CBC.ca, 26 Sept 13
milnews.ca said:
Thanks for the extra info - I was almost going to throw this into the Robo-calls thread, but wrong election fit.E.R. Campbell said:
E.R. Campbell said:
E.R. Campbell said:
Secular Charter case shows Supreme Court judges can be ideological – and wrong
EMMETT MACFARLANE
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Oct. 01 2013
A number of legal commentators have expressed dismay at the reports that former Supreme Court justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé has signed a petition in support of the much-maligned Charter of Quebec Values, a highly problematic law that, if passed, would prohibit public servants from wearing “overt” religious clothing or symbols at work.
The bill effectively targets visible minorities, who are more likely to wear “overt” religious garb like turbans or head scarves, and so it is a prime example of systemic discrimination. The law is plainly unconstitutional. That a former Supreme Court judge would support such an obviously defective law is disheartening in itself, but that is not the only reason to be concerned about Ms. L’Heureux-Dubé’s public support for it. Had a sitting judge signed the petition there would be little doubt about the problem: by articulating a political position on an issue that may come before the Court, a judge would be tainting his or her claim to neutrality.
Whether it is problematic for a retired judge to involve herself in political activity is much less clear. In the modern era, a retired Supreme Court judge would be unlikely to enter partisan politics, but a number have gone on to other public roles, including Louise Arbour’s stint as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Frank Iacobucci’s role on various commissions of inquiry. Retired judges also routinely sit on the boards of directors of various corporations or take up positions with law firms. None of these are considered inappropriate, but it is rare to see a retired judge sign a petition regarding a controversial public policy.
Yet in another fundamental way, L’Heureux-Dubé’s foray into a political issue is a good thing, because it helps expose the general myth that some in the legal profession continue to cling to: that judging – even as it applies to something as value-laden as rights – is not political. It is a myth Ms. L’Heureux-Dubé herself helped propagate when she was interviewed before the House of Commons standing committee on justice in 2004, which was examining reform to the Supreme Court appointments process. Asked about the role ideology might play in judging, L’Heureux-Dubé stated: “We talk about ideology, but very few of us [judges] have any. You may not perceive that, but we look at a case by first reading and knowing the facts and then reading the briefs, and then we make up our minds.”
A generous interpretation of these comments would not take them as literal – everyone has an ideology, it is what allows us to make sense of the world around us – but rather as a suggestion that judges can simply separate themselves from ideology and apply the law (as a thing somehow autonomous from politics) in an objective fashion. But would anyone seriously believe that if Ms. L’Heureux-Dubé were on the Court today she would refrain from upholding the Quebec Values Charter as constitutional?
It sometimes appears that judges would like to have their constitutional cake and eat it too. By supporting the notion that courts can reach the “correct” answer on where broad constitutional phrases like “freedom of expression” begin and end – often settling controversies about which reasonable people might reasonably disagree – by somehow detaching themselves from their political ideology, we are presented with a caricature of judges as infallible oracles.
As I explore in my book Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role on the Supreme Court, judging is distinct from normal political decision-making, but not because politics plays no role. We need an impartial judiciary to settle disputes between governments, and between governments and rights-bearing citizens. And there are a host of institutional factors that help ensure judging is done in a principled fashion. But it is fundamental for basic civic literacy and for a healthy democratic society to recognize that the law, especially when it comes to rights, cannot be separated from politics.
In some respects, Ms. L’Heureux-Dubé’s political activity underscores the extent to which judges and the legal profession sometimes treat judicial independence as if it were a one-way street. Judicial independence is intended to immunize courts from the pressures and ugly influences of everyday grubby politics, or from allowing partisan or personal interests to infiltrate and bias decision-making. But it has been extended in absurd ways, including a Supreme Court decision that determined how judges’ salaries are set.
In 2011, immigration minister Jason Kenney criticized Federal Court judges for a pattern of decision-making that he felt undermined the government’s immigration policies. After the Canadian Bar Association wrote a letter of protest, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin weighed in during a speech: “I was certainly – and I think all judges were – very pleased when an issue arose earlier this year when a minister of the Crown seemed to suggest that some judges were insufficiently solicitous to government policy. We were very, very gratified to see your president writing a powerful public letter to the minister in question, reminding the minister of the importance of public confidence in an impartial judiciary, that bases its decisions on the law and not on government policy.”
