“When you want to kill your dog, you say it has rabies,” says the adage…
Ditto for law 21.
When we want to incite the population against Quebec’s timid law on secularism, we say that the Legault government’s decision to use the derogation clause preventively to renew it constitutes a threat to democracy.
“Today, we use the notwithstanding clause to prevent citizens from wearing religious symbols at work. But what will tomorrow be? Quebec will evade the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to prohibit abortion?
Tonight we scare the world
Do you think I’m exaggerating? That I butter thick?
That I invent monsters to scare children?
No. This is the new argument that opponents of Law 21 are bringing out to decry its adoption.
This is what the president of the FAE, who will challenge Bill 21 before the Supreme Court, alongside the English Montreal School Board, says.
“Today, the escape clause seems to be used more and more easily, for all sorts of reasons. One day, anti-abortion lobbies could even push a government to use this approach to limit women’s rights…”
This is also what the chronicler of The Press Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot.
“The notwithstanding clause was just used by a Conservative government in Saskatchewan to prevent people under the age of 16 from changing their name and pronoun without their parents’ permission. At the federal level, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is tempted to use it, if he is elected, to exempt his reforms of the criminal justice system from the charters.”
Um… is it terrible to want to give harsh sentences to hardened criminals and to allow parents to know that their minor child has initiated the process of sex change?
On the contrary, I believe that it is full of common sense.
When a central government falls headfirst into ideology, as is currently the case with the Trudeau government, it is perhaps not so stupid to allow the provinces to bring out a Joker to protect themselves.
A rampart
It’s all well and good to denounce the “misuse” of the notwithstanding clause, but what about the “misuse” of the Charter which prevents democratically elected governments from governing as they see fit?
It is not up to unelected federal judges to tell the Quebec people how they should govern themselves. We are old enough to make our own decisions, thank you.
It is said that the Charter is a bulwark against the “populist” excesses of certain provincial governments, but the notwithstanding clause can also be seen as a bulwark which protects the provinces against certain excesses of the federal government.
A wall protects in both directions.
The offensive of the left
“The Legault government used the derogation provision to protect the specificity of Quebec. But he opened the door, whether he liked it or not, to an offensive by the Canadian right on fundamental freedoms,” wrote Michel C. Auger, of The Press.
And what about the offensive of the Trudeauist left which imposes its whims on the provinces?
