a Conservative government would not interfere with New Brunswick’s decision to not fund abortions that are not in hospitals (Source)
Though the majority of Conservative MPs voted for Bill C-233, which would have banned the barbaric practice of sex-selective abortion, Erin O’Toole voted against it. He has repeatedly referred to himself as pro-choice. (Source) (Source)
Every Conservative MP (in attendance) voted against Bill C-10, a bill which threatened to censor Canadians by applying broadcasting regulations to social media users (Source)
Plans to interfere with provincial governments who refuse to fund abortion outside of hospitals (such as in the case of New Brunswicks’s Clinic 554)
Plans to increase access to abortion in rural areas and in the North
Plans to ban all forms of conversion therapy, banning the work of groups such as Courage International, who non-coercively help people ro live chaste lives in accordance with the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality
Will use the government to crack down on what the NDP believes to be the spread of disinformation and “fake news”
Also…
Every NDP MP (in attendance) voted for Bill C-10, a bill which threatened to censor Canadians by applying broadcasting regulations to social media users (Source)
The NDP supported Bill C-7, which expanded Canada’s eiuthanasia laws, but opposed it and voted against it when the Senate added multiple amendments to it (Source) (Source)
Every NDP MP (in attendance) voted against Bill C-233, which would have banned the barbaric practice of sex-selective abortion (Source)
Plans to repeal C-16 and M-103, and oppose C-10, and C-36, which are all bills that either censor Canadians or compel/condemn the speech of Canadians who express politically-incorrect views
Plans to ensure that Canadians are not discriminated against because of their moral convictions
Plans to withhold federal funding from any post-secondary institution shown to be violating the freedom of expression of its students or faculty
Opposes vaccine mandates and vaccine passports
Bloc Quebecois:
Every Bloc Quebecois MP (in attendance) voted for Bill C-10, a bill which threatened to censor Canadians by applying broadcasting regulations to social media users (Source)
Every Bloc Quebecois MP (in attendance) voted against Bill C-233, which would have banned the barbaric practice of sex-selective abortion (Source)
Every Bloc Quebecois MP voted for Bill C-7, which radically expanded Canada’s euthanasia law, allowing euthanasia for reasons of mental illness alone, and for the incompetent who cannot provide consent but have signed an advanced directive (Source)
Plans to ban all forms of conversion therapy, banning the work of groups such as Courage International, who non-coercively help people ro live chaste lives in accordance with the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality
Plans to legalize prostitution
Plans to expand programs in “reproductive health, rights, and in sexual and reproductive health education”
As I have said many times in the past, I am not an admirer of the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is not because I disagree with
the “fundamental freedoms” listed in Section 2 or the basic legal and
civil rights listed in Sections 7 to 13. All of these rights and
freedoms, which are by far the most important rights and freedoms in the
entire document, Canadians already possessed as subjects of Her Majesty
under Common Law before 1982. The reason I dislike the Charter is
because the Charter, rather than making these rights and freedoms more
secure, as the Liberals who drafted it want you to believe, made them
less secure. It includes two extremely broad loopholes.
The clause “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as
can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” found in
Section 1 is the first of these. Who says what limits are “reasonable”
and who decides whether they are “demonstrably justified in a free and
democratic society?” The government that seeks to place limits on
these rights and freedoms cannot be trusted to make this decision
itself.
The second loophole is Section 33, the Exception Section with its
notorious “notwithstanding clause”. This section allows the Dominion
and provincial governments to pass Acts which will operate
“notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15
of this Charter”, i.e., the sections about our fundamental freedoms and
basic legal rights. Although such Acts are required to sunset in five
years (subsection 3) they can be renewed (subsection 4). This second
loophole is the reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, and he
was right to say it, that the “Charter is not worth the paper it’s
written on.”
This is not the only problem with the Charter.
Section 7 reads “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of
the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in
accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”, substituting
“security of the person” for “property” which is the third of the basic
rights under Common Law, in which the security of person and property is
the concise way of stating all three basic rights. Property is
nowhere mentioned in the Charter. This has long been criticized as one
of the chief failings of this document and has been thought to reflect
the Marxist inclinations of those who have led the Liberal Party,
arguably since Lester Pearson became leader in 1958, but especially
since Pierre Trudeau took over in 1968.
Subsection 2 of Section 4 allows a Dominion or provincial government
with a large enough backing in the House of Commons or the provincial
legislature – a supermajority of two-thirds – to suspend elections
indefinitely in a time of “real or apprehended, war, invasion or
insurrection.” Note the words “or apprehended.” The threat of war,
invasion or insurrection does not have to be real. Pray that neither
the Liberals nor any other party, ever obtain enough seats in Parliament
to put this subsection into effect.
