Our Supreme Court may or may not be politicized (I rather think not), but it definitely reflects our class structure -- a class structure that our betters keep denying. As my constitutional law professor pointed out many years ago. Supreme Court judges do not read the Toronto Sun or even the Toronto Star; they read the Globe and Mail. It is even worse with the francophone judges: they do not read le Journal de Montreal, they read Le Devoir. They have no idea what those other publications are on about.
They also undergo sensitivity training. I remember Freedom of Information request, around 2005, to disclose the materials being used. The request was denied.
As a result, it is no surprise that the judges have little idea, and are often surprised, by middle and working class Canadians.
I was around when the Charter was first put forward by Pierre Trudeau. There was fear among legal and political circles about what an activist court might do with it. In particular, many pointed to the United States, where the Warren Court was taking significant social actions (whether good or bad actions are a separate matter). No. no, we were told, we have a Parliamentary government tradition, and the supremacy of Parliament would be respected. And so it was, for the first decade or two. But no longer.
The situation is not improved by law school professors who spend their time inventing new rights to protect, but who never consider that past extensions might have been a mistake and should be reversed. Always expanding, never contracting.
The Notwithstanding Clause is an essential element of the bargain struck in 1982. Without it, there would have been no Charter. And the Clause is no bad thing. It allows different provinces to craft their own set of rules, independent from any "national" consensus. After all, that is the very essence of a confederation rather than a unitary state. Various provinces can try out different approaches. People who are uncomfortable with any given province's rules, are free to move to another province whose approach they prefer. They are free to move, the Notwithstanding Clause cannot be applied to mobility rights.
What makes you think that the Charter would impose a "national consensus" without the Notwithstanding Clause? The provinces appoint provincial courts which are involved in the handling of Charter cases. The Supreme Court only overrides these courts if cases get fully appealed.
The federal government gets to appoint superior court judges in the provinces, as well as judges in federal courts. Provinces get to appoint judges in inferior courts in the provinces.
But that is beside the point. The issue is. who has ultimate authority, the courts or the legislature? To put it differently, how activist a court system are we willing to accept?
The problem with Sean Fraser is that he's the MP for where I was born, not where I live now. If he sucks in Parliament, he prolly also sucks there. The guy is dealing with his wife having stage four breast cancer, and he's still in Parliament? Ugh. RESIGN AND BE WITH YOUR WIFE OR STOP SUCKING. Argh!
"They want a technocracy. One in which the smartest and ablest individuals (as defined by them, of course) are the ones who actually get to set the rules and guardrails for society writ large. One in which parliament really is as theatrical, symbolic and pointless as it often regards itself."
...and this is the way Mark Carney has been acting since becoming PM.
Last week, he stood at the podium at the UN and took a position on behalf of Canada which was diametrically opposed to the decision Parliament made less than a year ago, when they voted on this specific issue.
Parliament was/is in session - and he wanted to radically change Canada's long-held foreign policy position - why did Parliament not get a vote this time....?
...because Technocrat Daddy gets to do what he wants, that's why.
But oh, how they would howl if a Conservative governed this way...
Correction: Canada is not a democracy. Canada is a Potemkin democracy, and that is not a democracy because it is only a façade. Canada has mostly been a Laurentian dictatorship, and since 2015 is a more and more overt Laurentian dictatorship.
We show up as bright blue on all those "world democracy" maps, some of which declare the US to be a rung down, but meanwhile we have state media capture, manipulated elections, one-party perpetual minority government with absolute power, total PMO control over sock puppet MP's, and no accountability mechanisms at really any level of any part of government. The US may have its problems but they are at least able to change ruling parties pretty regularly, and politicians there who fuck up sometimes actually go to jail.
The Liberals' obsession with the notion of wise mandarins guiding the policy of the nation dates back to at least to Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, and this technocratic approach has been critiqued nearly as long by notable historians such as Donald Creighton. It's part of an even older trend that dates back to the Progressive era in US politics under Teddy Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson: the idea that experts should make policy detached from grubby politics.
