Biographics
Published 5 Jul 2018Maximilien Robespierre promised to usher a fairer, more representative form of government to the French people. What they got was a reign of terror that saw thousands facing the horror of the guillotine.
Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org
Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Steve Theunissen
Producer – Jack Cole
Executive Producer – Shell HarrisBusiness inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com
Kerry McDonald recently took part in a debate with a Harvard academic who has called upon governments to ban homeschooling. She’s written up some of the things she took away from the discussion and from the many questions submitted before the event:
While this event was framed as a discussion about homeschooling, including whether and how to regulate the practice, it is clear that homeschooling is just a strawman. The real issue focuses on the role of government in people’s lives, and in particular in the lives of families and children. In her 80-page Arizona Law Review article that sparked this controversy, Professor Bartholet makes it clear that she is seeking a reinterpretation of the US Constitution, which she calls “outdated and inadequate,” to move from its existing focus on negative rights, or individuals being free from state intervention, to positive rights where the state takes a much more active role in citizens’ lives.
During Monday’s discussion, Professor Bartholet explained that “some parents can’t be trusted to not abuse and neglect their children,” and that is why “kids are going to be way better off if both parent and state are involved.” She said her argument focuses on “the state having the right to assert the rights of the child to both education and protection.” Finally, Professor Bartholet said that it’s important to “have the state have some say in protecting children and in trying to raise them so that the children have a decent chance at a future and also are likely to participate in some positive, meaningful ways in the larger society.”
It’s true that the state has a role in protecting children from harm, but does it really have a role in “trying to raise them”? And if the state does have a role in raising children to be competent adults, then the fact that two-thirds of US schoolchildren are not reading proficiently, and more than three-quarters are not proficient in civics, should cause us to be skeptical about the state’s ability to ensure competence.
I made the point on Monday that we already have an established government system to protect children from abuse and neglect. The mission of Child Protective Services (CPS) is to investigate suspected child abuse and punish perpetrators. CPS is plagued with problems and must be dramatically reformed, but the key is to improve the current government system meant to protect children rather than singling out homeschoolers for additional regulation and government oversight. This is particularly true when there is no compelling evidence that homeschooling parents are more likely to abuse their children than non-homeschooling parents, and some research to suggest that homeschooling parents are actually less likely to abuse their children.
Additionally, and perhaps most disturbingly, this argument for more state involvement in the lives of homeschoolers ignores the fact that children are routinely abused in government schools by government educators, as well as by school peers. If the government can’t even protect children enrolled in its own heavily regulated and surveilled schools, then how can it possibly argue for the right to regulate and monitor those families who opt out?
We must separate the moral dimensions of a subject from the empirical questions surrounding it. For example, on the radioactive issue of sex (or gender) differences in cognitive abilities, there is the empirical question of whether or how men and women diverge in certain tasks, and then there is the moral question of how men and women should be treated. Empirically, there is much evidence that in some tasks women excel over men, and in other tasks, men excel over women. For example, women are more dexterous while men are better at throwing; women are superior in visual memory whereas men are better at mentally rotating shapes; women are better at mathematical calculation while men are better at mathematical problem-solving; in terms of overall general intelligence (g), however, there is no gender difference. Morally, however, none of this matters. We should support women’s rights regardless of any physical or cognitive differences between the sexes. To yoke one’s moral evaluation to empirical questions like this is a big mistake; worse is to assume that this is what people always do and therefore we must suppress any empirical evidence that there are differences, as this will only tilt people’s moral judgments toward empirical outcomes.
This reminds me of the debate in the late 1980s through mid-1990s about whether homosexuality was nature or nurture, something you were born to be or a lifestyle choice. Conservatives and Christians argued for the “choice” position and this led to efforts to “convert” gays to straight (or “pray the gay away”) because something that is learned can be unlearned. This led the gay community and supporters thereof to argue for the “born this way” position. The cumulative evidence from multiple lines of inquiry led to the nature position more than that of nurture, but this was another example of confusing the empirical question of the origin of homosexuality with the moral question of the rights of gays and lesbians (today the LGBTQ community). It should go without saying — but unfortunately in these times it must be said again and again — it doesn’t matter what the origins of homosexuality turn out to be, gays and lesbians and everyone else in the LGBTQ community are entitled to the same rights and privileges as everyone else protected by the constitution of their nation (and those nations that have yet to extend legal rights to gays and lesbians need to change their constitutions).
Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.
Colby Cosh outlines the events of 1975, where the Governer-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used his reserve powers to dismiss the government of Gough Whitlam and call for a fresh federal election in which Whitlam’s party was soundly defeated. In taking this action, Sir John corresponded with Queen Elizabeth and after his retirement deposited those documents with the National Archives. The bulk of his papers were made available to researchers after the statutary 30 year delay, but the letters involving Her Majesty were withheld for 60 years. An Australian historian has now successfully challenged the National Archives in Federal Court:
National Archives of Australia in Parkes, Australian Capital Territory.
Photo by Bidgee via Wikimedia Commons.
The confrontation at Yarralumla, and the various narrative twists and turns leading up to it, are a major event in Australian constitutional history. Which brings us to Jenny Hocking, a left-leaning historian who is a top specialist on the 1975 crisis.
Hocking knew that Kerr, after his retirement, had deposited copies of his correspondence with the Queen in Australia’s National Archives. Hocking made good professional use of Kerr’s formal papers, made available to the public in 2005 under the 30-year rule that covers Australian state papers. But Kerr had, with the agreement of the Archives, made separate arrangements for his letters to and from the Queen — the so-called “(Buckingham) Palace letters”.
[…]
The National Archives, trying to stand by its bargain with Kerr as a donor, successfully argued that while papers generated or received by “the official establishment of the Governor-General” would clearly be ordinary public records under Australian law, the letters that Hocking wanted to see didn’t involve “the official establishment,” but merely Kerr himself as … well, just a guy. The Federal Court found that the Palace letters therefore had the legal status of one of Sir John’s grocery bills, or sex diaries, or anything else that he would be perfectly entitled to stick in a locked box for 50 years.
(Or to burn in private. Which was an option he had, but rejected, explaining explicitly that he wanted future historians to have access to the material. But not for them to have it so soon that it might surprise or embarrass the Queen during her own lifetime.)
What happened last week was that the case reached Australia’s top court and Hocking won a smashing victory. Kerr’s correspondence with the Queen is known to have contained discussions of the Australian constitutional situation, and in view of that, the High Court said, the Federal Court’s distinction between Commonwealth records and personal correspondence must be regarded as a bogus artifice. The concepts aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Archives also asserted that queen-viceroy letters attract a higher level of secrecy “by convention” in all the Queen’s realms, but they couldn’t produce evidence that such a convention exists. Hocking’s costs must be covered by the Archives, and as far as the letters go, the ball is in their court legally. They could still use a “national security” exemption to withhold some of the material, and the freedom with which this magic formula is used by archival gatekeepers is notorious. But it may soon be possible for Australians to read the final chapter of the cataclysmic Kerr-Whitlam story.
The bureaucrat in question is New York Police Department Commissioner James O’Neill, an individual who clearly believes that his thirty-five years spent plodding unspectacularly up the NYPD chain of command equips him better to tell you what your rights are, and what they are not, than the Founding Fathers of this country and the Framers of its unique social contract.
Well I’ve got news for you, Jimmy, there is no “allow”.
“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machine-gun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”* That’s the essential freight of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the highest law of the land, which you and yours have been illegally suppressing since passage of the 1911 Sullivan Act, named for Tammany Hall’s Timothy Sullivan, perhaps the most corrupt, bigoted politician ever to occupy office in New York.
Since the ability to own and carry weapons unmolested by the State is a fundamental right, there can be no thought of any unit of that state “allowing” it or not “allowing” it. Any government employee who attempts to interfere with that right deserves a long stay in prison among those whose rights he’s violated. Note that I am not saying that peace and civil order are a bad thing, just that it has to be achieved within Constitutional parameters. The Founders put them there for a reason; they had seen the rule of law abused too often by arrogant and brutish British authorities.
* “The Atlanta Declaration”, L. Neil Smith, 1987
L Neil Smith, “There Is No ‘Allow’, Jimmy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-02-18.
L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:
We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.
(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)
All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.
