“I wrote the piece below for Victoria Day 2002. Six years on, I’m not half so optimistic about the ability of the Britannic inheritance to overcome the challenges it faces.
“Thanks to my present travails in the deranged Dominion, I’ve had to acknowledge the fantastic scale of the Trudeaupian project and the remorselessness with which it has hollowed out Canadian institutions.
“Like Rick Hiebert, my colleagues at Maclean’s had taken note of the 1938 Supreme Court decision on press freedom, which would appear to be dispositive — were it not that judges are ever less respectful of pre-Charter decisions.
“Like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Canada has its Year Zero, and a revolutionary’s disdain for the pre-Trudeaupian world. So, on this Victoria Day, I celebrate not modish cant but ancient liberties, in the hope that one day we can recover them…”