It's not completely wrong: the average Canadian member of parliament has no particular expertise in many highly technical areas of policy. Even when the MPs are doctors, lawyers, or businessmen, you're often talking about doctors with no experience in management of the health care system, lawyers with no particular expertise in criminal law, and businessmen whose experience is running a car dealership rather than a ministry with thousands of employees.
The problem is that the would-be mandarins aren't particularly expert either, often seeming to form a shallow understanding of issues rooted in TED Talks and pitches by activists and lobbyists. Where they are expert, they're often unaware of their own narrow perspective and mandate policies that don't balance other considerations. However, politicians also seem to like letting these "experts" dictate policy because it provides cover from criticism.
There's really no path back here without politicians starting to do their job, which is to seek out and listen to differing perspectives on the issues that government has to grapple with. Then weigh the opposing perspectives, balance them with other considerations, and take responsibility for making decisions on the path forward.
I am hopeful The Line will survive. It appears as a nimble home based business with no bricks & mortar or large debt to support. That, along with just a few permanent staff, is the key to survival.
It is a bit astonishing that (after having a front row seat to a modern war for 3.5 years and untold meetings with Ukrainians at all levels in the military and government) even hawkish nations like Poland, the Baltic countries and Denmark have not benefited from the expertise of Ukraine to deploy more cost effective anti-drone defenses. I am sure they are working on it but perhaps they should consider speeding things up a bit.
With regards to the spending, we should look back to parts of our own confederation when a couple of the provinces were acquired because they bankrupted themselves building railroads. Would be a bit ironic if we engaged in all this spending to keep our sovereignty only to see it force us to join the US to get our debts forgiven.
Trump was openly talking about economically destroying us to force the issue. 5% GDP military spending seems like a good way to get that ball rolling.
For all the talk of Trudeau's fiscal irresponsibility, the federal debt to GDP ratio trended DOWN almost every year of his tenure except for 2020. He was an austerity PM. The post-pandemic economic malaise was certainly caused by the sharp spending cuts of 2021. Compare to the US which is still running a massive fiscal deficit and has a booming economy.
A shrinking federal debt to GDP ratio means that more of the burden of economic growth falls on the private sector. That means higher mortgage/household debt or higher business debt to generate the dollars that support growth. And that's exactly what Canada has seen for the past 20 years. Federal debt to GDP has fallen while household debt has skyrocketed. This is partly the reason for Canada's low business investment and tepid wages. Government has been sucking money out of the private sector to extinguish the federal debt for 20 years.
In order to rebalance the household debt burden back to where it was in 2006, the federal government needs to spend about a trillion more dollars than planned. That's approximately an annual $150 B deficit over ten years. That will raise business demand and wages, spur business investment, and fix a lot of our infrastructure deficit.
I think Carney has the right idea, but it remains to be seen if he (and the Finance Ministry) has the balls to slay the sacred balanced budget cow, or if he's just another big talker like Trudeau.
Jeeeezzzzz....... I do like the "Ignorant Opinions" because it has a great sense of humour. However the comment promotes pixie dust accounting and pixie dust economics.
The two largest and most advanced and productive economies in the world (USA/China) spend huge amounts of government debt with impunity. The G7 economies mired in the most economic malaise (Canada/UK/Germany) restrain their spending. How does that square with pixie dust economics?
You're ignoring the fact that Productivity has plummeted over the same ten years - a clear indication that the main reason the GDP continued to rise is that the Libs chose to aggressively flood our country with new inhabitants.
Canadians have a LOWER standard of living today as a result, and the unchecked runaway immigration has caused several other forms of crisis.
Productivity has been plummeting for a long time. The financial crisis of 2008 was a body blow to Canadian industry that was never actually fixed. Harper cut spending and bailed out the mortgage industry while manufacturing melted away.
Canada can accommodate high immigration, but without a corresponding rise in government investment (in housing, health care, transportation, education), the burden of financing falls on current citizens. We end up paying higher prices with lower wages and crappier service. That's what causes the political backlash against immigration.
If Canada doesn't invest in itself, our grandchildren will pay through sky high housing costs, expensive imports, low wages, and low productivity jobs. Or more likely they'll move to a country that does invest in itself, and Canada will fade away.