It is true that attacks on the integrity or character of judges from political actors would be unseemly and highly problematic. But to suggest that any criticism from elected representatives directed at courts, especially those focused on the reasoning and decisions rendered, is verboten, displays a rather extreme conception of judicial independence and, it is worth noting, an apparent sensitivity to any public recognition of the basic fact that courts can sometimes get it wrong. This is a very unhealthy yet pervasive attitude, and it has only encouraged our elected representatives to leave all manner of difficult policy or moral questions to courts instead of democratic politics.
It is in helping to uncover this broader picture that Ms. L’Heureux-Dubé does us all a favor, for her support of the Quebec values charter is not only proof that judges can be wrong, but is also proof they can be political as well.
Emmett Macfarlane is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. His book, Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role[/i] was published this year by UBC Press.[/i]
pbi said:
Don’t be fooled, the Parti Québécois has never been inclusive
Andrew Coyne
04/10/13
Monsieur would like a word. “Until now,” Jacques Parizeau writes in Le Journal de Montréal, “the question of religious clothing has never been the subject of regulation.” Why, then, has the Parti Québécois proposed to prohibit the wearing of religious symbols in the public service? And why do so many Quebecers support it?
“I think there is only one explanation: Islam.” While public support for such a ban is “understandable,” given the images of violence that are “about the only contact most Quebecers have with the Islamic world,” it would be “preferable” to limit the ban to police officers, prosecutors, judges and others with coercive powers, “for the moment.” As written, he warns, the proposal allows federalists to present themselves as the “real defenders” of Quebec’s minorities. Quel horreur!
For this mildly worded admonition — ban Sikhs and Jews and Muslims from working as cops, but hold off on firing all the minority doctors and teachers and daycare workers because you’re making the federalists look good — Parizeau is being hailed on all sides as the voice of reason, the conscience of the party, the champion of religious tolerance. Why, his name is even being mentioned in the same breath as those famous advocates of liberal pluralism, Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry!
If nothing else, Parizeau’s intervention will cement an emerging media narrative. By promoting what amounts to a policy of institutionalized discrimination in the public service, runs this line, the PQ is breaking faith with its own traditions of tolerance and open-mindedness. Years of efforts to reach out to the province’s minority communities are being squandered. It’s a sad decline for the party of René Lévesque.
Thus is the party exonerated, even as it is being convicted. This is not the “real” PQ. It is some other PQ, an imposter perhaps. The real PQ apparently exists in another dimension, where it does not propose measures to harass and confine minorities; where it does not speak freely of “nous” to mean, not the whole of the province’s population, but only the French-speaking, overwhelmingly white majority; where it does not harbour members who point out that, écoute, c’est John Charest on his birth certificate, or fulminate about self-pitying Jews, or propose limiting future referendum votes to Québécois de souche. You just can’t see it.
The suspension of disbelief this requires is not possible without some quite heroic historical revisionism. It isn’t only a few cranks among the grassroots, after all, who have nurtured the party’s reputation for chauvinism. It is its leaders. If it is rich to see Parizeau transformed into a beacon of liberalism, he of the notorious “money and the ethnic vote” outburst (watch the clip, and hear the roar of the crowd in response), it is no less curious to see it said of the others.
Landry, who now says he disagrees with the ban, was just lately defending it: in any case, is this the same Bernard Landry who was heard abusing a Mexican-born hotel clerk (“it’s because of people like you that we lost”) the night of the 1995 referendum? Bouchard may have finally broken with the party over the Yves Michaud affair (“I have no desire to engage in any kind of discussion about the Holocaust and the vote of ethnic and cultural communities”), but was it not the same Bouchard who declared that “Canada was not a real country” — not real, because not based on the same ethnocultural vision as his own? As for the sainted Lévesque — surely not the same Levesque who inveighed darkly against “Westmount Rhodesians,” who accused Pierre Elliott Trudeau of following “the Anglo-Saxon part of his heritage”?
