National Post (National Edition)
This year, much less to celebrate
As the country limped toward Canada Day, there were not a few voices suggesting that the entire nation-building enterprise was a venal venture, corrupting all generations down to the present day.
Leave aside for another day the questions raised by those who wished to cancel Canada Day. Those who are generally proud of the Canadian project face a grim reality, too. Three things which usually rank high in surveys about what is best about Canada are in rough shape.
First, good government. It is one of our distinguishing features from the American behemoth, namely that “we the people” did not form a government as much as a series of governments assembled various peoples. We had no Wild West; the North-West Mounted Police went first to establish order. So it was that our constitutional history is rooted in “peace, order and good government.”
That's a tough sell today. Canadian confidence in good government has taken a pounding during the pandemic, both from those who think the various governments have done too little and those who think they have done too much. Both sides are frustrated by the contradictions and confusions, not only at the beginning, but even to the present day. They seem to agree that whether too little or too much, it has not been done well.
The question of who was governing even came into play, as vast areas of the common life were handed over to unelected, mostly unknown and largely unaccountable health officials to regulate. Were Canadians being governed at all — in the sense of the tradition of responsible government — or just subject to arbitrary authority?
Second, the health-care system. For decades, Canada's health-care system has come at the top of the list of surveys on what makes Canada distinct from and better than other nations. For a long time now, close observers have known that despite our high health-care spending, our outcomes are not notably better than many other countries.
The pandemic made the weaknesses of our health-care system evident. The conflicting advice from public health officials cost them much of their credibility. The debacle in long-term care homes illustrated how a major sector of health care was massively dysfunctional. Our hospitals were exposed as having so little capacity or flexibility that tens of thousands of “elective” surgeries were cancelled.
All the praise for health-care workers was something of a distraction from the perverse reversal of the normal order of things. The sick were asked to sacrifice their health care to protect the health system. Instead of bragging about our supposedly vaunted system, Canadians were asked not to use it. That is not a point of pride.
Third, the charter of rights and freedoms, usually the only rival to health care in the list of what makes Canada a great country, to employ a now out-of-fashion expression.
From the outset of the pandemic, the freedoms guaranteed in the charter were set aside with simple declarations. Mobility rights and the right to earn a livelihood were the first to go, and then all of the other fundamental freedoms followed. Remarkably, religious liberty and freedom of association were simply abolished in parts of the country for months on end.
Our charter has the means to deal with how to protect liberty when lives are at stake. Limits — even extreme limits — are permissible if they are “reasonable” and “demonstrably justified” in a “free and democratic” society. Those questions were rarely asked; Canadians preferred to acquiesce.
Few Canadians bothered to petition the courts to exercise their role. Indeed, popular opinion often disdained those who spoke about charter rights at all. In those few cases that were brought to court, the rulings were, in effect, that pandemic limits had neither to be “reasonable” nor “demonstrably justified.” All that was necessary to limit rights was for the government to invoke the apparently plenipotentiary power of the pandemic.
Pandemic restrictions were generally popular. The purpose of the charter is to put a check on the government limiting rights in the name of the popular will. That it was not even tested, let alone employed, for 18 months demonstrates that the esteem in which Canadians hold the charter is no longer justified.
There was much less to celebrate this year.