You can’t trust the Charter

Aren’t you glad I didn’t add “stupid” to the end of that sentence? To put one’s faith in the Charter for the preservation of rights and freedoms is very stupid, though, so it would not have been out of place.

The Charter sets out to preserve and guarantee our rights and freedoms, being freedom of speech, opinion and belief, association and assembly, voting and so forth. The framers of any constitution of government such as the Charter are invariably aware, be they framing the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, or our own Charter, that the greatest and most terrible violations of rights in history have always been by governments against their own people. Prof. R. J. Rummel finds that in the 20th Century alone, almost 170 million people were murdered by agents of their own governments, quite apart from war. This is evidently nothing new, since Rummel’s research into pre-20th Century ‘democide’ shows a fall in the Chinese population from 50 million to only 7 in the period of strife between the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdom period (220-222 AD), not to mention Jenghiz Khan, Timur Lenk, etc.

The Charter is framed, however, by our own government. Thus, it is a document set out by the government setting limits on what the government shall do. For those opposed to corporatism, this is akin to asking the largest corporation in the land to set out the laws on corporate ethics. It’s like the wolves sitting down and writing out a promise not to eat the sheep.

Furthermore, the Charter is interpreted by the courts, whose judges are paid from tax money gathered by the government, and who are appointed by the same government. It is enforced by the police, whose wages also come from the government. The whole judicial system that shall supposedly enforce the Charter is entirely within the hands of the government, police, judges, prosecutors, prisons, and the army. What we have effectively done is to give government all the power, and say, “Police yourself.” Clearly, such an arrangement will last precisely as long as the government wishes it to, because there are no checks or balances outside of the apparatus of government. There may be elections, however, the government has also decided when to hold elections and how. Jean Chretien’s party funding reforms, ostensibly to limit corporate influence in politics but in fact giving a big advantage to the incumbent party, is a minor example. Paul Martin’s flouting of democratic convention and insistence on running a government without the confidence of the House is another. Since the government decides what comprises good conduct and then makes and enforces the rules that are supposed to guarantee good conduct, there’s really nothing to stop them.

A greater flaw of the Charter is that it contains no protection of property rights. Without property rights, all other rights are meaningless. For instance, consulting the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, Chapter X, we see a host of rights granted to citizens: freedom of speech, religion and assembly, inviolability of the person, etc. However, 1936 was Stalin’s time and for two years after that Constitution, approximately 8,000 people would be murdered by the Soviet regime every day - one murder every 12 seconds. The Soviet constitution, of course, did not protect property rights either.

The problem, therefore, with an absence of property rights is that without them, other rights are meaningless. Freedom of the press is impossible if the State owns all printing presses, television studios and broadcast antennae. Freedom of association and assembly are impossible if the State owns every meeting hall. Freedom of movement is impossible if cars, buses, trains and planes are all State property. After all, if the State controls all of these things, then it shall decide who uses them, and the chosen people will invariably be those who favour the State. Read recent blog entries on the CBC by our contributors for examples of this uncomfortably close to home. The CBC, State property, is ostensibly run for the Canadian people but is increasingly run for the benefit of the government.

The Canadian State, of course, does not own all property. It certainly has pretensions to controlling all property and persons within Canada, by dint of its taxation of almost everything it can see. However, there is nothing within the Charter to prevent the State from actually seizing any or all property within Canadian borders, at which point, like the Soviet citizens between 1936 and 1938, our very lives would depend on the goodwill of the government. Conservatives who advocate a government limited by constitution should bear in mind the lesson of the USA, a nation born with a minimal, laissez-faire government and developed in the most favourable of circumstances, yet today has a government that controls a third of the economy and is busily stripping its citizenry of what the original framers would insist were fundamental rights. If a constitutionally limited government can fail so spectacularly in these circumstances, it is unlikely that it would succeed anywhere, ever.

The USA at least has the ACLU, flawed though it may be (many allege that it will not fight for the rights of social conservatives, for instance), but in Canada, the only truly effective check we have on government power is not the Charter, but bloody revolution, with uncertain results. To put your faith in the Charter is to be a sheep who puts faith in the promises of wolves.