But, well, Parizeau was probably drunk, and Landry was frustrated, and Bouchard was speaking off the cuff, and that wasn’t the real Lévesque…
Quite so. When they were on their best behaviour, shaved and sober and conscious of appearances, all were capable of sustaining the PQ’s preferred self-image as a liberal, inclusive movement dedicated to creating a harmonious multi-ethnic state that just happened to want to break up the most successful modern example of it.
At times, PQ leaders could sound positively Trudeauiste in their devotion to a civic, non-ethnic nationalism. A Quebecer was anyone who wanted to be, was the line. Until those unguarded moments, when the mask slipped.
It seems to me the party of Pauline Marois is not so different from the party these men led, nor is a law requiring the signs of religious minorities be hidden from view so very far out of line with its historic approach to the signs of linguistic minorities. All that’s changed is the frankness: what was implied in the others is overt in Marois. Or perhaps it is simply a putting aside of self-delusion.
There is a basic, unresolvable incompatibility between a pluralist, open, civic nationalism and a nationalism devoted to the interests of a particular ethnocultural group. No amount of careful obsequies can paper this over. Once you have freed yourself from the obligation, incumbent on governments in every other liberal state, to govern on behalf of all your citizens equally — once you have decided, frankly and unashamedly, to speak of and for “nous” — you have made your choice. If the province’s ethnic minorities have failed to respond to the PQ’s entreaties, that may explain why. If, after all, it were really about an inclusive nationalism, with equality for all, if that were the society you were trying to create, what need would there be to separate?
Péquistes, then, can be divided into two groups. Those who have persuaded themselves there is no contradiction, that they can be both inclusive and exclusive at the same time. And those who have shed the illusion.
Postmedia News
How Stephen Harper can embrace a genuine consumer-friendly agenda
Scott Stinson
11/10/13
The scene: A sunny, autumn morning on Parliament Hill. A crowd gathers on the steps in front of the Peace Tower. Someone ascends the steps and prepares to speak. He’s wearing jeans and his jacket doesn’t quite fit right. Must be a journalist.
My fellow Canadian consumers, we live in extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary opportunity. All across this great land of ours, we are burdened by so many modern millstones. Our politicians are loath to address them, wary of the vested interests that they protect. But we demand courage. We demand cheaper things!
Our Conservative government will this week, in this very building behind me, deliver a Speech from the Throne aimed, we are told, at putting “consumers first.” It will, reportedly, promise to make the cellular phone market more competitive, all in the name of increasing consumer choice. And it will curb excessive credit-card interest rates, even though consumers can avoid paying those by not charging things that they cannot afford.
That, friends, is fine. But is it really the best we can do? We live in an age where the transmission of information and goods is vastly more efficient than mankind has ever known. It is an age in which advances in technology have made us all citizens of a single global community.
And yet we Canadians pay punitively more than do our neighbours for milk. And cheese. Books and magazines. And automobiles — particularly the nice ones.
That, friends, is not all. Even when we aren’t subject to inflated prices for certain goods, Canadians are starved for choice. Television signals, the postal service, a bottle of wine: heavy regulation means the buyer either can’t get what he wants, or is stuck choosing between poor options.
Have we not outgrown such antiquities? If the Conservative government, nominally in support of free markets but, till now, demonstrably interested in something far different, is serious about a consumers’ agenda, it is time to send them this message: We will not accept half-measures!
If you want to truly put shoppers first, Mr. Prime Minister, there are some easy ways to do it — not by adding further regulations to businesses, but by ending our government’s very own attacks on consumer freedom.
AN END TO SUPPLY MANAGEMENT
Many years ago, our governments instituted a system called supply management. It has never been a source of much public consternation, probably because trying to explain it is complicated and anytime someone reads a sentence that includes the words “quota,” “tariff” and “supply management,” he just skips that article and heads straight for the celebrity gossip news.
[Pauses for laughter.]
Heh. Thank you. But what all this supply-management talk means is that the government artificially suppresses the supply of dairy and poultry products, which directly increases the costs to consumers, and restricts the importation of the same products, decreasing consumer choice.
