Liberals hit rock bottom — if possible
In recent weeks, former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps’ Twitter account has operated as a sort of museum of partisan excess. On Monday evening, hours after Manitoba Chief Justice Glenn D. Joyal got dragged into the mess for no good reason — pending further excavations — she finally hit rock bottom.
Joyal is a highly respected jurist who had been shortlisted by a non-partisan committee for appointment to the Supreme Court. But in Copps’ telling he is “homophonic (sic), anti-abortion (and) anti-charter” — and former justice minister Jody Wilson-raybould, for some crazy reason, wanted to make him chief justice.
To the extent that’s based on anything, it’s on accounts by anonymous sources to CTV News and Canadian Press alleging Wilson-raybould and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau very much disagreed on the appointment.
Well, I say “alleging.” It’s not actually controversial: No one disputes the appointment was ultimately the PM’S to make, or that the justice minister was allowed to have her opinions. No, this is just sort of an FYI leak. People thought we should know that Wilson-raybould supported a Supreme Court candidate whom Trudeau worried (per CTV correspondent Glen Mcgregor) “wasn’t committed to protecting rights that have flown out of interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly LGBTQ2 rights and even abortion access.”
“Well-placed sources say the former justice minister’s choice for chief justice was a moment of ‘significant disagreement’ with Trudeau, who has touted the Liberals as ‘the party of the Charter’,” Joan Bryden reported for CP. “Internal discussions about a Supreme Court appointment … are typically considered highly confidential,” Bryden added. But, you know, Anonymous Sources just thought we should know Trudeau had done his research, and had come across a speech Joyal gave to the Canadian Constitution Foundation in 2017.
In that speech, he soberly explains his entirely mainstream concerns that Canadian courts have over the years progressively asserted a policy-making dominance over the legislatures that the Charter’s framers had never intended, and with some deleterious effects to the country’s “political culture.” Perhaps Trudeau might also have come across Joyal’s 1993 Master’s thesis from the University of Manitoba, in which he makes similar arguments and analyzes R vs. Morgentaler, among other cases.
“Irrespective of one’s position on the excessively difficult substantive issue, abortion like capital punishment was undeniably one of the two subjects mentioned in the discussion before the Parliamentary committee about which it was assured that such substantive outcomes would be left to Parliament,” he wrote in his thesis. If stakeholders had known what Charter cases would look like in 35 years, in other words, we might not even have the Charter.
Joyal doesn’t ever seem to have articulated a personal position on abortion. I can’t find a word he’s said about same-sex marriage in any context. To imply such a person is unfit for the bench is outrageous. To impute from his analysis of R v. Morgentaler that he’s anti-abortion and homophobic is almost parodic demagogy. It makes “Why do you hate the troops?” look like something out of Plato’s Republic. As for “anti-charter”: “Put simply,” Joyal told the CCF, “as a foundational part of Canada’s constitutional architecture, the Charter deserves our respect and demands our compliance.”
This is all a brand new low for the Anonymous Sources. But it’s entirely typically Liberal thinking, as well: “Joyal has concerns about judicial overreach. Therefore he is a conservative. Conservatives hate abortion and gay people. Ergo Joyal applied to sit on the Supreme Court in hopes of repealing R vs. Morgentaler and the samesex marriage reference and goodness only knows what else. QED.
“So obvious and appalling is this, furthermore, that we must suspect Jody Wilson-raybould of holding similar hidden aspirations — or at the very least of woeful incompetence.”
After 10 years of Stephen Harper doing nothing on abortion, and with Andrew Scheer understandably pledging to continue doing nothing, many Canadians seem to truly believe that Margaret Atwood’s Gilead is but one misplaced ballot and one moderately conservative judge away. Three-quarters of Canadians now think it’s “great that … two people of the same sex can get married,” according to a 2017 CROP poll — up from just 41 per cent 20 years earlier. No one is challenging same-sex marriage in court. No prominent Conservative politician has made a peep about it in at least a decade. But the Anonymous Sources want us to believe the Chief Justice of Manitoba poses a mortal threat to marriage equality.
Incidentally, one of the deleterious effects of Canadians becoming so used to “judicial adjudication of political and social issues,” Joyal argued in his CCF speech, is that there is “less room for long-term legislative results and solutions premised upon the tools of negotiation, persuasion, bargaining and compromise.” Whatever the disease, the symptoms are acute. Ideally, the utter shabbiness of the Liberals’ behaviour since the Lavalin story broke might help wake us from this never-ending paranoid fever dream that passes for election-year politics.