Whither Canada?

How much can one country endure of this arrogance and deception?
– Brian Peckford, Peckford42

Canada has been much on my mind these days, weeks, months, and years, not only because I am a Canadian citizen, but because, like many of my American friends, I am witnessing firsthand the destruction of a country.

The current prime minister’s campaign, amounting to a kind of jihad, to destabilize the nation and create the world’s first “post-national state” proceeds on many levels. Among them, as I have previously catalogued, are a burgeoning national debt, a series of repressive bills making their way through parliament (C-4, C-11, C-12 and C-18), a prohibitive and unnecessary carbon tax, the deliberate destruction of the energy sector, the impending rollout of digital ID surveillance technology, and the notorious invoking of the deeply flawed and inappropriate Emergencies Act to deal with the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy protesting the vaccine mandates. This last travesty was compounded by the government’s striking a Commission of Inquiry in which it set its own terms and appointed its own Commissioner.

PM Justin Trudeau’s declared purpose of protecting Canadians’ health via the vaxx mandates by, among other initiatives, attacking the Truckers as violent, racist, and homophobic was a false-flag operation. As constitutional lawyer Leighton Grey persuasively argues, Trudeau’s “ultimate goal, which the COVID-19 pandemic helped governments like Trudeau’s to advance,” is nothing less than “total surveillance and corresponding control of human populations.”

Grey cites Ayn Rand’s dictum from The New Left: “Civilization is the progress of a society towards privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” The surveillance state pursued by autocratic governments like Trudeau’s Liberals seeks to achieve the precise opposite: a society of obeisant serfs controlled by an all-powerful panoptic administrative regime. One recalls H.L. Mencken’s pregnant adage: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule.”

Can such rule be averted? There is still a modicum of honest, committed, and patriotic legal and political actors among us, such as media columnists Rex Murphy and Spencer Fernando, bloggers Russ Cooper and Tex Leugner (both with military backgrounds), lawyers Bruce Pardy and John Carpay, provincial premiers Scott Moe in Saskatchewan and Danielle Smith in Alberta, leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier, and former premier of Newfoundland, the Honorable Brian Peckford, the last living signatory to the 1982 patriation of the Canadian Constitution.

With the assistance of the Justice Centre of Canada, Peckford launched a lawsuit in Federal Court challenging the government’s vaccine mandate against the unvaccinated as a violation of the Constitution, with particular reference to Section 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that provides for mobility rights. After various delays, the Court predictably ruled that the matter was now moot and the case was canceled. No thinking person doubts that the Court and the plurality of its judges are morally compromised and that their tacit motto derives from Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” A Pontian Court will inevitably support an ethically unaccountable and demiurgic government intent on disenfranchising and economically shackling its citizens.

For our VIPs: Rep. Raskin Wields January 6 Hysteria to Push Another Democrat Dream

In Canada, the three branches of government — the executive, the legislative and the judicial — are not rigidly distinct. The checks and balances system of the American Constitution (though it is eroding in the U.S.) does not pertain here. The executive and legislative functions of the Canadian government are often spliced and interlaced, while the judicial branch was supposed to enjoy a strong measure of independence. In practice, we have a jolly threesome cavorting in political cabrioles of indissoluble meldings.

Indeed, the judiciary now regards itself as the de facto framer and not merely the interpreter of laws. Former Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella referred to herself and her colleagues as “the final adjudicator of which contested values in a society should triumph.” As Bruce Pardy cogently writes, “The Supreme Court has read the Charter over its 40-year life largely through an ideologically ‘progressive’ lens, slowly transforming what was drafted as a roster of autonomy rights into a mandate for collective values, group rights and the priorities of the expansive managerial state.”

With the judiciary having sold its vaunted integrity to the executive branch and willfully forfeiting the humility of legislative self-limitation, then the rule of law, the principle of due process, and the balancing of evidence are perverted, transmuting into an arm of state power and resulting in the virtual death of democratic governance. We have seen this happening recently in Brazil where a corrupt Supreme Court judge is responsible for restoring a convicted criminal to the presidency. We have seen it happen just now in Arizona where a Superior Court judge ruled against gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s airtight case regarding obvious electoral malfeasance, thus establishing a rogue governor in office.

And we see it happening as a matter of course in Canada — in “[d]ecisions from around the country,” as Pardy documents — where the judiciary has become an enforcer for the Liberal government, a development that does not seem likely to change. When the last resource for the rehabilitation of justice has been abrogated or, to use the Federal Court’s own term, rendered “moot,” we know the country is lost. The three branches of government have effectively become one, which is the very definition of tyranny.

As it happens, I have just put down a strange and rather unsettling novel titled The Transmutations by the Welsh writer of Gothic tales Arthur Machen. It concludes with the description of an eldritch and disintegrating house: “The old beams, mouldering piecemeal, yield a little and groan, and such a house as this I can fancy all resonant at night with voices.” Further, we learn that the house contains a body “torn and mutilated…a shameful ruin of the human shape.” Given my current state of mind, I cannot help transposing this description to the desolate condition in which I find my country and the shameful ruin of the concept of the free and responsible citizen.

“Governments and large sections of the population,” writes Peckford, “have lost their way in the practice of representative and responsible Government [and] abandoned our democratic reformers who were fighting for such ideas even before Confederation in 1867.” This is where we are now, a century and a half later. Canada is no longer a robust political state founded on tradition and constitutional order but a withered relic of a former parliamentary democracy. The body social has been torn and mutilated and the house is no longer a home.