Everything is political. Everything is a Charter issue.

— 02.22.2016 08:18 AM

Good.

I’m glad they backed away from making the assisted-suicide vote a whipped vote. That would have been appalling, frankly. It wasn’t in the platform, it wasn’t promised by Trudeau, and it isn’t remotely necessary.

That said, this revelation in today’s Hill Times is worrying:

“But Mr. Oliphant and other Liberal MPs The Hill Times spoke with earlier in the week say they are comfortable with the whipped vote, because as they were told at the start of the session, the Liberal caucus will have whipped votes on: Charter issues, platform issues, and confidence matters.


Obviously its a Charter issue so I expect, and we’ve been told there are three things that will be whipped: Charter issues, platform issues, and confidence matters, and this is a Charter issue, Mr. Oliphant said before the news broke on Friday, but later he expressed relief.”

“We’ve been told that it will be whipped.” Rob Oliphant is a very thoughtful person, and he will immediately know what the problem is, here: namely, every single issue the Liberal caucus looks at is, by definition, a Charter issue. There is nothing they vote on, in fact, that isn’t.

Your fundamental freedoms. Your democratic rights. Your mobility rights. Your legal rights. Your equality rights. Your language rights. Your educational rights. Your aboriginal or multicultural heritage. Your gender rights. There is pretty much nothing, when you think of it, that an MP does that can’t have a Charter connection.

Don’t believe me? Then section 32 should help:

32. (1) This Charter applies

(a) to the Parliament and government of Canada in respect of all matters within the authority of Parliament

See the problem? The implication, here, is that everything will become an (aptly-named) “whipped” vote. If the democratic implications of that don’t unsettle you, then this should: right now, everywhere in Canada, judges are still attempting to apply the Charter’s provisions to real life. They are still interpreting it.

In other words, not even the learned experts at the Supreme Court of Canada knows what the constitutional outcome should be in cases they haven’t  heard yet. How, then, is the Liberal caucus supposed to know which way to vote? How do they know what is the correct Charter interpretation, when the judges themselves don’t?

I anticipate Dominic LeBlanc will walk this one back – just as he has with the voting change diktat, and now assisted suicide.

Because everything – everything – is Charter-related.


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From the bulging “junenile insults” file: Kid Kodak lashes out

— 02.17.2016 08:31 AM

My sense he is unhappy about not being reappointed. Um. Er.

Here’s his (typically) tweeted response to Your Humble Narrator’s post of yesterday, which he posted at three o’clock in the morning. I’ve done a screen shot of it in case he decides to disappear it into the Internet ether:

  

What’s he referring to, there? Well, he and his cabal made a complaint to the Law Society of Upper Canada, no less, to have me disbarred for being critical of him. I’m not making this up. 

As I this morning told a fine National Post reporter (who has also been attacked by Marin), if the Law Society accepts this bogus complaint, they will be setting a very dangerous precedent – for themselves. They’ll thereafter get an avalanche of complaints about lawyers getting mad at refs at hockey games, lawyers having marital problems, lawyers’ personal Facebook posts, lawyers getting tipsy at Christmas parties. If you accept one complaint about non-lawyering activity, you have to accept all of them. It will be a disaster.

I was critical of Marin because I think he is a vain, thin-skinned bully. Because I think he didn’t act like a representative of the Legislature, he acted like a six-year-old with a bad temper. Because the senior people around him facilitated all that.

I was critical because Marin and his senior team have been the subject of several human rights complaints, all settled with secrecy agreements. Because he used public money to buy himself wide-screen TVs for his home and body wash and whatnot. Because he has given contracts worth a quarter million dollars to a friend. And because he – a quasi-judicial officer of the Legislature, with more power than any judge or MPP – repeatedly acted like a child on social media.

Every newspaper in Ontario, pretty much, has editorialized against him at one time or another, and for good reason. Good riddance, we say. And good luck with your attempt to silence your critics, pal – same sort of thing isn’t working so well in Alberta for Rachel Notley, is it?

(Oh, and if you want to contribute to my legal defence fund, feel free to use the “donate” button to the left!)


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