The bizarre math of supply management is this: 35 million Canadians pay more for household staples like milk, cheese and eggs, to the benefit of fewer than 13,000 dairy
farms. Estimates vary on how much higher our prices are than those of other Western nations, but a conservative estimate is that Canadians pay an extra $75 annually ✓ Right! Supply management
on our grocery bills. Don’t even get me started on the inflated price of pizza. Bad though that is, the dairy tax — because that’s what it is — is even worse because it impacts has to go; the sooner the better.
low-income families the most; the poorest among us can least afford the extra cost.
And what, precisely, is the point? To protect our pastoral image of the iconic family farm? There are perhaps 10% as many Canadian dairy farms today as there were 40 years ago. The world changed, and we adapted.
But wait, say this system’s defenders: Supply management ensures our food security. Yes, parents, are you so mad as to be willing to expose your children to non-Canadian eggs? And yet, we do just that all the time, buying imported produce, meat and grains every week. Let us not be fooled: Food security is the straw man of our times.
WE DEMAND GENUINE FREE TRADE
My fellow bargain-hunters, Canadians, simply pay far more every day than we ought to for a constellation of other products that do not come out of a cow or a chicken. This is due to the system of tariffs that Ottawa imposes on imports. These hidden taxes — because that’s what they are — are automatically applied at the border, and subsequently passed on to consumers in the form of higher retail prices. It’s one of the main reasons why, even as the Canadian dollar in recent years reached parity with the U.S. dollar, we were still stuck paying more than Americans for so many everyday items.
Here’s another way of looking at it: the federal treasury rakes in almost $4-billion each year (!!) from import tariffs. It’s such a golden goose for Ottawa that last year, even as the purportedly “free market” Tories were reducing tariffs on high-profile imports like hockey equipment and baby clothes, for an estimated $76-million in savings for consumers, the government was, in the very same budget, raising tariff rates on imports from 72 countries, which was expected to bring in an extra $330-million in duties.
Friends, math is not my strong suit, but I am certain that 76 is far less than 330.
How do these tariffs impact consumers? Cotton T-shirts and pants are subject to an 18% tariff in Canada, as are bed linens. Automobile parts, hair dryers, bicycles, lamps, mattresses, hats, shoes, suitcases, and on and on. If you bought something in Canada, you probably absorbed the cost of a tariff on it. Why do these things persist in a world where free trade is supposed to be the order of the day? In a submission to the Senate Finance Committee last year, the Retail Council of Canada argued that many tariffs remain in place simply because they have never been challenged by free-trade disputes. It’s almost philosophical. Why do these tariffs exist? Because they do.
And that’s not all. In a submission to that same finance committee, which was studying why Canadian retail prices remain stubbornly higher than in the United States, Canadian Tire said it examined 15,697 imported products and found that 78% of them had a higher tariff rate in Canada than they did in the United States. We call ourselves a free-trading nation? Our legislators should be ashamed to even utter that phrase.
In theory, tariffs are meant to protect domestic manufacturers, but that’s a theory that should hold much less sway today. Domestic manufacturers have in many cases ✓ Right, again! We need real free trade now!
already moved production overseas in order to remain competitive in a global market. Why impose tariffs on clothing, when domestic clothing-makers produce everything Don't wait to negotiate it away, just do it.
in foreign countries? The world changed, and manufacturers adapted. Our government, tragically, has not.
The tariff situation is particularly egregious in the case of automobiles. The rate on vehicles imported from non-NAFTA countries is 6.1% in Canada, compared with 2.5% in the United States. And it is routinely true that vehicles that are manufactured in Canada can be purchased for less money in the U.S. than within our borders. As the Senate Finance Committee noted, someone could visit a dealership within walking distance of GM’s Camaro plant in Oshawa and face a list price of almost $5,000 higher than the list price of the same car — in Hawaii. To put a finer point on it, it could well be cheaper to ship a GM car across half the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to Seattle (an $1,100 expense) and drive it to Vancouver, than to buy the car in this country, where it is made (although you’ll still have to pay Canadian tariffs and taxes at the border).
