A rchive Date
[ 29-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Putting the state above the law
By GEORGE JONAS
Toronto Sun
June 29, 2000
Last week Justice Minister Anne McLellan and Solicitor General Lawrence MacAulay proposed a law that would permit "reasonable and proportional acts" of lawbreaking by the police. Such acts would include just about every crime, short of murder, manslaughter, and sexual offences.
The ostensible reason is that criminal gangs, somewhat like political terrorists, sometimes want new applicants to perform acts of "initiation" to prove their bona fides - that is, to prove they aren't undercover police officers. This makes such organizations harder to penetrate.
If the proposed legislation becomes law, officers will presumably deal drugs and commit robbery to better penetrate gangs. Sounds grand. It also sounds really useful, considering that it will take about a minute for gangs to figure out what undercover officers CAN'T do, then demand, say, sexual assault as an initiation.
It was only a matter of time, I suppose. This proposal has, in one form or another, surfaced many times before. Officials have great fondness for being put above the law.
Cops often complain they could be charged with making an illegal U-turn while chasing a kidnapper. In practice, the chances are remote. First, the authorities have discretion whether or not to lay charges. Second, the police, like all citizens, have the common law defence of necessity. No court is likely to convict an officer who broke a speed limit to save a life.
Still, existing law puts officials in the uncomfortable position of having to use their heads once in a while. That's why many would prefer to have statutory permission to run red lights, as it were, and drive on the wrong side of the road.
Politicians feel safe introducing such legislation. The left won't be critical because it always approves of special powers going to the state. As for the right, it has a knee-jerk reaction to crime. It's unlikely to object to any measure aimed at "criminal gangs."
The ultimate arrogance of statism is the belief that right and wrong are determined by government edict. This affliction is not new, nor is it peculiar to Jean Chretien's cabinet (though it seems to have a big dose of it). Twenty-odd years ago it was expressed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau's famous shrug when Mr. Justice David MacDonald's report on the RCMP revealed that the Mounties had been burning down barns belonging to suspected Quebec separatists.
Many Canadians were upset, but our P.E.T. remained undaunted. Between shrugs, he voiced the opinion that if people were so concerned with the Mounties burning barns illegally, perhaps he'd make burning barns by the Mounties legal.
Trudeau wasn't alone in believing that this would settle the matter. Editorialists at the Toronto Star wrote that "if the police need to run red lights, speed, use false documents or plant bugs, then the right to do those things should be given to them by statute law."
To say that this missed the point is putting it mildly. It's not wrong to burn barns because it's illegal; it's illegal to burn barns because it's wrong.
The fact that governments are competent to introduce legislation creates the illusion that governments determine matters of right and wrong. But arson or assault committed by a police officer is still arson or assault. Making a wrongful act right by legislation is beyond the state's competence. Only in James Bond movies can governments issue 007 licences to kill.
Former East German policemen could point to statutes permitting or requiring them to shoot at people trying to cross the Berlin Wall. They were still jailed after unification, not because their acts were unlawful - they were not at all unlawful in East Germany's communist state - but because their acts were wrong.
Unless a state is prepared to abandon the rule of law altogether, it can't have one law for citizens and another for the police. That road leads to a police state in this world, and (if you ask me) to perdition in the next.
It's not just arrogance or hubris that induces Ottawa's mandarins to think that they can have one law for their centurions and another for ordinary citizens. There's an even deeper error. Many people fall into it, not only statist politicians.
The error is to think of the law as some magic tree that bears the fruit of justice. In fact, the opposite is true. It's the tree of justice that may, in good years, bear the fruit of the law.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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