Late last month former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford launched a lawsuit to challenge the federal proof-of-Covid-19-vaccine requirement for air travel. Peckford, the last surviving political architect of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, said that governments are ignoring the Charter with their pandemic rules and creating a constitutional crisis. If anything, that understates the trouble Canada is in. Bruce Pardy provides a bracing evaluation of how the Charter actually operates in an era of expansive government and imaginative jurists.
Tag: Bruce Pardy
COVID-19 is here to stay. Therefore, COVID is done. Either mild Omicron is the end of COVID madness, or there is no off-ramp. The panic-demic must finish or we will be doing this forever.
As for the already vaccinated, making boosters mandatory would abandon any pretence of persuasion.
There are still people who value civil liberties in this country.
Wokeness, or social justice as it is also known, is an anti-Western ideology and is now Canada’s secular religion.
Western legal tradition has protected individual autonomy better than any other legal system in history. The problem is that for decades that tradition, and the culture from whence it came, have slowly been eroding.
In Canada, some are apt to believe that vaccine mandates surely must contravene the charter. But has a specific charter right been breached? Or is it just the charter’s vibe?
Judges lack training in everything but the law, which is not their weakness but their strength. On COVID, as on any other contentious subject, a little learning outside the courtroom is exactly what should not occur.
Left-leaning academics once championed ideological diversity. Now that they have captured the university, viewpoint diversity is perceived as dangerous.