In this episode, we talk about the Bill of Rights and why the Bill should have been debated on the floor of the United Conservative Party of Canada s AGM. We also talk about what happened at the AGM and why it should be revisited.
00:00:00.000Could the current state of the Bill of Rights be explained by deferring to legal experts that maybe gave her bad advice or steered it in a certain direction where maybe she doesn't fully understand what that means?
00:00:19.880Or maybe she just isn't pushing hard enough for that.
00:00:23.580But the Bill of Rights is interesting to me because I don't remember us asking about it.
00:01:40.140Now, I think those Black Hats got played.
00:01:42.300Because the bill as it stands is not what they wanted.
00:01:47.600You know, those clauses in there, especially that opening clause, that limitation clause, they're going to regret it if the bill goes through.
00:02:12.540But even watching the recording, you could see people were kind of treating that almost as a discussion on the nitty-gritty elements of the bill,
00:02:23.360rather than a voting it forward as a, yes, this is something that we're pursuing as a matter of policy.
00:02:41.160And people mixed up the motion with the fact that the bill, I mean, the motion, basically, the motion, you know, for the viewers, again, on the floor of the AGM,
00:02:54.560the organization, the members present motions, ideas.
00:03:13.980Then a committee of volunteers who are members of the UCP pared down that list of 600, found the ones that were in common and adjusted them,
00:03:24.080and then presented 237 or something like that.
00:03:28.100And then for the last two months leading to the AGM, we ranked those 200 and 35 made it onto the floor of the AGM.
00:03:37.240So, motions get debated, and then, and when accepted, they're given to the government to try and potentially turn them into legislation.
00:03:47.000So, yes, in simple terms, the motion said, we'd like the Bill of Rights to be either strengthened or revised.
00:03:54.780That's what should have been debated on the floor.
00:03:57.660You know, do you want the government to do that?
00:03:59.320Do you want the government to take a crack at revising the Bill of Rights?
00:04:04.320Well, weirdly, the government heard that throughout the summer and rushed to revise the Bill of Rights and issued it as Bill 24, like, Monday last week.
00:04:15.060So, of course, the floor was confused because we're debating a motion asking the government to revise the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights has already been revised.
00:04:43.200So, what passed on the floor is basically the notion that, or what passed on the floor is that the government should revise the Bill of Rights.
00:04:51.860They got what they wanted, but I don't think they're going to be happy if the bill stays as is.
00:04:58.980And you run into the issue, too, of, you know, like you were saying, Marty, if you don't have some sort of limiting principle, some sort of, you know, this is inalienable.
00:05:09.260We, like you were mentioning your admiration for the U.S. Constitution, which I share, the wording of inalienable and we hold these truths to be self-evident.
00:05:18.640Like those, that strong language, like that is what you build the country off of.
00:05:22.300And if you have these sort of weasel words of, you know, subject to reasonable limits and, well, then you run the risk of exactly what we saw happening two, three, four years ago of activist judges not acting in the best interest of a reasonable, objective interpretation of law.
00:05:40.020But just allowing themselves to be swept up in a moment and allowing, you know, passing maybe fears or emotions to influence something that's very consequential and shouldn't be subject to those things.