That's why the US is so appealing for business investment - the government runs a massive deficit, pouring money into the private sector and driving investment. We can do the same if we can get over the pearl clutching.
I agree we need more private sector investment. To bad the Libs have spent the past decade performing a master class in how to chase those dollars away.
All private capital needs/wants in order to (re)start pouring investment dollars into Canada is a predictable, stable and fair regulatory environment.
Instead of that much-needed stability, what the Libs have offered is a swirling mess of changes and a focus on whatever is trendy for today, accompanied by political vetoes AFTER all the regulatory hoops have been cleared, and other forms of outright government interference in entire (important) sectors of the economy.
...and what Carney has coined as "investment" is even more deficit spending which has above average odds of going down the typical path for such projects, ie: Liberal-friendly pockets getting enlarged while actual results are few.
He sees (but does not WANT to clear up) the regulatory mess his predecessor left behind --- and his big play is to allow a few pet projects to skip all of that.
Why would the private sector invest in Canada when the USA and the CCP is chucking money around left right and centre? The best way to catalyze private sector investment is through government spending. This has been the lesson through all of modern economic history. There has been no example of a country cutting its way to prosperity.
We could cut regulation, but that isn't going to spur some sort of investment boom. An investment boom to build what, exactly? The private sector won't just magic up navy ships and nuclear power plants and transmission lines and highways and rail service and hospitals. The Americans don't really want our cars or oil. China doesn't want our canola. What's the business model here?
We have to stop waiting for someone else to invest in us. We have to invest in ourselves.
It would appear that you didn't have first hand experience with how the structural deficit craze of the 1970's came back to hurt people in the 1980's and'90s.
Canada has had a structural deficit craze since Confederation. So has every other advanced industrialized nation. It comes with being a real nation state.
Federal debt to GDP actually declined through the 70's. It shot up in 1983/84 due to central bank interest rate hikes. The lesson is: don't jack up interest rates if you don't want more government debt.
I know, let's invite 40,000,000 more people to come settle in Canada in the next year, as long as they each bring at least $10,000 CAD to spend. That would boost the GDP and lower the debt to GDP ratio, and way reduce the debt per capita. Win win!
With the rest of your "spend our way to prosperity" philosophy, seems like you have a decent shot at becoming Finance Minister some day.
And things are going to work out great for the US going what, 6%? 7%? deeper into debt every year. Totally sustainable.
But to be on the safe side I think I'm going to go buy some gold. And maybe some ammo.
Re:Quebec's C-21. It occurs to me that the Liberals put themselves in yet another trap of their making thanks to yet more Trudeau negligence. Quebec voted to make oaths to the king optional in 2022, even though this is likely unconstitutional. The longer the Liberals never push back on it, the more they risk making it quasi-constitututional because the other option is very bad (imagine if the PQ wins a majority next year, and none of their MNAs swear an oath, and then they go on to pass budgets and bills. I doubt the Supreme Court would then be willing to invalidate an entire government sessions worth of laws years later because the government legislator votes can't count).
Then insert some tortured lawyer logic that if something unconstitutional like that is allowed to stand, then other (supposedly) unconstitutional things become constitutional if it's kept in place long enough via notwithstanding.
Is it truly the appropriate role of the federal government to declare that Quebec's action here is unconstitutional? Sean Fraser's factum is under fire precisely because it is going a little too far in making partial suggestions to the judiciary - is he weighing in on too few legal matters, then?
With respect Jen and Matt, for people labelling Sean Fraser as "Laurentian Consensus ilk". you should be more self-conscious of your Ottawa-bubble-talk, which is on full display with your hyperbole of "flirting with a full-blown constitutional crisis". Yeah sure, the integrity of our country is about to implode because of some misguided factum that no ordinary citizen has ever heard about - you know better than that.
Sean Fraser's suggestion that the courts rule that Section 33 cannot be re-invoked is a non-starter, but I would object to your accusation that wariness of Section 33 comes from support for "technocracy". The advantage of the Charter is not that it is supposed to allow unelected persons to over-rule the elected legislature, the advantage of the Charter is that it is supposed to allow unelected persons to over-rule the elected legislature *temporarily*. There simply are some political situations where the majority will is not quite or not yet on the side of the minority, even if that is where public opinion is going to be headed in the long-term. Think same-sex marriage, for example - the courts took the lead on an issue where the public will was inevitably going to come onside, but they hurried along the outcomes faster.
