Parliament And Court At Loggerheads

"From freedom of speech to freedom of religion and freedom of association, in almost all of these areas, not only did the courts show no support for these traditional small-c conservative values, but it has dismantled quite a few policies that were based on them."
"There's an ideological homogeneity in Canadian law schools. [To train for the legal profession is to study the] politics of victimology."
Ted Morton, academic, co-author The Charter Revolution and The Court Party

"If you believe in the supremacy of the Parliament, which I do -- and I think Stephen [Harper] does -- you have real reservations about the Charter and the Constitution act."
"It, in essence, undermined the supremacy of Parliament and gave the judges a much more active role in overriding decisions of Parliament."
"The Liberal propaganda machine perpetuates a myth that the Canadian constitution is some extremely glorified document that everybody should bow down to, and it isn't. It's another one of those political myths, and eventually it will fall under its own weight."
"I think the Charter is going to be seen not as the 'living tree' that justices envisioned, but as a straitjacket that's going to cause more and more pinch between the political class and the judiciary."
Preston Manning, founder, former head, Reform Party

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa May 6, 2014. (REUTERS/Chris Wattie)

"All of the people connected to Stephen Harper himself are the leading Canadian political scientists in terms of criticism of the courts and the Charter of Rights."
"Yes, politics matters. But when we talk about the Harper government losing cases at court, we can very quickly forget that Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien lost a lot of cases as well."
Emmett Macfarlane, professor of political science, University of Waterloo, author of Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role

 

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada  (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press) 

"Judicial activism has been an issue for American conservatives for a few decades. But the big trigger in Canada was the social conservative reaction to court decisions on abortion and gay rights in Canada during the late 1980s and early 1990s."
Ian Brodie, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Judges of course are people with their own inbred and alternately learned biases, tempered or fostered by their exposure in academia to the rigors of the application of formal law institutionalized through the Canadian system of Justice. Itself a by-product of Britain's judicial system, a legacy that Great Britain generously handed down to all of her post-colonial countries, once part of the vast British Imperial Empire. Politicians too are people who exercise their elected role through the lens of their political ideology.

But whereas politicians and their parties take the helm of government administration through voter-based alternations of the major parties to head the country, thus altering the focus from their monocular lens of either liberal or conservative values, judges are exposed to an institutionalized view of the law and justice through an equally monocular lens, but this one of left-liberalism, tending to social activism rather than the pure neutral application of the law through the substance of precedence based on freeze-framed portraits of prevailing justice.

Canada, to the West, tends toward conservatism; to the East, liberalism and centrally not quite so firmly entrenched in either but with a healthy dollop of leftism. We do not elect our judges as is commonly done in the United States. It is our lawmakers, our Parliamentarians whom we elect to the status of lawmaker for the purpose of putting in place a government that most closely happens to reflect the mood of the majority electorate at any given time.

Those comprising the Cabinet of Ministers of the Crown at any given post-election period representing the best interests of the country and the people who elected them and those who did not, but must, until the following election, trust that they will administer bearing their interests in mind as well, and along with the elite bureaucracy of the public service select from among the judicial talents of the Canadian bar, representatives to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

When, as happens, and as has happened with increasing frequency with a liberal-slanted judiciary weighing their values and priorities against those of a conservative-minded government, the court finds fault with the choices of the government whom ideally they should be supporting, it becomes a formula for dysfunction, and that truly is a situation that is of no benefit whatever to the country.