Canada is a unique country and a strange one, strangest of all to its own citizens. We Canadians have always been strung out in a narrow band of habitable territory north of the Great Republic to the south of us as if stealing warmth from its southerly climate. We native born Canadians have always been accused by the educated classes of not knowing our history as a distinct nation. And it’s always been true. The common citizen assumes that we must be so like Americans that we must enjoy the protection of human rights which the US Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the new US Constitution of 1789, accorded to Americans. But this is an illusion. Canada is a very un-American beast.
The Americans have a Constitution which incorporated a Bill of Rights as the firm basis of its laws right from the inception of that Constitution in 1789. Do we Canadians have a Bill of Rights similarly underlying all our laws? I argue that we have a travesty of such a bill of rights which has been grafted weakly onto our system. Our system is naturally hostile to even a written constitution, leave alone a bill of rights. Our system is a Limited Monarchy which has deposed the British monarchy in law but still lives on with a headless head of state called a Governor General who automatically gives “royal assent” to every Act or declaration our political elites can dream up.
There is an inherent problem with any bill of rights which Alexander Hamilton saw clearly during the controversies of the late 1780s leading up to the ratification of the new US constitution. Hamilton argued that a bill of rights specifying liberties was unnecessary because the new constitution as written in 1787 expressly stated that it was founded upon the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Any explicit specification of rights, he argued, inherently implies that these specified rights will be viewed as the only rights the people have.
History’s twists and turns have made Canada an illustration of what Hamilton feared. The British parliamentary system is based not on a written constitution but on a tradition of legal precedent called English Common Law. The British mother of the Canadian parliament established the principle of its own sovereignty even over the British Monarchy in the mid 1700s. Parliaments everywhere share this inherent principle. Parliaments are deeply jealous of any attempt to limit their sovereignty. And a written constitution is always just such an attempt and a bill of rights is an even more explicit attempt to limit the sovereignty of parliament. Our Canadian federal and provincial parliaments, containing as they do the executive power in the persons of premiers and Prime Ministers are still absolute and plan to keep it that way.
Our inherited parliamentary system calved off from the British monarchy gradually. In 1867 our separate provinces, colonies founded as such by the British monarchy, combined into one legally sovereign federation which still applied theoretically to the British crown for Royal assent to its laws through the medium of our Governor General, the notional “representative” of the Crown. But in 1926 the Governor General, Lord Byng, refused a request by his prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to dissolve parliament and call a general election. The genius and autocrat of the Liberal Party of Canada, William Lyon McKenzie-King, utterly crushed Lord Bing and forever established the principle that no Governor General can do anything more than rubber stamp whatever the Prime Minister as head of the majority in Parliament wants to call a law. McKenzie-King ruled Parliament and Canada for decades thereafter. The great Liberal Party has been called the natural governing party of Canada ever since.
In 1982 Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau received Royal assent at the hand of Queen Elizabeth II in London for the new Canadian constitution which included as an adjunct the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That was the last time any Canadian laws would need the assent of the British monarch. From then on our laws enacted by our parliament received a completely fictional royal assent from Governors General appointed by the Prime Minister (and provincial parliaments get automatic royal assent from appointed Lieutenant Governors). Yes, you are right. This is a fragile bastardization based on absurdity.
Pierre Trudeau strengthened the autocracy at the heart of our system by enhancing the autocratic power of the Prime Minister’s Office using Orders in Council which had the force of law. Gradually and imperceptibly the weakness of the House of Commons in the face of a majority party in the House combined with the complete impotence of the Senate and Governor General (both appointed by the Prime Minister) created an absolute dictatorship of the PMO which almost no citizens of Canada could recognize for what it was. I complained about it in letters to senators and politicians years ago when our feckless opposition parties demanded the abolition of the Senate; I said that the Prime Minister’s Office is what ought to be abolished or curtailed. Now the absolute dictatorship of the PMO is far more blatant than ever.
Our strange history set up our fragile democratic traditions and our representative democracy to be bulldozed by the WHO. We are members of the World Health Organization and thus when the WHO declares a global health emergency and Pandemic our federal and provincial governments declare an emergency and pandemic automatically which hands our governments over to the absolute dictatorship of the Public Health Officers. Our federal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and our provincial Premiers are heads of a thinly disguised autocracy already. They enjoy the absolute power our weird Canadian system gives them. And so the WHO’s Pandemic suits them right down to the ground.
Many people who saw Canada as sovereign, free and democratic are startled and angry to find themselves confined to their homes, fired from their jobs and masked and ordered to be experimental lab animals for Pfizer and Moderna under the absolute dictatorship of Public Health Officers to which their governments they thought were elected acquiesce without a whimper of protest.
Many of us dissenters want to call upon the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to claim their human rights. But this Charter has already been demonstrated to be a piece of paper that any federal parliament and prime minister can re-write as easily as enacting a new law. Bill C-16 in 2016 re-wrote the Charter by adding “Gender Identity” to its protected rights. The law was also changed to make “hate speech” prohibited. Canadians struggling for their human rights want to call upon the Charter’s protection but the Charter has been hijacked already to limit human rights, limit free speech and limit the rights of the general population as against those privileges the government gives to protected minorities of its own choosing. The Charter, as a protection for human rights and liberty, was weak from the beginning and it’s still weaker today.
Canada has gone off into uncharted territory. The ruling ideology is called “Liberal" in Canada but the liberals who struggled for human rights in the past wouldn’t recognize this Canadian beast. Our Liberalism is now an active campaign by a governmental culture which sees itself as the sole repository of rights and freedoms which it distributes at the pleasure of those who enjoy power in government.
I hope we can defend ourselves by utilizing Provincial law and Canadian Federal law. But this assault on our country began with the WHO issuing a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, pron. Fake) in early 2020 followed almost immediately by a declaration of Emergency in Canada and every other nation on the globe. This declaration of Emergency when in fact there was no real health emergency at all (as we can now see plainly) was followed by similar declarations in all the Provinces. This "State of Emergency" gave absolute autocratic authority to all our Public Health Officers to issue rules that were automatically granted the status of law. This series of events was transparently a set-up by people in and beyond Canada who hate the people’s democratic freedoms.
The BC Minister of Public Safety, Mike Farnsworth, cancelled this State of Emergency as of Canada Day, July 1, 2021. This removed the authority of Bonnie Henry our PHO (pron. Foe) to issue autocratic rules. Within days she issued more rules and our gutless excuse for a BC government let her do it. So PHOs, people under the direct orders of Tony Fauci, are the dictators of our country. They were set up in that position after a transparent song and dance. To me this has been a very dark revelation about how phoney our national independence and our democracy really has been all along. I hope our legal system can allow us to recover our rights and maybe even make our country stronger in the process. But my faith in it is weak when people like Bonnie Henry and Teresa Tam can so easily seize and hold absolute power.
If, as seems evident, laws can be promulgated over the heads of our representatives and our parliaments are not making but rubber stamping laws, where have we gone? This is just not the Canada I was born in. How can it ever be recovered? Could the wimpy debating club we are obliged to vote for do such dynamic action as to, for instance, abolish the infamous and corrosive Infants Act? This horrible Act combined with a State of Emergency is the legalistic excuse for injecting our children as young as five or even younger without their parents consent. Is there any real limit on what our government may do to us? I believe there is no such limit. Is there any power in Canada capable of belling this savage Canadian cat?