Those unfamiliar with the CCFD will likely recognize Link Byfield - a man who has been front and center in the radical right "Christian" movement in Canada.
A number of years ago, I read a particularly noxious column in my community newsletter from MP Jason Kenney which was a lovely example of button pushing and tying together completely unrelated topics. I spent quite a bit of time trashing his commentary. It would appear that Link Byfield needs a similar upbraiding.
First, Mr. Byfield claims:
Canada adopted U.S.-style constitutional rights with Pierre Trudeau’s “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” in 1982.
Huh? US-style? I can practically hear Pierre Elliot Trudeau turning in his grave over that assertion. To say that the Canadian Constitution is "US-style" is a serious misrepresentation of the reality. Trudeau, and the other authors of the constitution took their cues from democratic countries around the world - including the United Kingdom, France and others. The Charter of Rights is unique in the world, and emulated by many emerging democracies far more than the US constitution is.
Then he goes on to claim:
The Charter codified our traditional rights (freedom of speech, belief and assembly, the right to vote, etc.)*, and let judges rather than elected representatives decide what these rights mean, when they apply and when they don’t.
*Footnote: The only major right missing from the Charter is the right to property, which still exists, at least in theory, in ordinary statute and common law.
Unfortunately, judges are not always judicious.
Ye gods - the classic "judicial activism" saw. Apparently Mr. Byfield hasn't read a legal decision in the last 20 odd years. I have not seen a single ruling from the Supreme Court (which is where most Charter issues land up) that has not been incredibly well-reasoned - even if I disagree with it in some dimension or another. The justices on the Supreme Court have done an amazing job of interpreting a Charter of Rights that is deceptively simple in its wording.
As an example, Byfield points out
Since the Charter took effect 23 years ago, Canadian judges have given the criminally accused and convicted even more rights than American criminals, and we have become one of the most liberal criminal law jurisdictions in the world.
For example, a 1990 Charter ruling (under section 11) about timely trials led to the dropping of 43,000 criminal charges in Ontario, including murder, manslaughter and sexual assault. They just let them go.
Other cases -- and whole categories of cases -- have been thrown out when a single judge decided to invoke the Charter to change rules about arrest warrants, collection of evidence, use of informers, and burden of proof.
Apparently, Mr. Byfield doesn't understand the very checks and balances that keep the government from incarcerating people indefinitely without charge - like BushCo has done to this individual (for example). Oh yes, and it is necessary to have such limits on governments - otherwise we degenerate into a police state very quickly. (In theory, similar protections exist in the United States - but they seem to be on hiatus these days.
These are the same constraints that keep our government from using torture confessions as evidence in the courts (I hope!), and lord knows how many other abuses that can occur to civil rights and liberties without some kind of balance.
And then we get to the crux of Mr. Byfield's angst:
Under the Charter judges have become increasingly high-handed and unaccountable. The Supreme Court invented for itself a power to rewrite legislation (“reading in”). It has invented new aboriginal rights, immigration rights, and sexual rights.
...
There is no sign of this ending. The next big issues for judges to decide will likely be lowering the age of sexual consent and setting new limits on religious free speech.
Ah - now the truth comes out. In other words, Mr. Byfield doesn't like the morality of some rulings of the court. It's a sad statement that Mr. Byfield thinks that his views and values are the only ones in Canada. Goodness knows that it's his God Given Right to spew whatever uninformed, nasty opinions against Aboriginal citizens, immigrants, women or sexual minority populations that he wants.
I have no idea how the age of consent would ever become a constitutional rights issue in the first place. Last time I looked, it was defined rather carefully in the Criminal Code of Canada.
As for the issue of "religious free speech", I think Mr. Byfield needs to review a couple of points. First, freedom of religion and freedom of expression are guaranteed in Section 2 of the Charter. Second, he seems to forget that his freedom is an individual freedom. It might offend him to learn that I don't share his particular sense of religion - or appropriate religious "speech". (Most of the so-called religious free speech issue tends to break down to an excuse to publicly vilify sexual minority populations based on what twits like Byfield think goes on, or spout completely bogus "research" coming out of the Religious Right in the US)
Byfield's remedy for this?:
We should amend Charter section 33 to state that in those rare but important cases when courts and politicians disagree about what the Charter means, the question will be settled by a public referendum in the next general election.
Uh-huh. In other words, let's conveniently ignore the fact that the Constitution is written to protect the rights of both the minority and majority of the population and return to the blind notion of mob rule. Besides being a monumentally stupid thing to do, I think Mr. Byfield might be a little surprised to realize that his own rights as a religious person might suddenly find themselves constrained by the same "mob" that he wants to leverage to impose his will upon the nation.
I don't know if Link Byfield has Jason Kenney's ear - or that of anyone else in the CPC, but given that he has appeared at events organized by Craig Chandler, and there's evidence of Chandler having some influence over Jason Kenney, I think I'll assume this patent idiocy of Link Byfield's has been bandied about the CPC at fairly high levels - even if Harper's not really talking about it.
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