The Charter is a Reactionary Document
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is sacrosanct in many circles, particularly among those who consider themselves “liberal.” Yet there is nothing “liberal’ in the classic, traditional sense of a code of laws claiming to be the supreme law of the land.
The history of liberalism denounces the idea that an individual’s rights come from a piece of paper created by the state. The whole point of liberalism is to be as anti-state as humanly possible. Thanks to the great work of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, it’s now conceivable how obvious anarchy is.
The history of Britain, Canada and the United States are extraordinary because these countries have been based on customary traditions and a unifying thread of common-law. It is only when governments started codifying common-law into legislation that problems arose and thus prompted governments to act further – to remedy a problem they themselves created.
In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was that remedy, but it was, and still is, the incorrect treatment.
Liberty and peaceful social order lay in the decentralized, heterogeneous law-making of precedent-setting common law (or any law based on voluntary human action).
That is, law that arises from actual conflicts will settle conflicts. Common-law arose from real conflicts and were non-political ways of resolving these conflicts.
Code law, on the other hand, is self-defeating.
Canadians assume that before the Charter, they had no rights or freedoms, but this simply isn’t true.
Canadians lived in a – relatively – free and prosperous society long before 1982. There were problems with the practice of parliamentary sovereignty, but prior to the state’s appropriation of basic rights and freedoms via the Charter, Canadians were by default free.
It was in the British liberty tradition that Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier declared, “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
