According to the preamble of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” It follows, therefore, that any distance between its founding principles and its current ones may be measured at a glance: insofar as both God and the rule of law are recognized in Canada, its original principles persist. But, if either one is disregarded, we can only conclude that our nation has become unmoored from those sacred, sustaining principles by which our rights are really guaranteed.
A decision rendered by the Supreme Court in late December reveals the current principles of Canadian law all too clearly. Our highest Court saw fit to strike down the Criminal Code’s prohibitions against brothels, public solicitation, and living on prostitution’s profits. And, even more distressing than the disgraceful decision itself was the means by which the Court arrived at its conclusions: these protective prohibitions were struck down because, according to the Court, they – and not the obviously degrading practice of prostitution – infringed on rights enumerated in the Charter, specifically those provisions which ensure the “security of the person.”
But how could the Court strike down laws so clearly designed to prevent that pernicious exploitation known as prostitution? And how could the rights of the “security of the person” possibly be invoked to do so? After all, the very etymology of the word “security” means “without care,” and anyone forced into the corrosive and coercive practice of sensual servitude clearly enjoys neither freedom nor security.
The reason, sadly, is not far to seek. As Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin grandly asserts in the first sentence of her decision (from which none of the other justices had the decency to dissent): “It is not a crime in Canada to sell sex for money,” and from this undisputed point, her erroneous decision develops. Because the act of prostitution itself is not technically illegal, it follows, for McLachlin, that the organized orchestration of this legal activity cannot be prohibited.
Evidently, it never occurred to the Court that a recognition of the demeaning nature of prostitution was already embodied in the very laws which it summarily struck down, that this was the unspoken moral assumption from which these laws exfoliated, radiating outward from this moral intuition like spokes in a wheel. Instead, in the lonely world of the High Court, the law must feign ignorance of the moral principles from which it springs.
Indeed, every law must now be retested against the touchstone of the Charter which, in the cloistral chamber of Canada’s Supreme Court, has become a sibylline series of inscrutable, ambiguous axioms which always, somehow, turn out to be in opposition to Canada’s immemorial moral traditions. Thus, the Charter never protects the rights of all Canadians, but is used, instead, as a pliant list of protocols which provide our imperious judges the pretext for contentiously redefining these “rights” and reshaping our legal landscape in the process.
Lawless is that nation whose laws are constantly changing, whose precepts and ordinances are forever being revised by the capricious whims of the few. In 2013, the Supreme Court justices decided to adopt the slanted perspective of a handful of activists who challenged our country’s oldest laws; they accepted wholesale the preposterous premise that prostitution is simply a “profession” which operates not by coercion but free consent. In doing so, the Court offered a tacit endorsement of those outrageous euphemisms – such as “sex worker” or the “sex trade” – which confer on the oppressive institution of prostitution the illusion of labour when, in reality, it is only a filthy, loveless, remunerated form of temporary slavery in which the money of one is exchanged for the dignity of another. On the abhorrent practice of serial sexual violation – in which the vendors are the real victims and pimps the profiteers – the law now looks without blinking. What awaits our country in 2014?
The second paragraph of our southern neighbors’ Declaration of Independence begins with the famous words: “We hold these truths to be self evident.” The rights which they so held were not the counterintuitive deduction of a cadre of jurists; they did not fly in the face of Common Law or common sense. Instead, they were – and they remain – the very wellspring of law itself: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Charter’s preamble acknowledges precisely this same source. But, unlike the graduates of a venerable American law school who are exhorted, even to this day, to “aid in the shaping and application of those wise restraints that make us free,” Canada’s High Court flouts the double foundation of the Charter’s own rights, charging itself with the task of abolishing our country’s “wise restraints” in the name of a freedom which looks like license.
In a free society, only Lady Justice should wear a blindfold, yet our judges have blinkering themselves, preferring their own tendentious ideology to the self-evident truths they are sworn to defend. What possible meaning can the “security of the person” have if, in its name, the dignity of the person is violated? Since there is no reason that the court’s new precedents may not be overturned as easily as the ancient ones they have recently reversed, we hope the Supreme Court will come to see the error of its ways – or that the government will appoint to it judges who do.
