Think Harper’s scary? Check out this bogey(wo)man
I have someone that I’d like to nominate for Harper’s job as Scariest Person In Canada (sorry, Steve, but you’re just not living up to it):
Superior Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.
Let’s start this off by listing just a few of Her Beverliness’s scarier pronouncements, shall we?
“The rule of law requires judges to uphold unwritten constitutional norms, even in the face of clearly enacted laws or hostile public opinion.”
How about this one?
“There is certainly no guarantee or presumption that a given list of constitutional principles is complete, even assuming the good faith intention of the drafters to provide such a catalogue.”
Or this?
“I believe that judges have the duty to insist that legislative and executive branches of government conform to certain established and fundamental norms, even in times of trouble.”
In other words, “The law says what we say it says because we can interpret the spirit of the Constitution better than the people who wrote it and if the democratically elected government of this country doesn’t like it, then they can go to hell and take the unwashed masses of the public with them.”
Think about this. This little control freakette thinks that it’s a good idea for nine individuals, unelected and absolutely unaccountable to Canadian citizens, to have absolute and total control over what is and is not the law of the land. It reminds me of the story of the English tyrant King John, who has been infamously quoted as once saying “the law is in my mouth.” He clung to that until he had a spearpoint jammed between his shoulderblades and was told to either sign the Magna Carta (the document from which all Western democracies sprang) or put all that divine-right-of-kings stuff to the ultimate test.
Frau McLachlin seems to think that cutting off final lawmaking authority from elected officials (and thereby, from the people that elected them) and placing it in the hands of a small body accounable to no one is a good idea. Those who agree with her should read The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich and pay special attention to the role that the judiciary played in the Nazi rise in power. Hitler employed an army of lawyers to get the courts to do things that he couldn’t ever accomplish in Germany’s elected assembly. Those who forget the lunacies of the past are condemned to repeat them in the future.
Some screeching lefties will tell you that we need a system like this, “insulated from popular passions,” they like to call it, in order to protect minorities from the “tyranny of the majority.” Well just who the hell is this malevolent majority that we all need to be protected from, anyway? They never tell us that one. But whoever they are, we are assured that they’re in every closet and under every bed in the country.
Bottom line: The power to make or strike down laws belongs only in the hands of those men and women who are chosen by the people of the land for that purpose. It’s called democracy ladies and gentlemen, it’s sometimes a messy business, and Churchill was right: it’s the worst possible form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.