Now that Justin Trudeau is Canada’s prime minister, it might be worth revisiting his previous Charter-based critique of Stephen Harper. The op-ed below appeared in the National Post on April 17, 2012; it is based on a more extended piece — Charter Hyperbole: the New Politics of Heresy — in the c2c Journal.
In 1982, Pierre Trudeau realized his dream of a constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thirty years later, Trudeau’s son Justin, Liberal MP for Papineau, excoriated Stephen Harper for turning his back on major policies wrought by Charter politics. If Harper had his way, Justin suggested, Canada would be “going against” abortion and same-sex marriage. Fortunately, the real Canada, the Canada defined in part by these policies, had thus far resisted Harper’s reactionary plans. “If I believed that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper,” Justin declared, “I would think of wanting to make Quebec a country.”
The irony is delicious. While Trudeau père expected the Charter to unify the country, its imposition on an unwilling Quebec had from the beginning fuelled Quebec separatism. Now, according to Trudeau fils, Quebec might have to separate to preserve Charter policies that “Harper’s Canada” wanted to abandon. Quebec, which had so strongly resisted the Charter, had become its truest child. What lesson should Quebecers draw from the imposition of the Charter against the province’s wishes? Separate! What lesson should they draw from Harper’s opposition to Charter policies? Separate! Funny how the separatists get to have their cake and eat it too.
Funny also how Harper’s opponents, both in Quebec and throughout the rest of Canada, keep invoking his “hidden agenda” on such Charter issues as abortion and same-sex marriage. Given Harper’s manifest allergy to these issues, this charge has always been laughable, but it was easier to maintain during his minority government years, when his alleged desire to move Canada “backward” on these issues would have provoked defeat in the House of Commons. Electing a majority Conservative government, opponents maintained, would liberate the “hidden agenda” and see it implemented.
Well, even with a majority government, Harper runs as fast and as far as possible from the abortion and same-sex marriage issues. True, his first minority government held a free vote on whether legislatively to reinstate the traditional heterosexual definition of marriage, but Harper knew he would lose that vote and arguably was happy to lose it. In any case, he has since avoided the issue and disavowed any gambits launched by socially conservative backbenchers. Surely a majority Prime Minister who can do what he wants has no hidden agenda with respect to issues he assiduously avoids. Right?
Wrong! In light of Stephen Harper’s iron-willed and micromanaging control over his caucus, those backbench initiatives must be his own carefully managed trial balloons, intended to gauge public receptivity to the first steps in implementing the “hidden agenda.” Only the resistance of the “real Canada,” the one that keeps Justin Trudeau from jumping ship, punctures these trial balloons and prevents them from maturing into reactionary policy. Even in a majority government context, the hidden agenda charge survives.
As James Madison famously observed, exaggerated partisan zealotry is inevitable in a free society. It thus comes as no surprise to find it on all sides of the political spectrum. Conservative MP Larry Miller engaged in reductio ad Hitlerum when he reminded Canadian gun control advocates that they shared their policy preference with Adolph Hitler. And who will forget Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ claim that to stand against warrantless Internet snooping by government officials is to stand with child pornographers? In putting partisan opponents “beyond the pale,” such rhetoric echoes the age-old politics of heresy. In Justin Trudeau’s version, anyone who questions abortion on demand or same-sex marriage commits unCanadian Charter heresy.
In fact, the Supreme Court’s 1988 Morgentaler decision, which triggered the current abortion policy, pointedly left the door open to more regulation than we now have. Most of the Morgentaler judges would have had no difficulty recognizing as legitimately Canadian the kind of middle-ground policies on abortion that exist in many Western democracies. They thought there was room for reasonable disagreement and hence for parliamentary policy-making on this issue.
Clearly, judicial moderation does not inoculate against Charter hyperbole in the wider political process. For Justin, policies that seemed legislatively eligible to the judges would put Canada beyond the pale, making it a country he could no longer “recognize” and might have to leave.
That swords are generally not drawn nowadays to back up such intemperate claims — at least not in countries like Canada — shows that they are typically not meant as seriously as the claims of true religious zealots. For this, we can thank such founders of liberal democracy as James Madison and Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier, who sought to substitute commerce for religion as the central public preoccupation. As those same founders warned, however, we should keep a careful eye on even the emptier forms of inflationary rhetoric that inevitably persist; these include the Charter hyperbole that three decades in Charterland have taught us to expect.