Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella's Retirement

No doubt, most people - including me - will wish Madam Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada well in her retirement and well for the next stages in her life. We thank her for her public service, and for her good intentions to reduce the amount of inequality experienced by many Canadians.

However, in her interview with Matt Galloway of CBC's "The Current," aired earlier this morning, Justice Abella made a couple of remarks that to me were alarming.

Frankly, I do not really listen to or watch the CBC very much these days beyond its news bulletins, and the description of the CBC by others as the "government broadcaster" under the current Liberal Trudeau government is to my mind completely accurate. My position is that the station's coverage of the last general election failed to adequately probe Mr. Trudeau's blackfacing incidents etc. and his apparent agenda for his next term in office, with the result I believe that the Canadian public was essentially encouraged to re-elect his government. My own view is that his re-election has been inimical to Canada's best interests.

But, to return to Justice Abella whose interview piqued my interest.

Firstly, Justice Abella claimed that Canada is the "greatest country in the world." Although I imagine that she has visited numerous countries around the world, I really do not believe that she has lived in every one of them so as to be able to reach a conclusion such as that.

Additionally, notwithstanding any Canadian's gushing patriotism in the absence of supporting comparative evidence, it confounds me as an immigrant to Canada how any educated, experienced and intelligent person could make such a claim of global greatness - when neither The Charter nor Official Bilingualism were in any 1980 election manifesto nor ever put to a national referendum for ratification.

To my mind, that is instead evidence of Canada's inability to provide real democracy to its electorate, as well as Canadians' inability to demand and to receive real democracy for themselves. That is not evidence of greatness, except as to the magnitude of Canada's democratic deceptions. And MPs are not simply elected and sent up to the Parliament of Canada to do exactly as they please, such as to conjure up a Charter or Official Bilingualism (in reality for one, single minority language with no true historical or demographic justification to attain language parity) for a majority-Anglophone country that had no need for Official Bilingualism - otherwise general elections become totally meaningless.

There should never be a self-appointed elite in Parliament who, without a clear electoral mandate, assume the rights and powers to institute national character-changing measures such as the imposition of a new national flag, new constitutional laws and related legal machinery, etc.

We could also mention other examples that detract from a claimed global greatness of Canada: e.g., Canadian employees unable to afford extended health insurance coverage, illegal immigrants who have that coverage for 20 years by virtue of our federal tax dollars, and a well-trained military that is dangerously under-equipped to do its job in these turbulent times, etc.

Secondly, although she was very quick to qualify her comment with reference to the law and to the evidentiary base of each case, Justice Abella justified the Supreme Court's ability to ignore "the majority of the public" and to reach decisions that politicians could not take because politicians are subject to terms of re-election whereas judges are not.

I heard a pause between that claim and its subsequent qualification; and so what firstly troubles me about such a pause is that Canada's courts must always remember that Parliament and the provincial legislatures express the sovereign will of the majority of their respective electorates. That is the bedrock of democracy. The rule of law supports democracy, it does not attack it. What secondly concerns me is just how much in touch (or perhaps not) with the majority of average, every-day Canadians is our exceptionally well-paid and pensioned judiciary?

The interview was an intriguing insight into a significant part of the culture at the Supreme Court of Canada. But not one that reassures me. Perhaps, as in the United States, it is high time that Canadians also had the opportunity to directly elect their senior judges for defined periods in office, such as every 7 or 10 years?