Most Anglos are painfully aware of the noxious effects of Bill 96, propounded by National Assembly language ayatollahs and their media adepts in June 2022. The law allows the Quebec government to:
- Shield the law from court challenge by pre-emptively invoking Canada’s Notwithstanding Clause
- Wield widespread, warrantless search and seizure powers to investigate anonymous complaints about reported violations
- Intrude into private professional client relationships to require notes and interactions be kept in French
- Remove adults’ choice in language of education at the Cegep level
- Require after June 1, 2023, civil servants to address citizens in French only if they could not prove they were “historic anglophones,” even if the subject concerned were as complex and technical as provincial tax returns.
Predictably, Ottawa has turned “three wise monkeys” on us and neither sees, nor hears, nor speaks of any evil. Impotent keepers of the Constitution’s Disallowance provision, our federal representatives have chosen to cock a deaf ear to pleas to use it. (The legal window closed June 1, 2023.) By doing so, they have thrown Canada’s only English linguistic minority under the bus once again.
“Oh, the Cavalry’s coming. You can count on the courts!” is the tired refrain. Really? The same Supreme Court justices Ottawa could have consulted immediately and chose not to? Though try in court we must, if in their wisdom, judges decide that the Notwithstanding Clause is a legitimate part of our Constitution, not to be overturned even by the righteously aggrieved, what choice will we have? Resignation? Moving?
François Legault and his quasi-separatist confrères have determined that the straight-up Referendum cum UDI approach Parizeau and Bouchard adopted going back thirty years won’t work. It has been declared illegal in Canada, and they now know they’ll never get international recognition for such a venture. Instead, they’ve decided to pursue the route of judicial agents provocateurs – legislate outside the norms of the western tradition going back to Magna Carta, and see what they can get away with.
However, in extremis, there may be redress. To their eternal shame, federal parties have foregone the use of Disallowance – even though the protection of Anglo minority rights in Quebec was exactly the reason framers of the BNA Act entrenched the provision in the first place. Nevertheless, alternate means, “blunt instruments” to use Pierre Trudeau’s language, ones that don’t have one-year expiration dates on their application, do exist. Consider “Peace, Order, and Good Government.” That power, also vested in the BNA Act, enables the federal government to legislate in matters of “national concern” that would otherwise be provincial in scope. To qualify, the Courts would have to measure “the effect on extra-provincial interests of a provincial failure to deal effectively with the control or regulation of the intra-provincial aspects of the matter.” A case could be made that the pre-emptive invocation of the Notwithstanding Clause to deprive a linguistic minority of its rights has clear intra-provincial aspects and failure to deal with them raises the questions involved to ones of “national concern.”
A stretch? François Legault has never recoiled from legislative stretches. Why should Ottawa recoil from the same to defend minority rights, especially when the current government, aided and abetted by opposition parties, has so failed in its responsibilities? Future federal governments need not be so complicit and so compliant.
What are the dangers of Ottawa’s “three wise monkeys” approach? The permanent erosion of any sense of true Canadian identity. What good is a government that won’t defend fundamental rights? Shortly before he was assassinated (by Irish nationalists with no regard for rights and law), an Anglo-Quebecer and a prime Father of Confederation, Thomas D’Arcy McGee was asked why he was loyal to the new country, Canada, the one he’d helped create. “We are loyal because our equal, civil, social, and religious rights are respected by this government, in theory and in practice. Were it otherwise, it would be otherwise.” In short, the prime responsibility of the government is to respect and protect our rights. A government that fails to do so is no longer worthy of loyalty.
As my personal protest against the abrogation of my equal rights as a Canadian citizen, I shall no longer be singing the national anthem. Why not? Because it speaks of “the true north strong and free.” Without rights, we Canadians can never be free. In its French version, which many generous-minded Anglos have taken to singing, at least in the second half – to demonstrate their respect for the French language – our anthem speaks of Canada’s “valeur,” i.e., its valor or courage (with an overtone of “values”), ˆqui protégera nos foyers et nos droits.” Our anthem declares courageous Canada and its values will protect our homes and our rights. Except it doesn’t and won’t. That makes it a hypocritical lie. When sung, this Anglo will at least symbolically “take a knee.”