AN END TO UNCOMPETITIVE SALES TAXES
There are so many other ways in which our government buries consumer interests beneath some other dubious policy goal. Sure, this government has cut the GST by two points, and that’s all to
the good. But gasoline prices, after all taxes are included, remain about 30% higher here than in the United States. Or consider air travel. Canadians have long been used to paying some of the ✘ Not so fast.
highest costs for flights in the world, even for short domestic trips. When the government finally decided to do something about the fact that someone in Toronto, once all the taxes and fees are Governments need money.
included, is paying twice the costs of the equivalent flight out of Buffalo, did the government cut taxes and regulations to lower costs? No, it passed a “passenger bill of rights” that simply forced Consumption taxes are better than income taxes
the airlines to include all the fees up front. Thanks for that, Ottawa. Now we really know how badly we are being screwed.
FREE OUR ENTERTAINMENT
In Canada, when someone decides to subscribe to a cable or satellite television service, he is immediately subjected to choosing large bundles of channels, even if he would only like to
watch a few. Our government-sanctioned broadcast regulator is forever deciding what channels consumers will pay for. But shouldn’t the choice be the other way around? Can we not ✓ Yes, again!
have the basic freedom to choose which channels we want to pay for?
Also on the culture front, our governments charge us levies every time we buy blank digital media, such as recordable CDs and — if you’re still into that sort of thing — cassettes. At $0.30 per blank CD, the levy surpasses the cost of the actual product. The revenue collected is redirected to musical performers as supposed recompense for fans copying their music. As if anyone copies music using cassettes and CDs anymore.
And consider this little nugget, something called the de minimus threshold, which is the limit below which you can have something purchased and shipped to your country without paying duty and taxes. In Canada, it is a ridiculously low $20. In the U.S., it’s $200. So a Canadian who orders a $24.99 book from a U.S. seller will usually end up paying about twice the retail price once all the taxes and fees are added. Online shopping should be a staple of our modern economy, and yet that low threshold only serves to choke it off.
A TOAST TO RETAIL FREEDOM
I could go on all day, friends, but I realize most of you have jobs you should be getting to. I would suggest ending by raising our glasses to a consumer-friendly future, but of course it’s too
early to buy a bottle of anything other than water around here. Our provinces regulate the sale of alcohol so tightly that it’s as though our leaders think the ability to buy a bottle of Burgundy I agree, but it's a provincial matter, not federal
from a corner store at 10 p.m. will lead to total societal breakdown. Have Alberta, B.C., and Quebec, which have loosened restrictions on the sale of alcohol, been rendered wastelands?
Alcohol is also a tragic example of the trade barriers that persist between provinces. Most of our provinces are still stuck with Prohibition-era laws that restrict the flow of wine and other libations, even within our own borders. Ottawa has the power to force telecom companies to end four-year cellular phone contracts (something consumers could always avoid by, get this, not signing one); it can find a way to persuade our provinces to end the temperance-era tyranny on beer and wine. It succeeded with bringing (most) provinces to their senses with the HST, it can sure as heck do it with Chardonnay.
My friends, the path for our government is clear. Our “Conservative” government can stop right now with the token half-measures and populist, pandering crackdown on the practices of credit-card companies, telcos and airlines. It is time to embrace an authentically consumer-friendly agenda. Emancipate our cows and chickens. Tear down the tariff walls. Free our airwaves. Liberate our booze. And, in short, do all that can be done to encourage competition and truly free trade. This is what will really benefit the consumers you purport to care so much about — and with it, our economy. We have heard a lot, Mr. Harper, about your strong, stable, national majority government. Now do something useful with it.
With apologies to John F. Kennedy, we stand for freedom. And lower prices.
National Post
• Email: sstinson@nationalpost.com
E.R. Campbell said:
Stephen Harper Condemns Stephen Harper
Friday, 27 May 2011
I've been writing a lot about the indefensible concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister and for my troubles I have been called a Harper-hater, a Liberal shill, a hypocrite, and various other names that cannot be repeated here. In response, I will do something I generally avoid: I will quote myself.
