NCI panel says court failures suggest foreboding future
By Lee Harding | Published by Western Standard
An online panel of lawyers organized by the National Citizens Inquiry on COVID-19 said the courts have failed to uphold Canadian rights since the pandemic began and a bleak future awaits.
Lawyer Shawn Buckley kicked off the Friday conversation by saying Canadians had just experienced “the largest intrusion of government overreach into our personal lives, even in wartime,” without the courts putting on the breaks.
Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy agreed. “I think governments will interpret what has happened so far as a green light to go ahead and do it again,” he said.
Lawyer Leighton Grey said the 1982 Constitution enabled a “quiet revolution” to put judges in charge, something made most evident during the pandemic.
“The judges have, in unison, sung the course of the government's narrative, and we can’t vote them out of power. In Alberta, people were really upset with our premier, and we got rid of him. We can't get rid of Chief Justice Wagner,” he said.
“The judges can do…what they want. And the main problem of judicial activism in our country is that these courts are not answerable to the people for the decisions that they make, and they wield tremendous power.”
Lawyer James Kitchen said the “living tree doctrine,” that the constitution grows to become something new as time goes on, enables “judge-made law.”
“If…90% of the lawyers from whom the judges come from have a particular worldview, have a particular ideology, they cannot help but accept the invitation given to them to remake the country in their image,” he said.
“And they can't do it overnight, but they can do it probably within the course of a few decades…That's part of what's going on.” he said.
Kitchen said Americans are more likely to insist on a literal, originalist interpretation of the US Constitution, unlike Canadians.
“We never even talk about that. We don't understand that. And we have no movement in this nation to go back to that,” Kitchen said.
“Is it okay for judges to use the living tree doctrine in section one, to remake the nation? Well, no, it actually isn't. That's not democratic. That's not good for people. That's not going to represent all the people who actually like freedom and not socialism. So we need to stop that.”
Pardy agreed, but conceded case law was also necessary to clarify the Charter’s “very vague, almost platitudes, that really had no content to them.”
What makes our decade different, Pardy said, is that legislators, bureaucrats, and the judiciary “agree in the way we should proceed” and viewed civil liberties as “just getting in the way.”
“As far as the administrative state is concerned, this was not a failure. It succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. This was its pinnacle achievement, at least, so far…The active principle upon which our system is based now is the discretion of public officials to do what they think is best.”
Grey said the Supreme Court has influenced affairs by refusing to hear certain cases, such as the suit by Albertan Annette Lewis, who was taken off the organ transplant list for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine.
“There was a case out of British Columbia, concerning privatization of medical services there…That was a really juicy issue for them to deal with. They said, no, we won't hear it,” Grey recalled.
“They've brushed aside every single possible COVID case that could have come before them. And that's a concern, too. That's a form of judicial activism.”
Kitchen said it was already clear to him in March 2020 that the court had forgotten its job.
“The greatest thing to stop tyranny, and the required thing is the division of power amongst the executive, the legislative and the judiciary,” he said.
“The three of them collapsed into one…That is a recipe for tyranny. What did we get? We got three years of tyranny. And it doesn't look like it's ever going to be reversed.”
He said six of his clients left Canada because he told them Canada had reached a point of no return.
“I said, ‘In my honest opinion, this country is beyond the point of return. And if you have a way out, I think for your sake, if you want to live as a free person, you should take it,’” he recalled.
“The next crisis a few years from now, whether it's climate change, or God knows what, it's just going to keep going–you're going to have the unraveling of the rest of the rule of law and the rest of limited government and individual rights…And it's very scary.”
Read the original version of this article at the publisher’s website here.
NCI panel says Canadians need courage and culture change to restore freedom
“It was not a case where governments were running wild doing things that the population objected to in a kind of dictatorship. That’s not the case at all. The government was doing things that an awful lot of people approved of.”
By Lee Harding | Published by Western Standard
An anti-freedom attitude in Canadian courts and people could give way if enough people speak up, a public panel discussion concluded. Four lawyers said so in an online panel on Friday hosted by the National Citizens Inquiry on COVID-19.
Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy said the overreach of governments and the failure of courts concern him less than the public approval Canadians offered for such actions.
“It was not a case where governments were running wild doing things that the population objected to in a kind of dictatorship. That's not the case at all. The government was doing things that an awful lot of people approved of,” Pardy said.
“To really fix this, you've got to change things that are very deeply embedded now, and I don't know exactly how you do that.”
Lawyer Leighton Grey agreed wholeheartedly and said opinion polls always encouraged governments to maintain their heavy hand.
“What people were saying is, yeah, give us more. Give us more lockdowns and just give us more mask mandates. And the only thing that ultimately changed the picture was that freedom convoy. God bless the truckers. Without that, where would we be right now?” asked Grey.
What Grey wondered was whether convoy leaders would be treated fairly by judges.
“What sort of trial is a Chris Barber or Tamara Lich going to receive in this country? Art Pawlowski, he's going to be sentenced soon.”
Pardy said he was encouraged when superior court judges allowed Lich to get out on bail and that everyone should cross their fingers that she gets a fair trial.
Grey said the class action lawsuit by Ottawa residents against truckers was “mean…and perhaps intended to be a very strong discouragement, or indeed punishment, of people who would have the temerity to try this again.”
Lawyer Shawn Buckley, who asked questions during NCI hearings, said only in a “crazy world” could this be happening.
“If you're going to stand up for freedom and stand up for what you believe in, you have to understand you're going to be totally financially destroyed,” he said.
“At all levels of government, I don't hear a peep out of anyone for any of this madness. It's like this ever-tightening control grid. I mean, we've been joking about maybe losing our rights to practice [law], but even the fact that we joke about it means that it's at the back of our minds.”
Grey said he was glad no one tried to file an injunction to stop the NCI. Pardy suggested there was silent sympathy from the legal community.
“There are an awful lot of people out there, including lawyers, who, although they don't want to say anything out loud, in the privacy of their own thought, actually don't agree with the place we're getting to…people who understand and can see what's happening. On the other hand, it means that not many people who see it are willing to actually stand up and say so.”
Kitchen voiced his agreement.
“I certainly hear it a lot. ‘Thank you, Mr. Kitchen, you're saying all the things that I don't feel I can say’..People like us are the tip of an iceberg. That iceberg is fairly small. But the trouble is that, how are we going to grow that iceberg to make it the majority?” he asked.
“Amongst the 2000 lawyers in the country who agree with us, there's what–200 that are going to speak out and take the cases and do what we're doing here today? That's a problem. How are we supposed to change the culture, which we have to do, over the next 20, 30, 40 years?”
Kitchen said people need to speak out, but increasing censorship will limit the reach of each individual.
“We need way more people like us, and it doesn't have to be lawyers…more people like us spread out, using those hard, difficult to censor platforms to train or influence culture in order to change people's thinking.”
Leighton Grey said his travels and public speaking have given him the “mind bending” notion that the ideas of freedom are catching on with some youth, something he also noticed at a Jordan Petersen lecture.
“To see how many young people were there at that event–to me, that's encouraging. That shows me that there is a hunger, there is a yearning in our country for truth,” Grey said.
“The idea of freedom, a culture of freedom is becoming a cult, a counterculture. When you look back through history, young people…seize upon counterculture. And if we do…things can change very, very quickly.”
Read the original version of this article at the publisher’s website here.