My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.
This is why populism and nationalism, taken to their natural conclusions, always lead to statism. The state is the only expression of the national or popular will that encompasses everybody. So, the more you talk about how the fundamental unit of society is a mythologized collective called “The People” or the nation, the more you are rhetorically empowering the state.
Sure, the Constitution begins with the words “We the People,” but that is not a populist sentiment — it’s a statement of precedence in terms of authority: The people come before the government (not the European notion of the state). The spirit of the Constitution is entirely about the fact that The People are not all one thing. It places the rights of a single person above those of the entire federal government! It assumes not only that the people will disagree among themselves, but that the country will be better off if there is such disagreement. No populist frets about the tyranny of the majority. American patriots do.
But if you recognize that humans create wealth with their brains and their industry and that it therefore belongs to them, you’ll be a little more humble about the state’s “right” to take as much as it wants to spend how it wants. Human ingenuity is the engine of wealth creation, and there is no other.
But that doesn’t mean government doesn’t play a role. Because, as I said, there will be no wealth creation if there is no rule of law. There will be no investment or ingenuity if there is no guarantee that you will be able to collect on that investment or reap the benefits of your innovation. Without such an environment, the biggest mob wins. And when the mob wins, children starve to death in what should be one of the richest countries in the world.
Jonah Goldberg, “America and the ‘Original Position'”, National Review, 2017-12-22.
The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2020In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.
» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.de/thegreatwar/» SOURCES
Ehmer, K. and Hindermann, B. (2015). The School of Sophisticated Drinking. New York: Greystone Books.
Miron and Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition”. In the American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 242-247, (May 1991).
Darrow, Clarence, and John Haynes Holmes. Debate On Prohibition. Haldeman-Julius Co., 1924.
Iorizzo, Luciano J. Al Capone. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Nemtsov, Aleksandr. A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia. Stockholm, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward D. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. New York: The Vangaurd Press, 1929.
United States Government, “Codification of Internal Revenue Laws, … Published Pursuant to Section 1203(c) Revenue Act of 1926”.
18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ou…
United States Department of Agriculture. “Crop Production Historical Track Records, 2018”. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publication…
Kamieński, Łukasz: “Drugs”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-03-07
Blocker, Jack S Jr. “Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 96,2 (2006): 233-43.» SOCIAL MEDIA
Instagram: https://instagram.com/the_great_war
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WW1_Series
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/TheGreatWarChannel»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Mark Newton
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian WittigChannel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van StepholdA Mediakraft Networks Original Channel
Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020
Colby Cosh on the recent court decision on the Church of Atheism’s attempt to qualify as a church — and receive the tax benefits — under Revenue Canada’s rules:
“The Descent of the Modernists”, by E.J. Pace, first appearing in his book Christian Cartoons, published in 1922.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Last week the Federal Court of Appeal upheld Revenue Canada’s rejection of an application for charitable status made by a “Church of Atheism” tucked away in Ontario’s Lanark Highlands. The idea of making a gesture like this has probably occurred to every atheist who looks around at a world of tax-exempt churches and wonders why his kind is excluded from the gravy train. (Clergymen pay tax on their income, but they have access to a generous residential deduction, and any professional expenses covered by the church go untaxed.)
The fact is that the “Church’s” efforts were a bit amateurish and confused. But they may, like a doomed military reconnaissance, have revealed weaknesses in the anomalous exclusion of atheists from religious tax exemptions.
These weaknesses cannot be any big secret. You probably remember the Supreme Court’s Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay decision of 2015 — that’s the case in which the Quebec Court of Appeal had ruled that a statue of Christ with an electrically illuminated Sacred Heart was “devoid of religious connotation.” The Supreme Court, perhaps suppressing a chuckle or two, proceeded to unanimously overturn the Quebec ruling and expound the concept that the Canadian state has a Charter-based “duty of religious neutrality” (except, of course, where the constitution explicitly specifies otherwise, as with Catholic schools). Government, the SCC insisted, “must neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, and the same holds true for non-belief.”
Given that this is our law, what can be the problem with a “Church of Atheism”? Good question! Justice Marianne Rivoalen, writing on behalf of a three-judge Federal Court panel, confirmed the general point that there is a state duty of religious neutrality; in fact, even Revenue Canada, acting as the respondent, conceded this.
