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“Troubling Decision: Our Judges Have Treated the Charter As Their Licence to Socially Engineer Canada”
by London Free Press - ROBERT MARTIN, QMI Agency
March 11th, 2013

If there remain any Canadians who cherish the Rule of Law and freedom of expression, they should be deeply concerned by the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in a case called Saskatchewan v. Whatcott.

In this decision, the Supreme Court gave its approval to the role which “Human Rights” Commissions play in the vanguard of our overweening thought control sector.

William Whatcott’s sin was to have expressed public criticism of homosexual activists attempting to engage in proselytisation in the public schools. Whatcott was punished for this behaviour by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.

The province’s Court of Appeal struck down the decision of the Human Rights Commission which appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it was successful.

How, one might ask, do things like this happen in a country which has both a constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms which purports to guarantee freedom of expression?

The simple answer is to be found in the unusual, if not perverse, manner in which the Supreme Court has interpreted the Charter.

Documents like the Charter have a profound and simple purpose, which is to protect the citizen against the state.

Our judges, led by the Supreme Court, have disregarded this noble purpose and treated the Charter as their licence to socially engineer Canada to make it conform to their own ideological priorities.

As much as I dislike and disagree with the decision in Whatcott, it does afford me a degree of personal satisfaction, since it affirms the central theses of both my recent books: The Most Dangerous Branch: How the Supreme Court of Canada has undermined our Law and our Democracy, 2003 and Free Expression in Canada: Surrendered to Diversity and Multiculturalism, 2012.

The 2003 book argued that the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada have surrendered their independence and their intellectual integrity to a postmodern orthodoxy, which, rather than the law or the constitution, determines the outcome of cases before them.

The 2012 book argued that Canada today can best be understood as a “totalitarian theocracy,” a country completely in the grip of a secular state religion of equality which defines the behaviour of all state organs, including the courts, to such a degree that all other considerations, including free expression, must give way to the relentless pursuit of equality.

This book contains considerable critical analysis of “human rights” commissions and attempts (pp. 412-413) to set out a series of propositions to describe the state of free expression after the depredations of these bodies.

The Whatcott decision appears to confirm the accuracy of the third of these propositions: “No heterosexual person may publically disagree with or criticize or say anything that might, in any way, offend or annoy a homosexual person.”

Having studied the Supreme Court of Canada for several decades, the result in Whatcott did not surprise me. I was surprised and even a little disturbed by the fact that the decision was unanimous.

One might have hoped that, out of nine judges, there could be even one sufficiently independent and with enough integrity, to follow the law and the constitution rather than the secular state religion.

Still, I do enjoy the fact that the highest court in the land has told me I’m right.

— Martin is Professor of Law, Emeritus, Western University

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13