If there were no Section 33, we would still have fulsome democracy: in the long run, bad judges with bad decisions will get replaced with appointments from governments who revise their opinions on which judicial character types to appoint.
Again, you are not very observant of reality; as a professional theoretical academician you do OK, because you are unable neither smell nor see a full-blown constitutional crisis coming. There are several red flags waving right on the open, however professional theoretical academician typically have problems with acknowledging reality, which for them is too pedestrian an item.
So if a bunch of Conservative and Bloc Quebecois MPs say there is a "full-blown constitutional crisis coming", they're totally experts on the Constitution of Canada, right? Oh yeah, they shouldn't be subject to the *least* skepticism of their claims, they're totally truthworthy!
This Laurentian-owned "Liberal" government has ripped up the constitution and the charter of rights, the charter of evidently imaginary rights. This "Liberal" government is acting like a thug violently grabbing a person's wallet. If a full-blown constitutional crisis does arise, it is unlikely that constitutional expertise and legalistic minutiae will have much influence on how it will develop. Most likely it will be like a backstreet brawl with few rules, if any.
A crisis for big-C Conservatives' self-esteem issues is not necessarily a crisis for the country as a whole. Conservatives are having a meltdown over a factum, no one else is being or will be affected.
Our Supreme Court may or may not be politicized (I rather think not), but it definitely reflects our class structure -- a class structure that our betters keep denying. As my constitutional law professor pointed out many years ago. Supreme Court judges do not read the Toronto Sun or even the Toronto Star; they read the Globe and Mail. It is even worse with the francophone judges: they do not read le Journal de Montreal, they read Le Devoir. They have no idea what those other publications are on about.
They also undergo sensitivity training. I remember Freedom of Information request, around 2005, to disclose the materials being used. The request was denied.
As a result, it is no surprise that the judges have little idea, and are often surprised, by middle and working class Canadians.
I was around when the Charter was first put forward by Pierre Trudeau. There was fear among legal and political circles about what an activist court might do with it. In particular, many pointed to the United States, where the Warren Court was taking significant social actions (whether good or bad actions are a separate matter). No. no, we were told, we have a Parliamentary government tradition, and the supremacy of Parliament would be respected. And so it was, for the first decade or two. But no longer.
The situation is not improved by law school professors who spend their time inventing new rights to protect, but who never consider that past extensions might have been a mistake and should be reversed. Always expanding, never contracting.
The Notwithstanding Clause is an essential element of the bargain struck in 1982. Without it, there would have been no Charter. And the Clause is no bad thing. It allows different provinces to craft their own set of rules, independent from any "national" consensus. After all, that is the very essence of a confederation rather than a unitary state. Various provinces can try out different approaches. People who are uncomfortable with any given province's rules, are free to move to another province whose approach they prefer. They are free to move, the Notwithstanding Clause cannot be applied to mobility rights.
What makes you think that the Charter would impose a "national consensus" without the Notwithstanding Clause? The provinces appoint provincial courts which are involved in the handling of Charter cases. The Supreme Court only overrides these courts if cases get fully appealed.
The federal government gets to appoint superior court judges in the provinces, as well as judges in federal courts. Provinces get to appoint judges in inferior courts in the provinces.
But that is beside the point. The issue is. who has ultimate authority, the courts or the legislature? To put it differently, how activist a court system are we willing to accept?
Sean Fraser being Attorney General is not his fault, that rests with big brains Carney who put him there.
The problem with Sean Fraser is that he's the MP for where I was born, not where I live now. If he sucks in Parliament, he prolly also sucks there. The guy is dealing with his wife having stage four breast cancer, and he's still in Parliament? Ugh. RESIGN AND BE WITH YOUR WIFE OR STOP SUCKING. Argh!
True enough
He didn't even do anything about housing. HE HAD ONE JOB. ONE.