But the court simply ruled, without any logical elucidation, that “the Minister (of Revenue)’s refusal to register the appellant as a charitable organization does not interfere in a manner that is more than trivial or insubstantial with the appellant’s members’ ability to practise their atheistic beliefs. The appellant can continue to carry out its purpose and its activities without charitable registration.”
In The Atlantic, Ken White strongly urges pro-free-speech advocates to avoid using some arguments that have been bandied around recently:
What speech should be protected by the First Amendment is open to debate. Americans can, and should, argue about what the law ought to be. That’s what free people do. But while we’re all entitled to our own opinions, we’re not entitled to our own facts, even in 2019. In fact, the First Amendment is broad, robust, aggressively and consistently protected by the Supreme Court, and not subject to the many exceptions and qualifications that commentators seek to graft upon it. The majority of contemptible, bigoted speech is protected.
If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in America, or listened to talking heads on the news, you’ve almost certainly encountered empty, misleading, or simply false tropes about the First Amendment. Those tired tropes are barriers to serious discussions about free speech. Any useful discussion of what the law should be must be informed by an accurate view of what the law is.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Photo by Harris & Ewing via Wikimedia Commons.
[…]“This speech isn’t protected, because you can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”
This line, though ubiquitous, is just another way to convey that “not all speech is protected by the First Amendment.” As an argument, it is just as useless.
But the phrase is not just empty. It’s also a historically ignorant way to convey the point. It dates back to a 1919 Supreme Court decision allowing the imprisonment of Charles Schenck for urging resistance to the draft in World War I. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the “most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” This decision led to a series of cases broadly endorsing the government’s ability to suppress speech that questioned official policy. But for more than half a century Schenck has unequivocally and universally been acknowledged as bad law.
Holmes himself repented of the decision — though he continued to indulge his taste for pithy phrases with lines like “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” to justify forcible government sterilization of the handicapped.
So when you smugly drop “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” in a First Amendment debate, you’re misquoting an empty rhetorical device uttered by a career totalitarian in a long-overturned case about jailing draft protesters. This is not persuasive or helpful.
Peter Hitchins provides a thumbnail sketch of the state of play before the Supreme Court was added to British constitutional arrangements:
“Palace of Westminster” by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Why did we never even have such a body until ten years ago? As we shall see, it would have been, and still is, a contradiction in terms. But in interesting times such as these, elephants fly, fishes walk, figs grow on thorns, and oxymorons inherit the earth.
The most powerful law court in the land was, by a curious paradox, not in the land at all, but based in tiny Luxembourg, across the Narrow Seas which have kept invaders from our door but are useless against bureaucratic takeovers by the European Union. There sits the European Court of Justice, which as long ago as 1990 established that it could tell British courts to overrule British Acts of Parliament when they conflict with E.U. law. It can carry on doing this until we eventually do leave the E.U., if we ever do.
These various messes came about because we are so old, and rely so much on convention and manners, that it is all too easy for unconventional and ill-mannered busybodies to come storming in with new ideas. England’s constitution was not planned and built, like America’s. Instead, it grew during a thousand years of freedom from invasion. Both are beautiful in their way. America’s fundamental law has the cold, orderly beauty of a classical temple. England’s has the warmer, more chaotic loveliness of an ancient forest. It seems to be wholly natural but, when examined closely, it shows many signs of careful cultivation and pruning. Our powers are not as separated as America’s, but slightly tangled. Still, it has worked well enough for us over time.
Any thinking person must admire both the American and the English constitutions as serious efforts in a world of chaos, despotism, and stupidity to apply human intelligence to the task of giving people ordered, peaceful, and free lives. They have a common origin in the miraculous Magna Carta, which Americans often revere more than modern Englishmen do. We in England have grown complacent about our liberty, and have become inclined to forget our great founding documents.
But the two constitutions are not the same, and in my view they are not compatible. For my whole life, until a few years ago, the very idea that England should have a Supreme Court was an absurdity. The Highest Court in England is the Crown in Parliament which, as I was once taught, had the power to do everything except turn a man into a woman. In these more gender-fluid times, that expression is not much used. But it contains the truth. Parliament can make any law and overturn any law, made by itself or by the courts.
