Friday, January 28, 2011

Trudeau's Weapon Against Personal Responsibility

Yes, Lorne Gunter is talking about the Charter - and all the "human rights" industry that ends up robbing Canadians of their rights rather than protecting them.
The Charter as Trudeau conceived it was always doomed to expand group power at the expense of individual rights, because concurrent with the adoption of the Charter, Trudeau created an enormous state apparatus — human rights commissions, activist courts, government-subsidized special interest groups — that would leverage the Charter to re-engineer Canadian society. If Trudeau had genuinely seen the state as such a threat to individual liberty, why would he have subordinated individual rights to such giant institutional structures? Talk about putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.
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Perhaps it was his training in civil law, whereby rights are granted by the state — unlike in the common law tradition, whereby rights are seen as something natural that pre-existed the state. If you believe the state is the original granter of rights, I suppose it also makes some sense to believe you can put the state in charge of protecting rights.

In any event, the result of this vision, in the Canadian post-Charter context, has been that we have given up personal responsibility for safeguarding our own rights in favour of whining to government to make others give us what we want.
And, as if that wasn't enough, Ontario has moved to subordinate their education sector to those freedom-snatching commissions. Again, socially twisted lefties, in the name of "equality" and "tolerance", chose to put special interest and designated victim groups and their grievances ahead of the children's best interest (not to mention the parents').

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