"They want a technocracy. One in which the smartest and ablest individuals (as defined by them, of course) are the ones who actually get to set the rules and guardrails for society writ large. One in which parliament really is as theatrical, symbolic and pointless as it often regards itself."
...and this is the way Mark Carney has been acting since becoming PM.
Last week, he stood at the podium at the UN and took a position on behalf of Canada which was diametrically opposed to the decision Parliament made less than a year ago, when they voted on this specific issue.
Parliament was/is in session - and he wanted to radically change Canada's long-held foreign policy position - why did Parliament not get a vote this time....?
...because Technocrat Daddy gets to do what he wants, that's why.
But oh, how they would howl if a Conservative governed this way...
The reason Liberal politicians want appointed "experts" in charge is that they have some idea of how dumb and venal Liberal politicians are.
Correction: Canada is not a democracy. Canada is a Potemkin democracy, and that is not a democracy because it is only a façade. Canada has mostly been a Laurentian dictatorship, and since 2015 is a more and more overt Laurentian dictatorship.
We show up as bright blue on all those "world democracy" maps, some of which declare the US to be a rung down, but meanwhile we have state media capture, manipulated elections, one-party perpetual minority government with absolute power, total PMO control over sock puppet MP's, and no accountability mechanisms at really any level of any part of government. The US may have its problems but they are at least able to change ruling parties pretty regularly, and politicians there who fuck up sometimes actually go to jail.
100 upvotes for the factual way you described Canada's Potemkin democracy.
Good luck hanging in there subsidy-free. It’s going to get harder as the Zombies lurch around for more
The Liberals' obsession with the notion of wise mandarins guiding the policy of the nation dates back to at least to Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, and this technocratic approach has been critiqued nearly as long by notable historians such as Donald Creighton. It's part of an even older trend that dates back to the Progressive era in US politics under Teddy Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson: the idea that experts should make policy detached from grubby politics.
It's not completely wrong: the average Canadian member of parliament has no particular expertise in many highly technical areas of policy. Even when the MPs are doctors, lawyers, or businessmen, you're often talking about doctors with no experience in management of the health care system, lawyers with no particular expertise in criminal law, and businessmen whose experience is running a car dealership rather than a ministry with thousands of employees.
The problem is that the would-be mandarins aren't particularly expert either, often seeming to form a shallow understanding of issues rooted in TED Talks and pitches by activists and lobbyists. Where they are expert, they're often unaware of their own narrow perspective and mandate policies that don't balance other considerations. However, politicians also seem to like letting these "experts" dictate policy because it provides cover from criticism.
There's really no path back here without politicians starting to do their job, which is to seek out and listen to differing perspectives on the issues that government has to grapple with. Then weigh the opposing perspectives, balance them with other considerations, and take responsibility for making decisions on the path forward.
I am hopeful The Line will survive. It appears as a nimble home based business with no bricks & mortar or large debt to support. That, along with just a few permanent staff, is the key to survival.
It is a bit astonishing that (after having a front row seat to a modern war for 3.5 years and untold meetings with Ukrainians at all levels in the military and government) even hawkish nations like Poland, the Baltic countries and Denmark have not benefited from the expertise of Ukraine to deploy more cost effective anti-drone defenses. I am sure they are working on it but perhaps they should consider speeding things up a bit.
With regards to the spending, we should look back to parts of our own confederation when a couple of the provinces were acquired because they bankrupted themselves building railroads. Would be a bit ironic if we engaged in all this spending to keep our sovereignty only to see it force us to join the US to get our debts forgiven.
Trump was openly talking about economically destroying us to force the issue. 5% GDP military spending seems like a good way to get that ball rolling.
For all the talk of Trudeau's fiscal irresponsibility, the federal debt to GDP ratio trended DOWN almost every year of his tenure except for 2020. He was an austerity PM. The post-pandemic economic malaise was certainly caused by the sharp spending cuts of 2021. Compare to the US which is still running a massive fiscal deficit and has a booming economy.
