Juno News - May 26, 2022


Has Canada’s Charter failed Canadians？

Mentioned
Trudeau Stephen Harper MacDonald
＂Cabinet Confidentiality＂ is being used to hide the truth about the Emergencies Act Legacy media pushes fake news claiming Trudeau was a victim of “racist slurs”

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

148.74

Word count

726

Sentence count

33


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

After 40 years, the Charter is still one of the worst bargains in Canadian history. So I'm wondering if you don't have a lot of faith in that document? In this episode, I'm joined by Alex Blumberg of the National Post, who wrote a devastating piece about the charter.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You had a pretty devastating piece in the National Post a few weeks ago about the Charter.
00:00:05.040 We know that we just celebrated the 40th anniversary.
00:00:08.080 And I wanted to ask you about it while I have you.
00:00:11.580 You wrote, after 40 years, the Charter is still one of the worst bargains in Canadian history.
00:00:16.700 So I'm wondering if you can explain to the viewers why you don't have a lot of faith in that document.
00:00:23.260 I think one of the cornerstones of Canada is our federal structure, which allows, we're this huge country, 10 different provinces plus the territories, huge, huge country, relatively small population.
00:00:43.160 And the provinces are all different.
00:00:45.320 And the question is, you know, do you want to be governed by people who live and work in your province, who go to the capital?
00:00:53.460 Or do you want to be governed by people that you've never heard of, they've never heard of you, they live in Ottawa, again, at the risk of being politically incorrect, at least for those of us in the West, everybody in Ottawa, in the bureaucracy there is bilingual, we're not very bilingual out West.
00:01:10.880 Federalism, the ability for the different provinces to be self-governing, I think has been a big part of the success of Canada.
00:01:19.200 The charter changed that, and Trudeau did it on purpose, that he brought in a set of new rules enforced by, ultimately by one body, the Supreme Court of Canada, which the prime minister gets to make all the appointments to.
00:01:35.920 Six of the nine judges come, three from Quebec, three from Ontario, appointed by the prime minister.
00:01:42.340 They make the rules now.
00:01:45.620 And now, you know, I was around in the 80s when this happened.
00:01:50.220 Historically, the Supreme Court of Canada avoided policymaking and judicial activism.
00:01:55.060 There was a deference to the elected governments.
00:01:57.720 But that all changed in the first decade.
00:02:00.320 It hasn't stopped now.
00:02:01.700 So, in effect, what the charter has become is what I said in the piece, that disallowance in disguise.
00:02:11.220 Remember, again, at Confederation in 1867, the MacDonald wing of the founders wanted a much, much stronger central government.
00:02:20.980 And they gave these powers of disallowance and reservation to the federal government.
00:02:25.540 Within 30 years, those fell into disuse because they were simply inconsistent with the nature of Canada, our diversity, our size, and everything else.
00:02:36.340 And so this ability for Ottawa to reach out and veto provincial legislation they don't like was taken away.
00:02:43.820 Unfortunately, the charter has brought that back because the judges have interpreted the charter in such a loose way.
00:02:52.240 They can basically get any conclusion they want out of almost every charter case.
00:02:58.900 And, of course, then there's the Court Challenges Program, which I mentioned, which funds the groups that liberals like who want legislation, liberal legislation.
00:03:07.900 To Stephen Harper's credit, he defunded, he stopped funding the Court Challenges Program.
00:03:13.680 But as soon as Trudeau came back in, he started the funding again.
00:03:17.520 So the liberals fund the groups on the left, the woke group, the identity politics people, the people who can't win, can't win these political victories through elections, provincially.
00:03:32.780 But the Court Challenges Program gives them the money, they go to the court, they go to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has been appointed by prime ministers, and they get the policy result they want.
00:03:44.420 So from a point of view of federalism, it's really disallowance and disguise, and it's been, again, a really bad deal for those of us who think that all Canadians are best served if the decisions we have to live with are made by people in the provincial capital who come from our neighborhoods, who understand our problems,
00:04:06.800 who know about shortage of schools, who know about shortage of schools, water issues, traffic issues, employment issues, job issues, housing issues, not people in Ottawa who've certainly, again, out West, people who've never even been out West.
00:04:24.160 They're, and I'm including in this both the bureaucrats and the Supreme Court judges.
00:04:29.620 That's, that's, Canada did better before that, I think we can do better again, and I'm hoping with, but we haven't talked about the federal leadership race, Conservative Party leader, but I'm certainly hoping some of the candidates there will embrace the idea of a more decentralized Canada going forward.