Despite peaceful protest and the absence of any serious crime, the truckers who protested Canada’s draconian COVID-19 mandates were nevertheless subjected to police brutality; arrest and incarceration without just cause; deprivation of property, including their trucks and bank accounts, without due process; and various prohibitions on the right to travel, to work, and to assemble. Those are hallmarks of dictatorship, and the title of dictator is justly now the mantle Justin Trudeau has earned. Americans have always regarded Canada as a parliamentary democracy in which freedom comparable to our own was protected by the rule of law, but, in fact, Canadians have never enjoyed secure protection for their rights.
In 1982, the Canadian Parliament enacted a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That Charter includes provisions that purport to recognize and protect certain fundamental liberties. For example, Section 2 (“Fundamental Freedoms”) protects “freedom of . . . expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;” “freedom of peaceful assembly;” and “freedom of association.” Moreover, Section 8 purports to protect Canadians from “unreasonable search or seizure” and Section 9 from arbitrary detention or imprisonment. Section 11 purports to ensure that every person charged with an offense has the right to be “presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Because the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms includes those and other seemingly rights-protective provisions, many Canadians believed they were protected against actions by the prime minister in violation of their rights. Unfortunately for our freedom-loving friends and neighbors to the North, the reality is to the contrary, and that is, in part, due to the fact that Canadians’ rights exist by Act of Parliament, not from a written Constitution in which rights are deemed pre-political and unalienable.
In the very first section of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Parliament reserves to itself the power to impose “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In other words, the Canadian Parliament can enact measures that deprive Canadians of their rights based solely on Parliament’s conception of what deprivations are reasonable. To underscore that point, the Charter includes Section 33(1), which grants the power to deprive rights not only to Parliament but also to the legislatures of each Canadian province: “Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or the legislature . . . that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in Section 2 [Fundamental Freedoms] or Sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.”
Related: Are Trudeau’s Actions Under Canada’s Emergencies Act Unconstitutional?
The rights of Canadians are, thus, insecure, capable of being deprived whenever the state, acting through the legislature of a province or the Parliament thinks it appropriate. That is how, through the Emergencies Act, Justin Trudeau has succeeded in becoming a dictator and in transforming Canada into a police state. At root, the Canadian legal scheme has always proceeded on a faulty premise: that rights are not pre-political (do not come from God) but are bestowed by (and thus removable at the whim of) Parliament. What the state giveth, the state may taketh away, as Canadian truckers now know all too well. By contrast, the American polity is based on an opposite presumption which, when honored, proves formidable. Our Declaration of Independence in its second paragraph and our Constitution operate on the foundation that each American is endowed with rights from God at birth. Neither the President nor the Congress may unilaterally take those rights away. They are unalienable.
Unlike many Constitutions in the world, the American Constitution does not contain an “emergency” exception (whereby the rights and legal strictures of the Constitution may be removed in response to whatever the executive or legislature deems an appropriate exigent circumstance). We have but one constitutional provision providing for our rights to be temporarily suspended and only in a single exigency. Under Article I, Section 9, Clause 2, the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus (which guarantees each person detained the right to petition a Court to compel the government to prove the detention lawful and not indefinite) may not be suspended except “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
As a constitutional matter, Canadians have no comparable restriction on government power, inviting their Parliament and prime minister whenever so inclined to deprive Canadians of their liberties. Our history reveals that even with recognition of pre-political rights and substantial constitutional limits on the exercise of government power, our federal government has nevertheless succeeded repeatedly in depriving Americans of their rights (e.g., the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Biden Administration mandates compelling vaccination). Indeed, we have our own Emergency Act, which is vaguely worded and invites abusive executive action in transgression of the rights of Americans. Other federal statutory provisions also grant emergency powers to the president that may, from time to time, be abused.
Related: 2 of 3 Democrat Voters Approve of Canadian Fascism
As the American Freedom Convoy heads to the Capitol, we will see whether the Biden Administration will invoke and then stretch the bounds of the Emergency Act and related statutory provisions beyond constitutional limits to enable a police response comparable to that undertaken by the Dictator Trudeau. In the face of some of the most brutal authoritarian moves by Trudeau, which have destroyed individual liberty and the right to dissent from government orthodoxy, President Biden and his Administration have uttered not a single word of criticism, let alone grant asylum to Canadian truckers deprived of their liberty by Trudeau’s thugs. That is because, consistent with their own authoritarian moves domestically, President Biden and his advisors find largely unobjectionable the use of government power to suppress views, assemblies, and protests antithetical to their own woke politics and vaccine mandates. We need only look at the number of times President Biden has acted without Congress to impose mandates later deemed unconstitutional by the federal courts to see that Biden has no problem exceeding constitutional limits on executive power.
Unlike in Canada, where the Charter of Rights and Freedoms rests on a fickle foundation, Americans deprived of their First Amendment rights to assembly and speech may yet avail themselves of independent judicial review and a law supreme to executive and legislative action: the Constitution. Our Constitution provides in law a far more robust foundation in defense of individual rights than the Canadian Charter. Whenever government presumes to censor free expression and resort to police force to deprive us of liberty or property without due process of law, Americans uniquely in all the world may appeal through the courts to the Constitution’s protections, proving once again that the Founding Fathers’ recognition — that our rights come from God and not the state — is indispensable to preserve and protect individual liberty against abuses of political power.
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