Subsection 2 of Section 15 nullifies what subsection 1 says about how
every individual is “equal before and under the law and has the right to
the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without
discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race,
national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or
physical disability.”
I am not particularly keen on the wording of subsection 1 either.
Saying that everyone has a right to “equal protection and equal benefit
of the law without discrimination” can be interpreted in two ways. It
can be interpreted as binding the State, preventing it from practicing
said discrimination in its administration of the law and justice. I
would not have a problem with that interpretation. It can also be
interpreted as empowering the State to interfere in our everyday
interactions to make sure we aren’t discriminating against each other.
I have a huge problem with that – it is a form of totalitarian thought
control.
Consider the Canadian Human Rights Act which was passed five years prior
to the Charter. Although the expression “human rights” is thought by
most people to mean rights which all human beings possess by virtue of
their humanity and which only bad governments violate, and the phrase
“human rights violation” is ordinarily understood to refer to
governments incarcerating people for indefinite periods without a trial,
torturing them, murdering them, and the like, this Act places limits on
individuals not the State, which it empowers to police the thoughts and
motivations of Canadians in their private interactions with each other.
The second subsection of Section 15 states that the first subsection
“does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object
the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups
including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or
ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical
disability.” In other words, the State is allowed to practice
discrimination on the basis of race, rational or ethnic origin, colour,
religion, etc., if that discrimination is the type sometimes called
reverse discrimination, that is to say, discrimination against white
people, especially those of British and French stock, Christians, males,
etc.
Section 15 as a whole, then, appears to authorize the State to interfere
in our private affairs to prevent us from discriminating against each
other, while allowing the State to practice a form of discrimination
itself.
Other flaws in the Charter itself could be pointed out but those that I
have mentioned here are by far the worst. Worse, in my view, than any
actual flaw in the Charter, however, is the attitude towards the Charter
and the set of false notions about it that the Liberal Party has
encouraged us to hold ever since 1982. There are many, for example,
who refer to the Charter as if it were our constitution and claim that
Pierre Trudeau gave us our constitution. This is not a claim the
Charter makes for itself and it is no such thing. The Charter has been
a part of our constitution since 1982, but it is not the
constitution itself. Indeed, even the British North America Act of
1867, which was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867 during the
repatriation process which gave us the Charter but remains in effect, is
not the whole of our constitution. Most of our constitution is in
fact, unwritten, or, to put it another way, written in prescription and
tradition rather than paper and ink. As our greatest constitution
expert, the late Eugene Forsey used to say to those who made the absurd
claim that Pierre Trudeau had given us our constitution, we still have
the constitution we had in 1867, albeit with a new name, and bells and
whistles added.
Even more common is the strange notion that the Charter itself gave us
our rights and freedoms. Admirers of the Charter tend to view it this
way. Some critics, such as William Gairdner (The Trouble With Canada, 1990) and Kenneth McDonald (The Monstrous Trick, 1998, Alexis in Charterland,
2004) have argued that the Charter is an example of continental-style
charter law, like the Napoleonic Code, intended to replace our Common
Law system of rights and freedoms. The reality is more nuanced than
that. Before explaining the nuance and what really happened, we need
to understand the difference between the two systems and why this would
indeed be a “monstrous trick” if it were in fact true.
Under continental-style charter law, everything is imposed from the top
down, from the law itself, to the rights and freedoms that exist under
it. Therefore, under this kind of law, you only have the specific
rights and freedoms that are spelled out on paper in black and white.
The question, under this system of law, is whether or not I have
permission to do something.
Under Common Law, the law is not imposed from the top down, except in
the sense of the underlying natural law being laid down by God, and even
then this raises the much-debated theological question of whether God’s
law and justice are expressions of His character or of His will.
Don’t worry. I will not attempt to answer that question here as it is
quite extraneous to this discussion. The Common Law is not imposed by
the State. Although the Sovereign authority, the Queen-in-Parliament,
has the power to add to, subtract from, and otherwise alter the Law, the
Law is not the creation of the Sovereign authority. The law arises
out of natural law and justice, through a process of discovery in the
courts, where disputes are brought to be arbitrated on the basis of
fairly hearing all the evidence on both sides. Rights and freedoms,
under Common Law, are not limited to those that are spelled out in black
and white. The question, under this system of law, is whether or not I
am prohibited to do something. If not, I am free to do it.
