Mr. Justice Antonio Lamer, the most senior judge in the Supreme Court of Canada and a criminal law specialist, has been appointed the new Chief Justice. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced the appointment on June 27.
In the view of the Canadian legal community, Judge Lamer is a law reformer. It is not surprising that a judge with a history of liberal interpretations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should have been given the top post, said U of T political science professor Peter Russell.
Judge Lamer will be sworn in after the retirement of the current Chief Justice, Brian Dixon.
The difficulty of choosing a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is compounded by the fact that none of the present justices is suitable. They are all compromised by the Daigle decision of August 1989, which was unanimous. In this decision they said, among other things, “that the child in the womb is not a human being; that the child in the womb is not the offspring of its parents; that a father is not father until the child is born.
Not a human being
No one who agrees to such absurdities is fit to be the Chief Justice of our country.
The justices had to wriggle around the Quebec Civil Code’s declaration that an “etre humain,” a human being, has the right to life. Therefore, a fetus has the right to life. This statement is somewhat equivalent to the principle enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence that: all human beings are endowed by their Creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The justices, however, convinced themselves that this provision of the Civil Code could not have meant what it said, that the child in the womb does not become a human being until it is born.
Chantal Daigle thought her baby existed, and as reported recently, was even capable of telling her what to do. The baby was near the stage of viability. One only has to ask, if it did not belong to the human species, what species did it belong to, and by what sudden process it would have been transmuted into a human being at birth, to know how absurd the Court’s judgment was. If the baby had been removed from her womb by hysterectomy, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would have been a recognizable human child. If it had needed a blood transfusion in the womb, its blood type would have had to be determined, and it would have been given human blood of that type.
All of this, and more, was brought out in evidence by the Borowski trial before the Supreme Court. But in March of 1989, the Court declared that “the issue was moot,” i.e., that it had no case upon which to base a decision.
There was, and is, a section of the Criminal Code which says that a child does not become a human being until born; the Court could have struck down that section, with the observation that this is like saying that the sun goes around the earth or that water rises uphill. This would have brought the law in accord with science. Instead, the judges ignored the clear facts presented to them. The fact that they did so certainly makes it seem that they wanted to find that the death and dismemberment of a baby is of no great significance.
Not offspring of its parents
The justices summarized the position of the baby’s father, Jean-Guy Tremblay, as follows: – Under Quebec Law 1) a fetus has a right to life, and, in addition, a “potential father” has a right of veto with respect to abort his “potential progeny;” 2) the appellant would infringe each of these rights by having an abortion; (etc).
More gross and palpable nonsense! When an unmarried girl conceives a child, a question commonly asked is, “Who is the father?” It would be idiotic to ask, “Who is the potential father?” The child has been engendered; the act of fathering has taken place. Similarly, the child in the womb is the offspring of its parents; it exists; it is not merely potential.
In the Daigle judgment the justices say, “It is submitted that granting the fetus the right to life from the moment of conception sets up a potential conflict with the rights of women to personal dignity, bodily integrity and autonomy expressed in R. v. Morgentaler and leads to an inevitable clash with the rights of a woman who seeks an abortion.”
The notion that the personal dignity and bodily integrity of a woman are somehow compromised by her obligation to carry her child to term is a novel one, defended in the Morgentaler ruling of January 1988, by Mme. Justice Wilson. She referred to recent (polemical) writing by radical feminists, thus making the opinions of Gloria Steinem and Kate millet and Germaine Greet the basis for Canadian legislation and Canadian judicial decisions!
All through the centuries, pregnancy has normally led to childbirth; childbirth is its natural consequence. As others have said, it is ridiculous to regard the unborn baby as a parasite upon its mother as a kind of tapeworm.
None of the present members of the Supreme Court ought to be regarded as a candidate for the position of Chief Justice. They are as compromised, and the court needs to take a new direction which , on the evidence, none of them seems willing to provide.
