Juno News - August 05, 2020


The erosion of the rule of law

Topics
rule of law
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau
The actual history of slavery in Canada Only 4% of Canadians have downloaded the COVID-19 tracing app

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

215.04

Word count

1,373

Sentence count

74

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Rule of Law is a pillar of Western civilization, one that is slowly being eroded, if not outright under attack from certain sectors of society. In this episode, I discuss why the rule of law is so critically important to our society and why it needs to be upheld.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So today I want to talk about something that is a pillar of Western civilization,
00:00:11.400 one that is slowly being eroded if not outright under attack from certain sectors. Now you may
00:00:17.640 not know the name of this concept but I can assure you that you feel both its effects and its absence
00:00:23.100 and this is something called the rule of law. So what exactly is the rule of law? Now many people
00:00:29.680 think that the rule of law means that everyone is equal under the law and sort of that's it but it's
00:00:34.420 a bit broader than that and I want to go through what it is and why it is so critically important
00:00:38.980 to our society. So thanks to my friends here at LexisNexis there is a very nice chart that sort of
00:00:45.040 outlines the four parts of the rule of law. So the first as we said is all are equal under the law
00:00:50.260 and that means it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from and I kind of sound like a
00:00:54.100 Backstreet Boys song but it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from you are equal under the
00:00:57.660 law. So everybody is treated equally doesn't matter if you're the king, the prime minister,
00:01:01.320 you know, just a regular employee, some, you know, middle class worker somewhere. It doesn't
00:01:05.520 matter. You're all equal under the law. The next is transparency. So the law has to be transparent.
00:01:11.280 You have to be able to read it, to understand it, to see where it is. Now I know there's often some
00:01:15.660 legal mumbo-jumbo and this is what lawyers are there for to try and help us decode some of that jargon
00:01:20.220 that you might find when you're reading a legal text but it still has to be transparent. If you want to
00:01:25.020 access the law, you have to be able to find a, you know, go on Google and search up the criminal code
00:01:30.300 and see what exactly it says there. And you actually might be shocked. There's a lot of things that you
00:01:34.440 may want to look at about people, for example, returning from fighting for ISIS or people breaking
00:01:40.380 law, people crossing the border illegally. So there's a lot of interesting stuff in there
00:01:44.200 and it has to be transparent. That's something that I think we should all take a look at if we have
00:01:48.440 questions about what is illegal or what is not. The third is an independent judiciary and people are
00:01:53.520 familiar with this but they don't necessarily talk about this. And this is that judges and courts need to be
00:01:58.420 independent. So there needs to be mechanisms in place that stop or prevent or reduce bribery or political
00:02:04.600 influence. So the prime minister can't just phone up someone and say, you know, this, this person is my
00:02:08.400 friend, don't charge them or drop the charges, these kinds of things. The last one that is important and
00:02:13.360 seems to be getting eroded all the time is accessible legal remedies. Now that means that you have to be able to
00:02:20.300 access a legal remedy. In essence, if I were to buy something from your store, right, I would buy
00:02:25.840 something from your store, but you never gave me the product. So I come and I pay, but I never got
00:02:29.900 what I paid for. I have to be able to have a legal remedy. There has to be some court or some body that
00:02:35.380 I can go to, to be able to get my money back. Because if there isn't, we're left in a situation
00:02:40.280 where I'm basically forced to resort to force and now I want to, you know, break into your place of
00:02:44.820 business, bring a gun and get my money back. So the, the accessible legal remedies basically allow
00:02:51.120 people to trust that there is a system that's going to, it's going to take care when there's
00:02:55.720 a dispute or some disagreement. And this is one of the foundations of society because you cannot
00:03:01.200 have commerce. You cannot have trade without the rule of law. And, and this is sort of a, a global idea.
00:03:08.120 And this is why you may hear things about the global order or things like that. But the rule of
00:03:13.800 law is important because same thing, just like if I want to do business with someone in Canada,
00:03:18.560 I can trust that the criminal code is the same across the country. But what happens if I want
00:03:22.740 to do business with someone in the United States or someone in Europe, I have to be able to trust
00:03:26.660 that there are legal remedies to what's, what's going to be, what's going to happen. And I have a
00:03:31.460 legal recourse. If someone, you know, if we have a disagreement or there's some, you know,
00:03:35.500 some issue with, with finances or some issue with product, there has to be a legal remedy that I can access.
00:03:41.640 So where is this under attack from? Now it can be seen, the attack either direct or indirect can be
00:03:47.880 seen in places like defunding the police because the police, whatever they're there for, and we can
00:03:52.380 definitely have a conversation about the police, but one of their rules is to uphold the rule of law,
00:03:56.940 to make sure that everyone is treated equally and to enforce laws and rules and regulations that are
00:04:02.040 in place. You can also see it in Roxham Road. It's not just about immigrants or, you know, you don't like
00:04:07.160 immigrants, as the accusation often is. It's about the fact that we have a system. And when people are 0.89
00:04:13.060 sort of bypassing the line, if you're a legal immigrant, and you see people bypassing the line, that sort of
00:04:17.420 erodes your trust in this concept of the rule of law. Justin Trudeau's many ethics violations, and the whole
00:04:23.540 we scandal. Now, if he's found guilty of an ethics violation, the fine is up to $500. And that doesn't sit well
00:04:30.500 with people. And that doesn't sit well with people, not necessarily because it's illegal. What the
00:04:35.580 things that he has been accused of, and when he's been found guilty of breaking the ethics rules,
00:04:40.920 it's not necessarily illegal in the sense that we're thinking about, but it is what I would call
00:04:45.480 illegal adjacent. It's so close to being illegal, it's really debatable. Maybe it should be. And this
00:04:52.760 is, again, a point with the rule of law that it's not about morality. It's not about legislating morality,
00:04:59.120 because certain things have been legal or illegal in the past. It's been legal to discriminate. It's
00:05:05.000 been, you know, legal to sterilize people. It's not about the legality or illegality per se. It's
00:05:10.720 about the law applying equally to everyone. Now, again, obviously, as lawyers and lawmakers and
00:05:16.060 politicians, you expect that they're not going to put in place laws like this that are maybe
00:05:21.140 absolutely immoral. But morality is not the main point here. The rule of law is about all of these
00:05:26.120 four things. Equality, transparency, independence of the judiciary, and accessible legal remedies.
00:05:32.160 These are some of the foundations of the rule of law. And we do have to be careful because it does
00:05:36.860 seem like they are being eroded. When they are being eroded, or when we get that sense that they
00:05:41.000 are being eroded, we lose trust in our government, we lose trust in our state, and we lose trust in
00:05:45.440 our society. And ultimately, social cohesion is hurt. And that really does not work for such a large
00:05:51.100 and diverse country as Canada. So all told, we must ensure that we work hard to understand
00:05:56.980 and preserve the rule of law wherever we can, because the world as we know it, the world as
00:06:01.360 we understand it depends on this very small concept that has a very, very large effect and
00:06:06.820 large consequences. So for True North, I am Sam Ashkenazi. I hope you enjoyed this video.
00:06:11.600 Please don't forget to click on some of the links and see what my colleagues are saying.
00:06:14.980 There's a lot of great stuff. And have yourself a great day. Thank you so, so much.
00:06:21.100 Thank you.