[BRIEF NOTE] Paul Wells on the 30th anniversary of the Charter

[rfmcdonald]

dewline's reminder that today is the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian constitution that has become in the years since its 1982 adoption a model for constitutions around the world, was invaluable. One thing he picks up on is the lack of public celebration of this. Is Prime Minister Stephen Harper responsible for the lack of celebration? Sure. In this, a Paul Wells piece at MacLean's argues, he reflects the lack of consensus Canadians feel generally. It's a decision that' calculated for effect.

The prime minister is hardly trash-talking the constitution here. He calls the 1982 amendments “important” and “interesting” and “important.” He does sound a bit wary and forlorn about the lack of consensus. Already, on the ravenous global Twitter chatterbox, colleagues are upset that he is parrotting Quebec nationalists’ rhetoric about “divisions…which are still very real” around patriation.

I’m afraid my feelings are mixed. I believe the Charter is a good thing. It gives citizens power no government can take: its effect is often profoundly libertarian. I believe repatriation was a bit of a schmozzle, but when you have an embittered defeated Péquiste at the table, an already inelegant process is likely to become even more of a mess, and that’s life. (Harper was speaking in Chile. Take a look at their constitutional gong show.) I was supposed to speak at a conference on repatriation last week in Montreal, and I begged off because of time constraints, but I didn’t mind begging off because I didn’t really feel like challenging the local sooky consensus. “Woe is us!” “Humiliation and woe!” “Pain and suffering!” “And now, Paul Wells.”

But there is no necessary or even frequent connection between emotions and evidence, and emotions are real. And it’s hardly just in Outremont’s more self-indulgent salons that the Charter is seen as a bad show. When the newish Conservative party had its first convention in Montreal, the foundering Western Standard magazine distributed lapel pins with “It’s the stupid Charter!” on them. I’ll leave it to the magazine’s then-editor, Kevin Libin, to explain what the point of that was, because as the linked article shows, Kevin was pretty good at finding everyone else’s explanations wrong.

But my point, or part of it, is that there’s no consensus in the country around even as mildly rah-rah a conception of the Charter as mine. Harper’s first chief of staff, Ian Brodie, will by now be getting tired of my pointing out that his PhD thesis asserted a Liberal-judicial racket to make sure the Charter gets interpreted a certain way. Harper’s fellow firewall theorist, Ted Morton, wrote a book with Rainer Knopff, who in 2010 helped Harper find a new governor general, that says all kinds of un-celebratory things about the Charter. The Court Party of the book’s title is, more or less, Brodie’s “Friends of the Court:” “a well orchestrated network of state-funded interest groups that use litigation and the media to achieve what they can’t win through democratic elections.”

Morton is currently having a bad few weeks on the campaign trail, but at one point in his academic career he was using “Reform Party” as a direct antonym for “Court Party.” Morton’s “Reform Party” wasn’t perfectly synonymous with, you know, the Reform Party, but the differences were slight.