Conservatism in Canada is no longer a coherent political philosophy. It has become a hybrid of a business that sells access to power, and a collection of people who have been drawn into utterly paranoid conspiracy theories. The slide into this place has been a long, slow process, and I don’t think it’s necessarily all intentional.
Let me explain why I think this is the case, and then we can get into how we got here in the first place.
I have little love for the oil & gas industry in Alberta. Having grown up here, worked in and adjacent to the industry for years, I have become increasingly disillusioned, and then angry with both the industry and the government. At this point in our history (2025), I'm pretty much at the point of saying that not only has the industry captured the UCP government, but it has become a parasite on the Alberta and Canadian economies.
"Oh, but what about the billions it brings in?" proponents say. Those billions mean nothing if they leave the people holding the bag with billions more in costs after projects are shut down. We have a massive problem with oil companies leaving their industrial wastelands lying about and simply doing nothing to clean up after they are done with production on a site.
Further, they refuse to pay municipal taxes to municipalities because they know they can ignore it and the government will do nothing, and they can tie any legal actions up in courts until the municipality runs out of money to pursue the matter with. Landowners are supposed to be paid money for access to the surface area where they put wells down, and companies ignore those obligations too - often for the same reasons.
All of this makes me quite furious - both with the government and with industry - however, my ire is focused much more on industry because they are the ones making profits off the resources, and ignoring their responsibilities beyond those profits.
I see that Poilievre has borrowed another page from GOP politics - this time he’s going after birthright citizenship.
Birthright citizenship is really nothing more than “if you are born in Canada, you are deemed to be a Canadian Citizen. It’s really that simple - in a nation that was literally built out of immigration, it makes a certain amount of sense that we might look at citizenship through such a lens. Many of us were born here when one, or both parents, were not yet citizens themselves.
Frankly, when the subject comes up, nobody seems to have any idea what pressing problem Canada is facing would be solved by revoking birthright citizenship. Are there suddenly a whole bunch of citizens of Canada that are causing problems because they aren’t “Canadian enough” for Pierre’s tastes? Or is this a revisitation of Harper’s infamous “Old Stock Canadians” nonsense?
I’ve seen a few people whine about “anchor babies”, or “birth tourism”. Of those arguments, I am inclined to be more than a little suspicious that the people making that argument are doing so more because they don’t like the idea of people from certain cultural backgrounds. However, so-called “birth tourism” babies are hardly a large number of Canada’s births - some 5,000 or so annually, on a total birth rate of ~365,000 - and nobody has demonstrated that those 5,000 births are resulting in “a problem” for Canada.
Frankly, the problem I see with this is that it creates a whole subclass of people who are born in Canada, may live their lives here, and are denied citizenship because of their parents’ circumstances at the time they were born.
Additionally, it gives politicians with malicious intentions an easy tool upon which to make the lives of Canadians more difficult. Removing birthright citizenship suddenly means that a person who has lived in Canada their entire lives could have to prove not only their citizenship, but also that of their parents.
Consider some of the possible scenarios:
Someone travels to Canada for work reasons, and for one reason or another has a child while residing and working in Canada. Subsequently they decide to become a permanent resident. Does the child's status follow that of the parent? Or have we just created a situation where the child, having been born here to a person classified as "temporary" ends up effectively stateless?
Or, let's say the child becomes an adult (18 years old) when the parent finally gains Permanent Resident status. What then? Do we suddenly deport that 18 year old to a country they have no experience with?
Similarly, let's say that a child of a "temporary resident" grows up in Canada, and applies for citizenship under this new regime. Do we then demand that they go through the same process of applying for "Permanent Resident" status, and then on to citizenship a decade later? Do we demand that they apply through the same immigration system that they would have to apply through if they were coming from abroad, and they would have to "qualify" under the admission criteria? Does that make any kind of sense?
Let's consider the case of someone who has been born and grown up in Canada. Regardless of the status of their parents, they are asked if they are citizens. Now the question rests not on "where were you born?", but "who were your parents, and what was their immigration status when you were born?". I dare say most adults in the country would have a very hard time proving the citizenship status of their parents - especially if their parents are deceased, or their documentation isn't readily available.
