How the Charter underminded Canadian democracy

The U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired and crafted by geniuses the likes of which the world had never seen and will never see again; the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on the other hand, was cobbled together a few years ago by a bunch of mediocrities, some of whom were actually French.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is – to borrow back a locution Mark Steyn has since borrowed from me – “a worthless piece of crap.”

I sat on a television panel once with Truffles the Hobbit, who asserted with a straight face that “Pierre Trudeau gave us our rights.” I wondered aloud what either God or even Thomas Jefferson would make of such an assertion, but what else would you expect from a twenty something Canadian who’s too stupid to really be Jewish.

We should have Charter burning parties.

Anyway, here’s Charles W. Moore:

Many Canadians, blinded by the seductive but hazily-defined notion of “rights,” welcomed Pierre Trudeau’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but in truth the Charter represented a radical handover of the reins of legal authority that should have worried every Canadian.

Prior to 1982, Canada’s cultural heritage and pre-Charter legal system operated under the principle, rooted in the Magna Carta, of the supremacy of Parliament, whose decisions regarding laws and statutes that govern were accountable to citizens at each election.

The Charter transferred the erstwhile authority of common law to the courts and unelected judges, unaccountable to anything but the judicial community’s subjective, too-often ideological, interpretation of the law. (…)

there’s a sizeable and (I think) growing constituency of Canadians who think the document has been a disaster, and would prefer to see it abolished and accountable parliamentary democracy restored in Canada.