The Charter of Freedoms does not actually replace Common Law with
continental-style charter law. It merely creates the impression of
having done so. The Charter does not identify itself as the source of
our rights and freedoms, nor does it say that we have only those rights
and freedoms it spells out. Indeed, it states the very opposite of
this. Remember that the addition of the Charter was part of a
constitutional repatriation process that required adopting an amendment
formula and which required the participation of the provincial
governments. Nine out of ten of the provinces are fully Common Law,
and it is the exception, which under the provisions of the Quebec Act of
1774 has a hybrid of Common Law criminal law and French civil law,
which dissented from the final product. The Liberals would never have
been able to get away with substituting continental law for Common Law
in this context in 1982. They, quite in keeping with their modus
operandi of never telling the truth when a lie will suffice, settled for
creating the impression that they had done so. Their totalitarian ends
would be met, as long as Canadians started to think in terms of “am I
permitted” rather than “is it prohibited.”
This is why the most important section in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is Section 26. Here it is in full:
The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall
not be construed as denying the existence of any other rights or
freedoms that exist in Canada.
This is the Charter’s acknowledgement, tucked away in the miscellaneous
category towards the end rather than being placed in the very first
section as it ought to have been, that the Charter did not take us out
from under Common Law and cause all of our Common Law rights and
freedoms to disappear.
To illustrate what this means in application to a current hot topic, the
Supreme Court of Canada was entirely in the wrong when it said as part
of its ruling in R v Hasselwander
in 1993, that Canadians have no constitutional right to own guns. The
passing of the Charter, by its own admission in Section 26, did not
cancel our right, as subjects of Her Majesty, to have arms for our
defence, such as are allowed by law. This is a Common Law right, the
fifth right that Sir William Blackstone in the first volume of his Commentary on the Laws of England
(1765) identified as a necessary auxiliary to the basic and absolute
rights of life, liberty, and property, and which had been put into
statute in the Bill of Rights of 1689. This does not mean that
the Supreme Court of Canada was necessarily wrong in its ruling on this
case which involved the confiscation of a Mini-Uzi sub-machine gun. It
does mean, however, that it erred in saying that Canadians had no
constitutional gun rights. This was in response to the defence’s own
mistake of trying to argue based upon American law, but what they should
have said was that Canadians’ Common Law right to own guns is not
absolute, but is subject to the qualification “as are allowed by law.”
Paul Fromm warns us about the Canadian Liberal
Party considering making it a Criminal Offence to Knowingly Spread
Misinformation about just the coronavirus or what? Paul has been the Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression since 1983.
CAFE is dedicated to Free Speech, Immigration Reform, and Restoring
Political Sanity. The website can be found at http://cafe.nfshost.com
Paul lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and you can contact him at paul@paulfromm.com .
He has been an active leader on the Canadian right for 50 years and
has a steel trap memory so he is a treasure and resource of information
and history.
It has been almost two years since a gullible Canadian electorate was duped into giving the Liberal Party a majority government in the last Dominion election. This means that that government, headed by Captain Airhead, is approaching the half-way point in its four year mandate. It has recently been reported that the Grits have passed less than half the legislation in that time than the previous Conservative government had. This is not surprising. The Prime Minister has been far too busy flying around the world, handing out money, and looking for photo-ops, all at the taxpayers’ expense, to actually do the job of governing the country. John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, made the observation that “the amount of legislation a Parliament creates matters less than the quality of that legislation.” As true as that is, the quality of the bills the Trudeau Grits have passed is enough to make one wish that they had, the moment they were sworn in, called a term-length recess of Parliament and sent every member on a four-year paid Caribbean vacation.
One example of this is Bill C-16, which passed its third-reading in the Senate on Thursday, June 15th and which was signed into law by the Governor-General on Monday, June 19th. Bill C-16 is a bill which amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. To the former it adds “gender identity or expression” to the list of grounds of discrimination prohibited by the Act. To the latter it adds the same to Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause of the Code. The Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code were both inflicted upon us by the present premier’s father in his long reign of terror and it would have been better had the present Parliament passed legislation striking both out of existence rather than amending them to increase the number of ways in which they can be used to persecute Canadians. When, a century and a half ago, the Fathers of Confederation put together the British North America Act which, coming into effect on July 1, 1867, established the Dominion of Canada as a new nation within what would soon develop into the British Commonwealth of Nations, their intention was to create a free country, whose citizens, English and French, as subjects of the Crown, would possess all the freedoms and the protection of all the rights that had accumulated to such in over a thousand years of legal evolution. The CHRA and Section 318 do not belong in such a country – they are more appropriate to totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Third Reich.
