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”.

(2)   Amusingly, one gun which somehow made it onto the Liberals’ list of guns to be banned is something called the “Butt Master”.   This gun is pretty much the exact opposite of a gun designed to kill as many people as fast as possible.   It is a single use gun in the shape of a pen that has to be re-loaded each time it is fired.  Moreover, there has only ever been one of these in existence, the one still owned by its designer, Mark Serbu of Tampa, Florida.  

(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.

Technocracy Triumphant

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.

 

 

 

Freedom Under Siege

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.