Something is happening in Canada.
Something is causing the foundation of the country to shift underneath our feet.
Something we’ve all seen but haven’t yet recognized.
And what exactly is that “something”? The individual is losing to the collective. An ever-expanding managerial bureaucracy of an oversized government is now directing Canadian life from cradle to grave. It regulates how you can act and what you can say in the name of “common good”.
Is the end of Western liberal civilization, as we have known it, conceivable? And if so, how did we get here? Part of the explanation, law professor Bruce Pardy says, is what he calls “The Unholy Trinity of the Administrative State”:
Unholy Trinity part 1. Our politicians delegate authority to government officials and bureaucrats.
Unholy Trinity part 2. Our courts defer to the bureaucracy, to their “expertise”.
Unholy Trinity part 3. Officials assume the discretion to decide the public good, running roughshod over individual liberties when they deem it necessary.
During the “Covid” era, this implicit bargain made possible the most significant trampling of civil liberties in Canadian peacetime history. Government officials made up incoherent diktats on the fly. For the most part, courts said “no problem”.
But what about Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms? As things went off the rails, people thought that the Charter would save them. But courts can decide what Charter rights mean. As long as they can support their answers with judicial rhetoric, rights can mean something a little… different every time.
In Canada, the rule of law is fading. When it suits them, our institutions set aside their restraints. Using an idea to hold the powerful in check works only for as long as the powerful believe in the idea. And increasingly in the Canada of today, they do not.
This state of affairs, which has evolved over many years, is now somehow the new normal in Canada. And with anti-free speech legislation pending or already on the books, liberties are skating on perilously thin Canadian ice.
Is there a way for Canada to reform the Unholy Trinity? Maybe. In his riveting keynote presentation, Bruce Pardy describes Canada’s bureaucratic devolution, and the challenges that lie ahead. Whatever the path forward, audiences can be assured of one thing: They will question what they believed about how they are governed.
Videos
Our Constitutional Mistake
The Nanny State is a_______
In Canada, All People Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others
In Canada, You Have Free Speech. (So long as you say the right things and think the right thoughts.)
BIOGRAPHY
Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe, a law and liberty thinktank, and professor of law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is a scholar, lawyer, columnist, and outspoken critic of the illiberal managerial state. He has spoken and written extensively on a range of subjects at the front lines of the culture war inside the law, including human rights and freedoms, constitutional law, property rights, climate change, professional governance, higher education, free markets, and the rule of law. Bruce serves as senior fellow with the Fraser Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He has written for the National Post, Epoch Times, and the Brownstone Institute, among others, has taught at law schools in Canada, the United States and New Zealand, practiced civil litigation in Toronto, and served as adjudicator and mediator on the Ontario Environmental Tribunal.
