Man is a social animal: an individual within a larger group of individuals, which leads to a constant question within politics: what are the roles of the individual and the state within our system of governance?
The ideal of Western Liberalism – the underlying essence of Canada with values of life, liberty, and property – is ever-present within our political institutions, but there is a constant flux of the importance of balancing the needs of the individual over those of a greater social good.
This leads to much frustration when we feel that government is infringing too much upon our fundamental rights.
Rights are something we rarely hear expressed within Canada; they are something we hear more often in an American context, and part of the reason for this is that they were not initially entrenched within our Constitution.
What constructs of rights we had came from our British heritage, which meant that they truly did not extend to the average person: rights were tied more to property and title, the economic power of a limited class of individuals rather than to all.
This meant that we were more subjects to government, rather than citizens, and even after we gained our enfranchisement (the right to vote), we were still treated as subjects. Power rested in the state, not in the individual.
John Diefenbaker would initially try to set forth a Bill of Rights, 1960, for Canadians, but, due to the nuances of constitutional law, it could never be entrenched within our legal system, and it would be Pierre Trudeau who would change that through the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982.
Though a detached document from the original Constitution Act, 1867, it was done through envisioning the Canadian Constitution as two separate documents with different functions: the first, the roles of government; the second, the powers of the individual.
The Charter, like all similar documents around the world, was designed to rebalance the asymmetrical power relationship between the individual and the state, and it was done because Trudeau recognized that government had far too much power within Canada.
Since 1982, there are a trail of challenges and Supreme Court decisions that now detail the rights of Canadians and the limitations placed upon government and its agencies. But we are, for the most part, still quite ignorant about those fundamental rights within Canada.
In more recent times, we have seen politicians challenge the courts, claiming they have usurped the power of Parliament (and the lessor governments in Canada), as if these rights are bad, but it behooves us to be aware of them.
Governments will naturally infringe upon our rights, though not necessarily through the intention of being oppressive, but through their intent to achieve certain goals.
In some cases, we could argue that this is for a greater good, but we should be aware that this could be imposing a hardship upon a group of individuals too. And when we ignore this, we see citizens, fellow Canadians, being turned back into subjects. Are we comfortable with that?
- Reprinted from the St. Albert Gazette, a Great West newspaper. Written by John Kennair.