A shrinking federal debt to GDP ratio means that more of the burden of economic growth falls on the private sector. That means higher mortgage/household debt or higher business debt to generate the dollars that support growth. And that's exactly what Canada has seen for the past 20 years. Federal debt to GDP has fallen while household debt has skyrocketed. This is partly the reason for Canada's low business investment and tepid wages. Government has been sucking money out of the private sector to extinguish the federal debt for 20 years.
In order to rebalance the household debt burden back to where it was in 2006, the federal government needs to spend about a trillion more dollars than planned. That's approximately an annual $150 B deficit over ten years. That will raise business demand and wages, spur business investment, and fix a lot of our infrastructure deficit.
I think Carney has the right idea, but it remains to be seen if he (and the Finance Ministry) has the balls to slay the sacred balanced budget cow, or if he's just another big talker like Trudeau.
Jeeeezzzzz....... I do like the "Ignorant Opinions" because it has a great sense of humour. However the comment promotes pixie dust accounting and pixie dust economics.
The two largest and most advanced and productive economies in the world (USA/China) spend huge amounts of government debt with impunity. The G7 economies mired in the most economic malaise (Canada/UK/Germany) restrain their spending. How does that square with pixie dust economics?
You're ignoring the fact that Productivity has plummeted over the same ten years - a clear indication that the main reason the GDP continued to rise is that the Libs chose to aggressively flood our country with new inhabitants.
Canadians have a LOWER standard of living today as a result, and the unchecked runaway immigration has caused several other forms of crisis.
Productivity has been plummeting for a long time. The financial crisis of 2008 was a body blow to Canadian industry that was never actually fixed. Harper cut spending and bailed out the mortgage industry while manufacturing melted away.
Canada can accommodate high immigration, but without a corresponding rise in government investment (in housing, health care, transportation, education), the burden of financing falls on current citizens. We end up paying higher prices with lower wages and crappier service. That's what causes the political backlash against immigration.
So your preference is the classic LPC "solution to everything", is what you;re saying.
Tax and spend, and when that doesn't work, spend and tax.
I'm sure your grandchildren will love paying for it.
If Canada doesn't invest in itself, our grandchildren will pay through sky high housing costs, expensive imports, low wages, and low productivity jobs. Or more likely they'll move to a country that does invest in itself, and Canada will fade away.
That's why the US is so appealing for business investment - the government runs a massive deficit, pouring money into the private sector and driving investment. We can do the same if we can get over the pearl clutching.
I agree we need more private sector investment. To bad the Libs have spent the past decade performing a master class in how to chase those dollars away.
All private capital needs/wants in order to (re)start pouring investment dollars into Canada is a predictable, stable and fair regulatory environment.
Instead of that much-needed stability, what the Libs have offered is a swirling mess of changes and a focus on whatever is trendy for today, accompanied by political vetoes AFTER all the regulatory hoops have been cleared, and other forms of outright government interference in entire (important) sectors of the economy.
...and what Carney has coined as "investment" is even more deficit spending which has above average odds of going down the typical path for such projects, ie: Liberal-friendly pockets getting enlarged while actual results are few.
He sees (but does not WANT to clear up) the regulatory mess his predecessor left behind --- and his big play is to allow a few pet projects to skip all of that.
Why would the private sector invest in Canada when the USA and the CCP is chucking money around left right and centre? The best way to catalyze private sector investment is through government spending. This has been the lesson through all of modern economic history. There has been no example of a country cutting its way to prosperity.
We could cut regulation, but that isn't going to spur some sort of investment boom. An investment boom to build what, exactly? The private sector won't just magic up navy ships and nuclear power plants and transmission lines and highways and rail service and hospitals. The Americans don't really want our cars or oil. China doesn't want our canola. What's the business model here?
We have to stop waiting for someone else to invest in us. We have to invest in ourselves.
It would appear that you didn't have first hand experience with how the structural deficit craze of the 1970's came back to hurt people in the 1980's and'90s.
Canada has had a structural deficit craze since Confederation. So has every other advanced industrialized nation. It comes with being a real nation state.
Federal debt to GDP actually declined through the 70's. It shot up in 1983/84 due to central bank interest rate hikes. The lesson is: don't jack up interest rates if you don't want more government debt.
