Ottawa is Playing a Game of Charter Chicken with the Provinces

Alberta separatism is often dismissed – even within the province itself – as the domain of a few deluded rural hardliners. But the sentiment and the movement have only grown since the federal election brought another Liberal government to power. And Bruce Pardy, one of the country’s senior legal scholars (and not even an Albertan), thinks it is time for Alberta to prepare – seriously, definitively, foundationally – for independence. Here Pardy presents 13 provisions that create an elegantly simple architecture for the constitution of an independent – and radically free – Alberta.

When a student protest against rising tuition fees disrupted his classes at the University of Calgary, Jonathan Barazzutti had questions. He didn’t have to look far for the answer. While it has become popular to blame government for the financial crisis on Canadian campuses, Barazzutti uncovered that the real reason lies much closer to home. Metastasizing school bureaucracies are not only pushing tuition fees higher but also shifting the focus of universities away from the pursuit of academic excellence towards woke-minded empire-building. If students want to see their school costs come down, Barazzutti concludes, they ought to be targeting the administrative Leviathan on campus.

Canada spends more on health care than just about any other country in the world, and with abysmal results. Yet when it comes to fixing the problem, most politicians and policy-makers are immune to common sense. As business leader Gwyn Morgan writes, allowing private options alongside government-funded health care has been proven to help patients in both systems – around the world and here in Canada, too. Yet the courts continued to uphold restrictions on private care while the Mark Carney government simply promises to throw still more money at the problem – showing itself to be as deluded and dogmatic as those who went before.

Most Canadians would likely never have heard of conservative American Christian singer Sean Feucht had city councils and government officials not spent their summers shutting him down. But this latest exercise in censorship would hardly be possible, explains constitutional lawyer Josh Dehaas, had Canada’s courts not spent the last few decades arbitrarily expanding the definition of harmful expression. In this perceptive and accessible essay, Dehaas walks through the legal decisions that have eroded the simple, clear conception of free speech that once guided the English-speaking democracies and exposes the flawed thinking that has made Canada what it is today: a country where a performer can be banned before he has said – or sung – a word.

The criminal charges arising from the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa in February 2022 were by and large for the relatively innocuous infraction of mischief and, as the last of these cases finally conclude, most eyes are on the impending sentencing of protest leaders Chris Barber and Tamara Lich. But the sheer intensity of the prosecution of Convoy members whose activities were not as well-reported looks less like the fair administration of justice than revenge upon people who dared protest the arbitrary and oppressive measures of the Covid years. In her recently published book, Thank You, Truckers! Canada’s Heroes & Those Who Helped Them, Donna Laframboise tells their story. In the combined essay and book excerpt below, Laframboise counts the severe costs of challenging an overreaching government – while reminding us that millions of ordinary Canadians supported the Freedom Convoy and all it represented.

Although the slide of Canada’s universities into wokism is well-known, few who don’t spend their days on-campus probably grasp just how far it has gone. Administrators chase academic respectability through “performative inclusivity” – at the expense of educational standards and even students’ health. One Toronto resident watched her beloved institution devolve deep into ideological rebranding with an expensive “campus greening”, a contrived “Indigenous landscape” and donor-bait memorials that cheaply evoke a Holocaust memorial while eerily conflating living adults with dead grandchildren. In this intense first-person telling, P.M. Szpunar recounts her horrifying discovery of the U of T’s strange new proclivities and seeks to unravel how they came about.

Sweden may have inflicted Greta Thunberg and her environmental hectoring on the world, but Canada is now making its own contribution to children’s activism. Ontario climate zealots have launched a court battle – with seven children and youth named as applicants – alleging the province’s modest rollback of its greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets violates their Charter rights. Exploiting children is bad enough, but in this devastating critique, retired litigation lawyer Andrew Roman explains how the activists use legal and logical fallacies to make their case. And he exposes the fundamental flaw in the entire matter – that Courts should not even be ruling on the inherently political matter of climate policy.

Originally meant – and heavily marketed – as a low-cost, accessible means to protect the fundamental rights of individuals, Canada’s human rights commissions and tribunals have become a dangerous farce. Ruling on everything from workplace disputes to getting bumped from an airport lineup, they’ve degenerated into a means for the easily-offended to seek vengeance. That is when they’re not undermining the essential Charter-protected rights of all Canadians at the behest of aggrieved members of designated identity groups. Surveying recent decisions from across the country and interviewing experts on the front lines, Lynne Cohen considers what has gone wrong with Canada’s human rights industry, and how to fix it.

