There are plenty of people throwing around opinions on this issue—some good, some bad—but it’s helpful to keep in mind that, in public life as in real life, multiple things can be true at the same time.
This week’s Hub Dialogue Roundtable discusses the potential political fallout from the Emergencies Act inquiry in Ottawa, plus, the Bank of Canada’s surprising decision this week to announce a rate hike below the market’s expectations.
Neither the Wildrose nor PC parties still exist, but the leadership contest may be another clash of their legacies.
While reams of punditry have examined the constitutionality and wisdom, or lack thereof, of this proposal, most have overlooked the fact that provincial nullification of federal laws has been practiced for decades in other parts of the country.
Pierre Trudeau enacted his rationalist Constitution just as the corrosive logic of liberalism was fracturing our society. Its legacy is a post-rational, post-liberal system where the most important issues are subject to the whims of judicial power.
Because our liberal constitutional order claims the authority of a universal principle, it must spread and occupy every corner of society, colonising our speech and even how we think about every question of law and morality.
Pierre Trudeau’s constitutional reforms went right for the pre-Enlightenment heart, injecting the adrenaline of the American and French revolutions into our sleepy constitutional compromise. For the first time in a Westminster parliamentary system, the principles of government were written down and the abstract notion of universal rights was elevated above the sovereignty of parliament.
Why have some on the Right abandoned the traditional conservative skepticism about placing policy decisions in the hands of the legal profession?
Danielle Smith’s political gambit and the spectacularly inappropriate public musings of Alberta’s viceroy could compound and build into a perfect storm of unconstitutionality. That is, if one or the other doesn’t reconsider her position.
Political scientist Geoffrey Sigalet joins Hub Dialogues to discuss the “dialogue” between the government and the courts and what he hopes to achieve with the new Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies.
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