"The operation of the government is more reliant on janitors than MPs, especially backbenchers, whose jobs have literally been reduced to standing and sitting on command.... More astoundingly, even cabinet ministers have been stripped of real authority. Political scientist Donald Savoie describes cabinet as little more than a focus group for the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). That leaves all power in the person of the prime minister -and the handful of courtiers and jesters who have his ear. Law, regulation, appointment: All the acts of the federal government are subject to the whim of one man. L'état, c'est Jean."
Yes, that was me writing about prime minister Jean Chrétien in December, 2000. I dropped a word or two to set up the punchline. The "backbenchers" I mentioned? In the original, they are "Liberal backbenchers." I mentioned a few in the column. Remember John Nunziata? Banished for dissent. And who can forget the Liberal MP who cried after voting against her conscience? A great moment for democracy.
Loyal Chrétienites were quite comfortable with the status quo, naturally. But most of the rest of us spent a great deal of time complaining about the centralization of power. Conservatives were particularly incensed.
"In today's democratic societies, organizations share power," wrote two conservative intellectuals. "Corporations, churches, universities, hospitals, even public sector bureaucracies make decisions through consultation, committees, and consensus-building techniques. Only in politics do we still entrust power to a single faction expected to prevail every time over the opposition by sheer force of numbers. Even more anachronistically, we persist in structuring the governing team like a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power to appoint, discipline, and expel subordinates. Among major democracies, only Great Britain so ruthlessly concentrates power."
That's a pretty good summary of what I've been writing lately about the Conservative government. Which is curious. Because the authors are Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper.
Flanagan is a conservative political scientist. And Stephen Harper, well, you know him.
As Postmedia's Randy Boswell reported a few days ago, Flanagan and Harper published a long essay about the state of Canadian politics and governance in a conservative magazine. It was late 1996. And the authors were as unsparing in their criticism as they were daring in their proposals for reform.
"Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship, not under a strict one-party rule, but under a one-party-plus system beset by the factionalism, regionalism and cronyism that accompany any such system." Its embodiment is the Liberal party. "It is a true centre party, comparable to the Christian Democrats in Italy, the Liberal Democrats in Japan, and Congress in India, standing for nothing very definite but prevailing against a splintered opposition," Harper and Flanagan wrote. "It avoids ideological commitments and brings together people simply interested in exercising power and dispensing patronage."
Hope lay in two changes. First, the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties should start working together, "leading to a system of sister parties." Eventually, this "coalition of the right" may win government. "Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, such alliances are actually the norm in the democratic world."
And how could such a thing be set into motion? "The two parties could begin by agreeing to advocate electoral reform." Scrapping the first-past-the-post system is a realistic possibility, Harper and Flanagan wrote, because the NDP would support it, "allowing even a minority conservative government to pass the necessary legislation."
It was an essential step. "Many of Canada's problems stem from a winner-take-all style of politics that allows governments in Ottawa to impose measures abhorred by large areas of the country."
Change a few details and the Harper/Flanagan essay could be published today. Word for word.
Hyper-centralization of power in the PMO? Even more than in Chrétien's day. A meek and obedient ruling caucus? Just like Chrétien's, but without a Martinite faction.
Hopeless opposition? Ruthless exploitation of advantage? Political expediency the only consistent feature of policy making? Three more checks.
Cronyism and patronage? Jean Chrétien wouldn't have dared try what Harper just pulled in the Senate.
And the basis for all of this is the first-past-the-post electoral system, which turned the minority of a fraction who voted Conservative -- 39 per cent of the 61 per cent of eligible voters who cast a ballot -- into a mandate for four years of unchecked prime ministerial power unlike anything in the democratic world.
"Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator, because there is no way to stop a majority government," Conservative senator Bert Brown observed recently.
There was a time when conservatives found that appalling. But an awful lot of them seem quite comfortable with it today.
What they find appalling, what makes them quiver with indignation, is a journalist who makes the same arguments they once did about a prime minister who has become what he once opposed.
I guess we'll see ....GAP said:
Wherever they live.Crantor said:
GAP said:
