A rchive Date
[ 16-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Supreme Court's been hijacked right here
Interest groups and slick lawyers are swaying the course of justice
By PAUL JACKSON
Calgary Sun
May 4, 2000
Out of the hundreds of "average" men and women I know, I can count on just one hand the number who have any respect for the Supreme Court of Canada.
By "average," I mean Canadians who live basically normal lives, go to their jobs each day, pay their bills on time, obey the law, and generally adhere to The Ten Commandments. They also know the difference from right and wrong - and not on a technicality either. Yet they have utter contempt for the Supreme Court.
In the book The Charter Revolution & The Court Party (Broadview Press, $22.95), Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff, two University of Calgary professors, explain why the court has lost the public's confidence.
Morton, by the way, is one of Alberta's senators-in-waiting, which gives his arguments an added bite.
Chiefly, the problem - and one which will one day diminish respect for the court to the point it will have to be brought to heel and revamped - is justices have taken over the role of politicians.
Our elected politicians pass laws and then the un-elected justices interpret the laws any way they want, often aligning themselves with radical fringe groups bearing no relation to the values of mainstream society.
Another menace today, at all levels of the court system, are slick lawyers using "technicalities" to sway the justices.
That's why a man can be acquitted of rape by claiming he was too drunk to know what he was doing. Coincidentally, if he was caught driving a car while drunk, he certainly wouldn't be acquitted on the same basis. One has to figure the justices regard rape as a far lesser crime than driving a car while impaired.
Ten-to-one too, when a case comes before the court involving Native land claims or fishing rights, the justices will rule for the Natives.
If you shake your head at some of the damning and disastrous judgments the Supreme Court makes - then ponder that an entire second court of intervenors are always pressing the justices to side with their argument.
They include: The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Woman's Legal, Education and Action Fund (LEAF); Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE); Canadian Ethno-Cultural Council; National Action Committee on the Status of Woman; National Indian Brotherhood; National Association of Canadians with Origins in India; Canadian Parents for French; Canadian Prisoners Rights Network; and Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women.
Very few Canadians belong to any of these and to most Canadians, the aims of the groups are way off the wall. They make most of us laugh, or even shudder.
The authors even hint of a cosy relationship between the group of regular intervenors and the court. Both know each other and quite like each other.
That's why these are the groups the justices view as representative of the true feelings of Canadians coast-to-coast. Hence, when they say a law is flawed or discriminatory, the activist judges - all appointed by the political and bureaucratic elite without any input from real Canadians - figure these are the voices of the people and so the law obviously is a bad law.
The dumb politicians in the House of Commons balled up the law, so it's the justices' job to temper it. Of course it isn't really the justices' job to temper the law at all. In reality, they shouldn't be interpreting or shading the law, they should be following its provisions to a "T," just in the way Parliament passed it.
So that's it: The Supreme Court, once held in such esteem by Canadians, has now been hijacked, and not only by a group of political activist justices whose aim seems to be to usurp the power of Parliament.
It's also been captured by radical and zealous "action" groups, who get their own minority views before the court, which then uses them to strike down the legitimate laws passed by MPs, who were elected to represent the views of millions of "average" Canadians.
Morton's and Knopff's book is slim, just 166 pages, with another 60 pages of notes, but well worth reading. After you've been through its pages, you'll realize just who is turning our country into a basket- case, and you won't like it at all. It's actually frightening.
Jackson, associate editor of the Sun, can be reached at conradjackson@home.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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