Canada’s Radical Supreme Court

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Canada’s Radical Supreme Court

The activist court fundamentally changing the country

The Canada of today is radically different from one generation ago. Drive through any small town and you’ll come across a cannabis store. Visit a big city and you will find homelessness and rampant drug problems, along with safe injection sites. Turn on the news and you will hear about multiple violent crimes each night. Homosexual pride flags fly from nearly every government and public building. And perhaps the most shocking, someone in your family ended his or her own life at the hands of a doctor. This is hardly the country it was just a short few years ago.

A common thread joins all the changes listed above: All were instigated by the Supreme Court of Canada. Elected officials that Canadians voted for did not enact these changes. A group of nine unelected judges willed into law these massive social changes that have swept the country. Tristan Hopper at the National Post wrote: “Canada’s top court has been on an activist streak that has begun to profoundly affect Canadian daily life.”

One of the most underreported aspects is that all of these major constitutional decisions have all been slanted to one side of the ideological spectrum. This has been a significant force pushing all of Canada to lean radically left.

It is important to understand how the most powerful judicial institution in the country came to be this way, and what that means for the fate of Canada.

Laurentian Elite Alliance

Canada operates under the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, yet the Canadian Constitution was an attempt to amalgamate the best of the English and American models. The big turning point in Canadian law came when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau repatriated the Constitution from Great Britain in 1982. Canada had to that point operated under the principle of parliamentary supremacy, in which whatever Parliament decided was law. Trudeau introduced the concept of judicial supremacy, which was a high court having final say over the law.

Trudeau battled with the provincial premiers for days, mainly over this principle. Eventually a compromise was reached: Trudeau would get his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the provinces got their “notwithstanding clause” that allowed them to legally override a judicial ruling. The federal government has the same power. On paper it seemed to work, but in practice is has proved to be a trap.

Supreme Court justices are appointed by the prime minister and stay in office until age 75. The legislature has no power to revoke a nomination. This automatically lends itself to the executive power building a coalition of judges in ideological alignment through appointment. The Supreme Court has no democratic oversight.

This issue has been exacerbated since Canada has had virtually no political course correction since 1967. Starting with Pierre Trudeau, the federal government has traveled in the same far-left direction, whether Liberal or Conservative. The only exception was Stephen Harper, but by that time the court was entrenched as an ally of the liberal Laurentian elite who make up the political class in Canada. Whether politician or judge, most come from the same schools in Ontario and Quebec. The liberal Laurentian alliance between the federal government and Supreme Court has been a potent vehicle for change.

Policy Options wrote in 2003: “Less obvious, but no less true, is that the Supreme Court of Canada, like its American counterpart, is part of the national governing coalition. It reflects and protects the coalition of interests that appointed its judges. Since the coming into force of section 15 in 1985, the Dickson, Lamer and McLachlin Courts have served as a partner of, not a check on, the Mulroney and Chrétien governments. As Trudeau anticipated, a judicial ally armed with the charter allows the feds to achieve indirectly ‘through judicial fiat’ what they could not achieve directly, or at least not without unacceptable political costs.”

This is called constitutional checkmate. Either way, the radical left controls the final say over the supreme law of the land.

The Communist ‘Living Tree’

The underlying legal theory used by the Supreme Court sheds more light on the situation. “According to the Supreme Court of Canada, the meaning of the Constitution is not fixed by its text,” wrote Bruce Purdy at C2C Journal. “Instead, the Constitution is a ‘living tree’ to be interpreted in accordance with changing social circumstances.” This legal metaphor was coined by Lord Sankey in 1929. This has given the Supreme Court supposed authority to create new rights not written in the Constitution.

“The Supreme Court has read the charter over its 40-year life largely through an ideologically ‘progressive’ lens, slowly transforming what was drafted as a roster of autonomy rights into a mandate for collective values, group rights and the priorities of the expansive managerial state,” continued Pardy. “Stated bluntly, the court decides social policy. As former Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella put it in a 2018 speech in Jerusalem, later published as a column in the Globe and Mail, the Supreme Court is ‘the final adjudicator of which contested values in a society should triumph.’ And adjudicate values it has.”