That is why England (often to my regret) lacks a First Amendment and cannot have one unless we undergo a revolution. No law in England could possibly open with the words “Parliament shall make no law.” Our 1689 Bill of Rights, the model for the U.S. Bill of Rights a century later, tells the king what he cannot do and the courts what they cannot do. It grants me (as a Protestant) the right to have weapons for my defense. But while it draws its sword against arbitrary power, it puts a protective arm round Parliament.
Red Flag laws for Congress.
Any Congresscritter says or does, something unConstitutional, anyone should be able to file a Red Flag violation and have that politician’s powers to write bills, attend sessions of Congress, vote, draw a taxpayer-funded paycheque, live in a mansion in Washington DC, or anything else tied to the job of being a Congresscritter immediately suspended.
There would be a hearing within fourteen days before a judge in their home district, where the Representative or Senator would be given the opportunity to show where in the Constitution what they said, or the law they proposed, or the action they did, was explicitly authorised, and if they can show that, their rights to all the goodies of being an elected representative of the People would be restored.
If they can’t, then they can sit at home for a year and twiddle their thumbs. Not allowed into the Capitol, no drawing a paycheque, no voting, no proposing bills, nothing added to their pension funds, zip, zero, NADA to do with being an elected official.
And their party doesn’t get to fill that slot. Their party doesn’t get to vote on their behalf. Their party doesn’t get to help them with re-election.
No, that Congresscritter, and the seat they occupy, goes into the penalty box for a year.
After a year, if their term in office hasn’t expired, they can take up their duties again.
Unless, and until, they mention violating the Constitution again, and someone files another Red Flag complaint.
Lawdog, “Sauce for the goose…”, The Lawdog Files, 2019-08-06.
In the National Post, Barbara Kay discusses a recent book on the key legislation that regulates relations between the Canadian federal government and the various First Nations groups:
Few and far between are disinterested scholars of Canada’s Aboriginal history who have the tough hide and principled will to publicly depart from the approved Indigenous “nation-to-nation” narrative that keeps the guilt and money flowing, but perpetuates a dysfunctional status quo on many reserves. Most of the dissenters are university academics. But Best is simply an intelligent man with a passion for his subject, a deep impatience with political correctness, and unremitting determination to weather whatever storms afflict him as he shepherds his views to a public market.
I’ve written before in the National Post and elsewhere about Best’s lonely battles with our society’s forces of repression. There Is No Difference began its public life as a post on a dedicated online site in 2014, copied to his legal firm’s. Shortly afterward, complaints were filed against him with the Law Society of Upper Canada (now the Law Society of Ontario), asking that Best be “disbarred or suspended” and that he be forced to apologize for using his law practice “to disseminate racist materials.”
After two years of stressful limbo, the Law Society graciously allowed that the excerpts submitted by the (unnamed) complainant were “not enough to merit a finding of any form of professional misconduct on their face.” (The last three words telegraph the ardent wish that they had been; apart from a dissenting group of new benchers, the Law Society’s board has increasingly demonstrated worrying Thought Police tendencies.)
Best believes the Indian Act is a benign form of apartheid, and advocates for the integration model of equal citizenship for all, a model promoted, for example, by Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who called the system “apartheid”), and the late Aboriginal lawyer William Wuttunee, author of Ruffled Feathers, who was marginalized and discredited as an “apple,” red on the outside, white on the inside.
Best believes the federal government must be the ultimate master in its own house for Canada to function as a healthy nation. He is fiercely critical of the Supreme Court’s 2004 emphasis on the “honour of the Crown” concept in its Haida Nation vs. British Columbia ruling, with key words “to consult and where appropriate, accommodate the Aboriginal interest” virtually decreeing a devolution of Crown sovereignty to Aboriginals, and effectively turning Indigenous bands into a third order of government with the power arbitrarily to advance or restrict Canada’s economic fortunes.