The CHRA, which Parliament passed in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds including race, religion, sex, and country of origin. It applies in a number of different areas with the provision of goods and services, facilities and accommodations, and employment being chief among them. Those charged with enforcing this legislation have generally operated according to an unwritten rule that it is only discrimination when whites, Christians, and males are the perpetrators rather than the victims, but even if that were not the case, the very idea of a law of this sort runs contrary to the basic principles of our traditional freedoms and system of justice. It dictates to employers, landlords, and several other people, what they can and cannot be thinking when conducting the everyday affairs of their business. It establishes a special police force and court – the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal respectively – to investigate and sit in judgement upon those private thoughts and prejudices. Those charged do not have the protection of the presumption of innocence because the CHRA is classified as civil rather than criminal law.
There are more protections for defendants under Section 318 because it is part of the Criminal Code but it is still a bad law. Incitement of criminal violence was already against the law long before Section 318 was added. It is not, therefore, the incitement of criminal violence per se that Section 318 was introduced to combat, for the existing laws were sufficient, but the thinking and verbal expression of thoughts that the Liberal Party has decided Canadians ought not to think and speak.
Bill C-16 takes these bad laws and makes them even worse. By adding “gender identity and expression” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination the Liberals are adding people who think and say that they belong to a gender that does not match up with their biological birth sex to the groups protected from discrimination. Now, ordinarily when people think they are something they are not, like, for example, the man who thinks he is Julius Caesar, we, if we are decent people, would say that this is grounds for pity and compassion, but we would not think of compelling others to go along with the delusion. Imagine a law that says that we have to regard a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar as actually being the Roman general! Such a law would be crazier than the man himself!
Bill C-16 is exactly that kind of law. Don’t be fooled by those who claim otherwise. The discrimination that trans activists, the Trudeau Liberals and their noise machine, i.e., the Canadian media, and everyone else who supports this bill, all want to see banned, is not just the refusing of jobs or apartments to transgender people but the refusal to accept as real a “gender identity” that does not match up with biological sex. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been fighting this sort of nonsense at the provincial level for years, and who testified against the Bill before the Senate committee that reviewed it, has warned that it could lead to someone being charged with a “hate crime” for using the pronoun – “he” or “she” – that lines up with a person’s birth sex, rather than some alternative pronoun made-up to designate that person’s “gender identity.” Supporters of the bill have mocked this assertion but we have seen this sort of thing before – progressives propose some sort of measure, someone points out that the measure will have this or that negative consequence, the progressives ridicule that person, and then, when the measure is passed and has precisely the negative consequences predicted, say that those negatively affected deserved it in the first place.
Indeed, progressive assurances that Peterson’s fears are unwarranted ring incredibly hollow when we consider that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would be considered discrimination under a similar clause in Ontario’s provincial Human Rights Code, if it were to take place in a context where discrimination in general is prohibited, such as the workplace. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, writing in the National Post, explains that this new expansion of human rights legislation goes way beyond previous “hate speech” laws in its infringement upon freedom of speech. “When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself,” Pardy writes, but “Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.”
It is too much, perhaps, to expect Captain Airhead to understand or care about this. Like his father before him – and indeed, every Liberal Prime Minister going back to and including Mackenzie King – he has little to no appreciation of either the traditional freedoms that are part of Canada’s British heritage or the safeguards of those freedoms bequeathed us by the Fathers of Confederation in our parliamentary government under the Crown. For a century, Liberal governments have whittled away at every parliamentary obstacle to the absolute power of a Prime Minister backed by a House majority. The powers of the Crown, Senate, and the Opposition in the House to hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable have all been dangerously eroded in this manner. Last year the present government attempted to strip Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of what few means it has left of delaying government legislation. The motion in question was withdrawn after the Prime Minister came under strong criticism for behaving like a spoiled, bullying, petty thug in the House but it revealed his character. These Opposition powers are a necessary safeguard against Prime Ministerial dictatorship but Captain Airhead, the son of an admirer of Stalin and Mao, regards them, like the freedoms they protect, as an unacceptable hindrance to his getting his way as fast as he possibly can. Years ago, George Grant wrote that the justices of the American Supreme Court in Roe v Wade had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought – the triumph of the will.” This is also the modus operandi of Captain Airhead and the Liberal Party of Canada.
