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.