To so many central Canadians, Alberta’s sense of alienation is inexplicable, even contemptible. But for John Weissenberger, a transplant from Montreal who built his career, family and life in Alberta, what’s truly confounding is the West’s enduring faith in Canada. In this sweeping essay – by turns passionate, lyrical and coolly analytical – Weissenberger explains the roots and reasons for Alberta’s frustration, charts the many ways central Canada has plundered and sneered at this most productive province, and makes the case that its grievances be treated seriously. Not just out of fairness, but because Alberta’s spirit and dynamism embody the best of Canada.

“La révolution est dans la rue,” as the excitable French like to say. The same holds true in placid Canada. After receiving four photo radar tickets for going just slightly over the speed limit in Ottawa, John Robson declares the current proliferation of automated speed cameras to be a revolution in how Canada’s streets are policed, and an outrageous violation of the principles of fundamental justice. Robson is not alone in his outrage. While Ontario cities eagerly embrace these cash-hungry Robocops – one municipality expects to issue at least one ticket per year to every local driver – the masses are pushing back. In Alberta, for example, the “photo radar cash cow” is already on its way to the slaughterhouse. Robson’s denunciation of speed camera tyranny offers a manifesto for drivers everywhere.

When it comes to Indigenous Reconciliation, Canada’s path seems like a one-way street. Years of apologies and billions in spending have not created a spirit of co-operation and partnership but have instead led to more grievance and more obstruction of efforts to build a more prosperous Canada. There could be a better way forward. Combining his five decades of experience on Indigenous affairs with his conviction that decisions made 200-300 years ago are still alive today, lifelong academic and author Tom Flanagan suggests ditching grand visions and constitutional amendments in favour of incremental – and achievable – gains. In particular, giving more Indigenous communities an ownership stake in major resource development projects to bring both sides together, build wealth and raise living standards in a process of grassroots reconciliation.

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently declared that, “Canada is the most European of non-European countries.” With Chile, Argentina and Australia (among many others) likely to object to such a characterization, Peter Shawn Taylor’s counterclaim that Canada is the “most U.S. of all non-U.S. countries” seems a much safer bet, given the centuries of shared history, geography, culture and trade. In this latest installment of C2C Journal’s Restoring Canada Special Series, Taylor examines the deep economic relationship between the two countries and argues that nothing can ever destroy its significance. Further, any attempt at such a thing – as currently seems popular with the “Elbows Up!” crowd – will ultimately prove disastrous. Canada’s economic future depends on trading with the Americans. Full stop.

It won’t come as news to say that Canada’s federal institutions aren’t working very well. But what to do about it? Jim Mason steps outside the box and thinks big to propose a federal government that works for Canadians once again. In this sweeping contribution to C2C’s Restoring Canada series, Mason goes back to the source – the British North America Act of 1867 – for a rock-bottom analysis of how it all began and what worked at the time. He then examines today’s situation in Ottawa and applies a systems analyst’s rigour to restore the things that originally worked while discarding 158 years of accumulated dysfunction to fashion a redesign focused on the key objectives for a modern-day constitutional state. Mason’s result is a refurbished Confederation with clearly demarcated legislative, executive and judicial branches offset by effective checks and balances, a strengthened Parliament, a new way of electing MPs, term limits for key officials, a Supreme Court justice from every province, and a notably constrained Prime Minister and Prime Minister’s Office.

For anyone who still bought into Mark Carney’s self-declared image as the great global banker who would responsibly manage Canada’s finances, his recent promise to juice defence spending to 5 percent of GDP – $155 billion per year in today’s dollars – must surely be the final straw. The Liberal Prime Minister had already announced massive spending hikes and a huge deficit, with interest on the federal debt to hit $70 billion by 2029. All this will spell doom for a country already struggling with declining productivity, zero growth and a falling standard of living, concludes Gwyn Morgan. The veteran business leader charts Canada’s path to budgetary disaster and places the blame squarely where it belongs – on Canada’s profligate Prime Minister.

The global decline in fertility rates has grown so severe that some demographers now talk about “peak humanity” – a looming maximum from which the world’s population will begin to rapidly decline. And though the doomsayers who preach about the dangers of overpopulation may think that’s a good thing, it is in fact an existential threat. Canada has not escaped the decline: birth rates have fallen steadily since 1959, during which time we built a massive welfare state without the manpower to sustain it – and immigration has proved no solution to either problem. In this deeply-researched analysis, Michael Bonner looks at the root causes of our looming demographic disaster and explains the first steps that are essential to fixing it.