It’s easy for Indigenous activists to bash a white historian, or even an Aboriginal dissident without special standing like Wuttunee. But it will be more difficult to dismiss the opinion of a former Supreme Court justice. Best just came in for an unexpected stroke of luck. Former Supreme Court justice Jack Major (1992-2005) has given the book his endorsement in a letter discussed in an article by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP).
Andrew Coyne on the disgraceful habit of the federal government (and nine provincial governments) to look the other way when Quebec decides that some of the guarantees in the Charter don’t apply in La Belle Province:
For many observant persons, particularly Muslims, Sikhs and orthodox Jews, this amounts to a religious hiring bar: the wearing of the hijab, the turban and the kippa are key requirements of their faith, and as such core elements of their identity. To demand that they work uncovered is, in effect, to post a sign saying Muslims, Sikhs and Jews need not apply.
We should be clear on this. It’s not just a dress code, or an infringement of religious freedom, or religious discrimination, or those other abstract phrases you hear tossed about. We are talking about a law barring employment in much of the public sector — not just police and judges, but government lawyers and teachers — to certain religious minorities.
Existing workers may have been grandfathered, but only so long as they remain in their current jobs. Should they ever move, or seek a promotion, they will face the same restrictions. The signal to the province’s religious and, let’s say it, racial minorities, vulnerable as they will be feeling already after the mounting public vitriol to which they have been exposed in the name of the endless “reasonable accommodation” debate, is unmistakable: you are not wanted here. Not surprisingly, many are getting out — out of the public service, out of Quebec.
That this is actually happening, in 2019, in a province of Canada — members of religious minorities being driven from their jobs, and for no reason other than their religion — is sickening, and shameful. That shame is not reserved to Premier Francois Legault or his CAQ government, the people responsible for designing and implementing this disgraceful exercise in segregation, this manifestly cruel attempt to cleanse the province’s schools and courts of religious minorities. It is no less shaming to the rest of us, everywhere across Canada, so long as we permit it to continue.
That is, so far as we are capable of feeling it. But experience has taught us to look the other way when it comes to Quebec, to tell ourselves that it is none of our affair, that we must not raise a fuss when the province explicitly elevates the interests of its ethnic and linguistic majority over those of its minorities, or threatens the country’s life for long years at a time — the beloved “knife at the throat” strategy — to back its escalating fiscal and constitutional demands. We dare not. We cannot. For then Quebec would leave.
It could not only untangle the current mess in Parliament but have the almost equally attractive feature of sending his opponents into paroxysms of rage:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The consensus is that the Government is trapped in an iron vice that will now be tightened till it cracks. The truth, however, is that this vice is less of iron than of hot air.
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is a constitutional outrage. It allows a government to declare an emergency, and then to rule by decree. It should never have been made. But it was made; and it can now be used as an instrument of liberation.
The Act defines “emergency” as just about anything the authorities may dislike. One possible definition is “an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom.” (s.1(1)) This sounds a promising excuse. It seems to cover what the Opposition claims would be the effect of a No-Deal Brexit.
Triggering the Act requires no more than “a senior Minister of the Crown” – that is, Boris Johnson – to announce an Emergency. This done, he can make, alter or suspend almost any law he likes. (s.22) He can do this for a period of thirty days. (s.26) All he has to do is preface his decree with a statement that he “is satisfied that the regulations contain only provision which is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.” (s.20(5)(b)(ii))
He cannot change the Act itself, or the Human Rights Act. He cannot set up concentration camps for his opponents, or put them before a firing squad. But the Fixed Term Parliament Act is fair game. He could suspend that. Then he could dissolve Parliament in the traditional way.
He must, “as soon as is reasonably practicable,” lay his decrees before Parliament. (s.27(1)(a)) No doubt, the Parliament we have would punish him with an Act of Attainder. But this Parliament would no sooner reassemble after the prorogation than it would be dissolved. The Speaker would barely have time to open his mouth. Assuming the general election went as hoped, the next Parliament would not be inclined to dispute the circumstances of its birth.
All the opposition parties would go screaming mad. But, as said, we are not talking about concentration camps and firing squads. The only use of the Emergency would be to give a voice to the people. Who could legitimately deny that? As for sharp practice in general, the opposition parties have spent this year turning the Constitution upside down. Who could complain if the Government now joined in the fun?
Powered by WordPress