It creates an environment where, like the US, a huge amount of energy is wasted on "finding illegal residents". This will stratify society further, making a subclass of people who live here, and may have done so their entire lives, who have no legal status. As we have seen in the US, that subclass of people becomes ruthlessly exploited by employers looking for cheap labour they can abuse.
I'm not arguing that our immigration systems are perfect or ideal. They need work - a lot of it. There is an honest discussion to be had around what immigration to Canada should look like, and how the various streams should flow. Stripping birthright citizenship from the equation creates problems, it does not solve them.
Poilievre's tirade doesn't make Canada a safer place, it makes Canada a much more dangerous place for the people who live here already.
So the 5 conservative premiers have sent a letter to Carney demanding that the Attorney General of Canada (AGC) withdraw its filing with the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) regarding the application of The Notwithstanding Clause (S33) in The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (The Charter).
To me, this looks like a desperation maneuver on the part of the premiers:
What this tells us is that premiers like Alberta's Danielle Smith already know that their intentions for the use of S33 are in fact intended to erase rights entirely, and if the SCC were to adopt even partially the AGC's position, their use of S33 would come to a screeching halt.
It is not lost on me that it is conservative premiers who are making this argument - because collectively, conservative legislators have been looking for a way to undermine The Charter for years. Once Ontario started using it to buttress back to work legislation, they started the process of a slow boil - get people used to the idea of S33 being used on issues with relatively minor impact on them, and by the time that they start using it to erase The Charter as Danielle Smith in Alberta is trying to do using Transgender people as a target, it will be "too late" and The Charter is rendered moot.
I explore the filings in more depth in another post. However, the tactic of sending a letter to the Prime Minister tells us a couple of things:
First, it's a tacit admission on the part of the premiers that their own arguments do not address the issues raised in the AGC's filing. They can argue indefinitely about "the agreement that allowed The Charter to come into being", and the importance of Parliamentary Sovereignty, but that doesn't address the problems that the AGC's position raises (and solves). They have been outmaneuvered and they're admitting it.
Second, their argument that this "violates the agreement around The Charter" ignores the implicit fact that the same agreement presupposed that the legislatures would act prudently with regards to S33 and not use it as a weapon against the people of Canada.
It is this latter point which is more significant - Scott Moe and Danielle Smith wish to use S33 to extinguish the rights and validity of Transgender Canadians in their provinces. Unlike Ontario's use of S33 to save back to work legislation from court challenges, where the situation around that legislation is clearly temporary and naturally resolves itself in time, the legislative use of S33 in Saskatchewan and Alberta addresses issues that are not temporary, and the laws themselves are intended to stand not just for 5 years, but indefinitely. That is a far different use of S33, and one without legitimate legal or cultural justification to support it.
[Update: Oct 8, 2025]: The federal government just told the premiers to go pound sand.Something that has been bugging me ever since various conservatives started yammering about (ab)using the Notwithstanding Clause (S33) in the Charter has been the phrase "Parliamentary Sovereignty".
Neither The Constitution Act, 1867 (The Constitution), nor The Constitution Act, 1982, Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK) (The Charter) make specific mention of the concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty. This is important simply because it tells us that we are dealing with a legal convention, rather than a structure within Canada's constitutional laws. That doesn't minimize the importance of it, but it tells us that the idea itself exists in practice rather than in writing.
In the submission of the Attorney General of Alberta (AGA) to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in English Montreal School Board, et al. v. Attorney General of Quebec, et al. there is a phrase used that I want to explore further, especially with regards to S33 (The Notwithstanding Clause) of The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (The Charter).
That phrase is "parliamentary sovereignty", and I think the Alberta submission embodies a very flawed understanding of it.
With some 60 or more intervenors in English Montreal School Board, et al. v. Attorney General of Quebec, et al. before the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC), there is a ton of material to delve into - that's far beyond this writer's time and scope of knowledge. However, there are lines of reasoning that I do wish to explore in some more depth - especially as regards the nature of S33, and how its application might be limited in the future.
In particular, I want to examine arguments put forward by:
This is, of course, far from a complete list of interesting submissions, but a representative sampling of the ones I found the most relevant to the issue of legislatures applying S33 (The Notwithstanding Clause) pre-emptively to shield legislation from scrutiny. Let's dive in.
