For once in Canada law triumphs over judicial virtue signaling

The Supreme Court of Canada just ruled that Justin Trudeau’s Bill C 69 was largely unconstitutional.  Bill C69 gives jurisdiction of absolutely everything to the Federal government if the feds deem the environmental impact sufficiently large.  Basically it is power grab by Justin Trudeau.  It is his attempt to do an end run around the constitution.

The way that the Canadian Constitution is written the federal government is supposed to be in charge of very little.  This annoys federal politicians because they view themselves as omnipotent superior beings who should have the final say on everything.  The traditional way around the constitution has always been hold tax dollars hostage.  The federal government over taxes citizens then promises to return some of the money to the provinces if the province agrees to do things the way Ottawa wants them done.  This was not enough for Justin Trudeau so he passed a law that allows him to override provinces whenever he wants.

The law was clearly unconstitutional yet this ruling was quite unexpected because the Canadian Supreme court does not have a great track record of upholding the constitution.  Judicial appointments in Canada are political and unlike the US there is no public vetting so Canadians are largely unaware that Judges are political insiders.  They are appointed based on ideological purity not judicial expertise.  Even with this rare ruling the ideological influence is apparent in the opinions of the dissenting judges.

Dissenting Justices Andromache Karakatsanis and Mahmud Jamal wrote that they believed the act was constitutional in its entirety. 

“Environmental protection requires action by all levels of government because each — whether by action or inaction — can affect the environment,” the dissenting opinion reads.

“This shared responsibility is ‘neither unusual nor unworkable’ in a federal state such as Canada. Rather, it reflects this Court’s flexible approach to federalism, which recognizes that overlapping powers are unavoidable and intergovernmental cooperation is essential.”

There is no shared responsibility in the constitution and the court is not supposed to have a flexible approach to anything.  Judges are not supposed to read things in to laws that are not there and were never meant to be there, but these judges do.  In their opinion anything they feel is important, like environmental protection, should override the constitution.

This is precisely why Canadians found themselves without legal protection during COVID.  Every single COVID mitigation measure violated individual rights but too few judges in Canada care about individual rights or the law.  It is about what the feel to be correct.  COVID tyranny was the natural outcome of a judiciary corrupted by politics and ideology.  The courts should have protected us but they did not.  Too many judges are just overgrown children who think their feelings are the only thing that matters.  Thomas Sowell said it best.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.