Do you think nine unelected people should decide which values in Canadian society should triumph?

The Supreme Court’s track record proves that the “living tree” has its roots in communism. Nearly every major decision in which a new right has been invented by the court has been radical left. This is not righteous judgment, but woke, communist judicial activism.

Here are some of the key decisions the Supreme Court has made. Reflect on how these changes have impacted the lives of everyday Canadians:

  • Euthanasia: In 2015, the court created the right of euthanasia in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The National Post wrote: “According to the court’s ruling in R v. Carter, any competent adult who was ‘suffering intolerably’ as a result of an ‘irremediable’ condition now had the right to seek a doctor’s help in killing themselves. Somewhat ironically, this new guarantee was found within the provisions of the charter right to ‘life, liberty and the security of the person.’” It was also the court that forced the legislature to expand euthanasia to include the mentally ill.

  • Violent crime: A 2017 decision by the court has established that the “default position” of the law is that criminals must be released at the “earliest reasonable opportunity.” This created the “catch and release” problem across the country where repeat offenders are back on the streets to commit more crimes.

  • Gun crime: As violent crime has increased across the country, the court decided in 2015 that the mandatory three-year sentence for gun crime was “cruel and unusual punishment.” The decision was not based on the case in which a gang member tried to shoot a rival but a hypothetical situation where a legal gun owner allowed his license to expire. Just the imagined situation was enough to remove the mandatory sentence.

  • Drug Use: Homelessness and overdose deaths are at record highs in Canada mainly due to the focus on “harm reduction” and not getting rid of the drugs. The genesis of this direction came from a 2011 court decision that allowed provinces to open safe injection sites and that drug laws did not apply within the walls of the building. The court decision said there was no evidence that these sites created any harm to public safety. Go to any community in Canada with a safe injection site and see for yourself if that is true.

  • Cannabis: While the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government holds the power to criminalize cannabis, in a 2015 case the court expanded the definition of “medical cannabis” to include oils, teas, brownies and other forms. This helped pave the way for legalizing the drug in 2018 via legislation.

Now that all these drastic social policies are in place, it is very difficult to reverse course. That was the plan from the beginning.

The Real Agenda

The hard fact Canadians need to realize is that the Constitution does not protect them from tyranny, but rather enables it.

When the senior Trudeau repatriated the Constitution and created the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it represented the beginning of a slow-rolling revolution. Party continues at C2C Journal: “Relying on the charter to protect individual liberty is a mistake. The document is not equipped to hold back a dominant state integrated into every aspect of modern life or a judiciary inclined to endorse that dominance. In retrospect, the charter seems almost naive, written as though such a thing could not come to pass.” The charter was deliberately written to allow for an abusive government, an abusive Supreme Court and an alliance between the two.

How can you know the motive and agenda behind these events? Bible prophecy.

The late Herbert W. Armstrong warned for decades that the Western nations were under attack from a Communist infiltration. It wasn’t a hot war, but an ideological war, where Communist believers entered the country and eventually gained control over key institutions, the most important being the educational system. There is a reason why Canada has been walking down the well-trodden path toward communism since the 1960s. There is a reason why nearly all of Canada’s politicians, lawyers and judges are called the “Laurentian elite,” educated at the same schools in Ontario and Quebec. There is a reason why all of these elites think the same way and endorse radical social changes and expansive government. The Communist infiltration has been highly effective. You can read more about that Communist infiltration in Canada here.

This is why, if you are Canadian, your town, your community, your life has changed. This is why Canada has drifted so far left over the past few generations. 2 Kings 14:25-27 say that it would get to the point where Canada as a nation would become “blotted out.” That is the real agenda of the Supreme Court and radical-left government of Canada. Yet the Bible says God will save the United States, Canada and the British Commonwealth one more time.

If you are troubled by what is going on in your country, then you can take action. Not by protesting or voting—but by repenting toward God. That is the only way to fight back against this Communist infiltration. To learn more, read our books The United States and Britain in Prophecy and America Under Attack.