Oh boy. This is the kind of stuff that tests the patience of The Line Editors.
With reluctance, you get the last word.
The doom-mongering narratives about government debt tend to fall apart when confronted with the history and the numbers.
I know, let's invite 40,000,000 more people to come settle in Canada in the next year, as long as they each bring at least $10,000 CAD to spend. That would boost the GDP and lower the debt to GDP ratio, and way reduce the debt per capita. Win win!
With the rest of your "spend our way to prosperity" philosophy, seems like you have a decent shot at becoming Finance Minister some day.
And things are going to work out great for the US going what, 6%? 7%? deeper into debt every year. Totally sustainable.
But to be on the safe side I think I'm going to go buy some gold. And maybe some ammo.
Re:Quebec's C-21. It occurs to me that the Liberals put themselves in yet another trap of their making thanks to yet more Trudeau negligence. Quebec voted to make oaths to the king optional in 2022, even though this is likely unconstitutional. The longer the Liberals never push back on it, the more they risk making it quasi-constitututional because the other option is very bad (imagine if the PQ wins a majority next year, and none of their MNAs swear an oath, and then they go on to pass budgets and bills. I doubt the Supreme Court would then be willing to invalidate an entire government sessions worth of laws years later because the government legislator votes can't count).
Then insert some tortured lawyer logic that if something unconstitutional like that is allowed to stand, then other (supposedly) unconstitutional things become constitutional if it's kept in place long enough via notwithstanding.
Is it truly the appropriate role of the federal government to declare that Quebec's action here is unconstitutional? Sean Fraser's factum is under fire precisely because it is going a little too far in making partial suggestions to the judiciary - is he weighing in on too few legal matters, then?
On the one hand, I could subscribe to the Line's Alberta branch. In the other hand, I would comment there as well. Thoughts?
Good article! I like Op Eds in list form!
With respect Jen and Matt, for people labelling Sean Fraser as "Laurentian Consensus ilk". you should be more self-conscious of your Ottawa-bubble-talk, which is on full display with your hyperbole of "flirting with a full-blown constitutional crisis". Yeah sure, the integrity of our country is about to implode because of some misguided factum that no ordinary citizen has ever heard about - you know better than that.
Sean Fraser's suggestion that the courts rule that Section 33 cannot be re-invoked is a non-starter, but I would object to your accusation that wariness of Section 33 comes from support for "technocracy". The advantage of the Charter is not that it is supposed to allow unelected persons to over-rule the elected legislature, the advantage of the Charter is that it is supposed to allow unelected persons to over-rule the elected legislature *temporarily*. There simply are some political situations where the majority will is not quite or not yet on the side of the minority, even if that is where public opinion is going to be headed in the long-term. Think same-sex marriage, for example - the courts took the lead on an issue where the public will was inevitably going to come onside, but they hurried along the outcomes faster.
If there were no Section 33, we would still have fulsome democracy: in the long run, bad judges with bad decisions will get replaced with appointments from governments who revise their opinions on which judicial character types to appoint.
Again, you are not very observant of reality; as a professional theoretical academician you do OK, because you are unable neither smell nor see a full-blown constitutional crisis coming. There are several red flags waving right on the open, however professional theoretical academician typically have problems with acknowledging reality, which for them is too pedestrian an item.
So if a bunch of Conservative and Bloc Quebecois MPs say there is a "full-blown constitutional crisis coming", they're totally experts on the Constitution of Canada, right? Oh yeah, they shouldn't be subject to the *least* skepticism of their claims, they're totally truthworthy!
This Laurentian-owned "Liberal" government has ripped up the constitution and the charter of rights, the charter of evidently imaginary rights. This "Liberal" government is acting like a thug violently grabbing a person's wallet. If a full-blown constitutional crisis does arise, it is unlikely that constitutional expertise and legalistic minutiae will have much influence on how it will develop. Most likely it will be like a backstreet brawl with few rules, if any.
A crisis for big-C Conservatives' self-esteem issues is not necessarily a crisis for the country as a whole. Conservatives are having a meltdown over a factum, no one else is being or will be affected.