One man’s dream for the Magna Carta
Two years ago, Len Rodness, a self-described history buff, had an off-chance talk with a teacher at his son’s school in Toronto. Today, the Toronto lawyer has turned that brief encounter into a nationwide campaign to bring the Magna Carta, one of the most famous documents in the world, to Canada.
“I knew nothing about putting on such an event,” Rodness says of his dream of having a rare copy of the Magna Carta and its companion document, the Charter of the Forest, displayed in 2015 in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Edmonton to mark the 800th anniversary of what is known as the birth certificate of freedom. “This was completely out of my realm of comfort and a lot harder than I ever knew,” says Rodness, a real estate lawyer with Torkin Manes, a prominent Toronto law firm.
For example, it took 18 months of negotiations just to get permission from the British government for the Magna Carta copy to leave the country.
Now, Rodness is trying to raise $2 million to stage the four-city tour, complete with films, special exhibition galleries, interactive multimedia materials, souvenir catalogues and school learning modules.
It’s a worthy goal because the Magna Carta still has extreme relevance to Canadian lives today.
The original version, and the several revisions it underwent in subsequent years, established one of the first codes on the fair treatment of citizens.
And it is the basis of today’s legal codes in Canada and around the world, with its most quoted line being “No one is above the law.”
Indeed, many rights and freedoms Canadians now take for granted — women’s rights, environmental rights, trial by jury and freedom from unlawful detention without cause — stem from the Magna Carta.
Only 17 copies of the Magna Carta are known to still exist. Four of those date back to 1215, and never leave Britain. The first version of the Magna Carta was signed by King John I in 1215 at a monastery at Runnymede, England. He was forced to sign the document, which amounted to a peace treaty, by English barons who were fed up with being forced to pay for the costly wars the king loved to launch.
Durham Cathedral in England has three of the 17 copies of the Magna Carta, including a 1225 version that’s being loaned to Canada. It will be joined by one of only two surviving copies of the 1217 Charter of the Forest, the first document to include the concept of universal rights.
Rodness first learned the cathedral might be willing to loan the copy to Commonwealth countries when he bumped into that teacher at his son’s school. She is a sister-in-law of a senior Durham Cathedral official and told him about the Magna Carta idea.
His interest piqued, Rodness contacted the cathedral official. Within months, he had travelled to Durham and formed Magna Carta Canada, a nonprofit group to organize a tour and raise funds to pay for it. Working almost single-handedly, he got commitments for the documents to be displayed at Fort York in Toronto, at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. The documents would stay in each city for four to six weeks and be open to the public, with a special focus on school groups.
The $2 million that Rodness needs to raise will be used to build special crates to transport the documents and develop interpretative material focused on how the achievements of the Magna Carta spread to Canada and how it influences our lives today.
With Canadian schools focusing less on teaching history, Rodness deserves praise for trying to bring a remarkable piece of history to life both for students and adults.
As people in other parts of the world struggle for basic rights, as witnessed in Egypt in recent weeks, Canadians too often take our freedoms for granted.
That’s why we should all hope Len Rodness achieves his $2-million goal and brings the Magna Carta to Canada on its 800th anniversary. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to commemorate what this historic document means to all of us. Bob Hepburn’s column appears Thursday. bhepburn@thestar.ca