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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

How Canadians lost the rule of law

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Colin Alexander

Universal problems are evident in the rejection of Jordan Peterson’s appeal against Ontario’s College of Psychologists (CPO) in Divisional Court. They had sought to re-educate him as a condition for retaining his license—because he openly ridiculed public figures. But as Dr. Peterson related in the National Post, October 11, they’ve failed to find a brainwasher for him.

Precedent now confirms that unaccountable tribunals may override apparent Charter rights. That may declare as unacceptable anyone’s contrary opinion or peaceful protest. Dr. Peterson’s case follows the way the courts clobbered supporters of the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest on Parliament Hill. Now members of all regulated professions are especially at risk, including doctors, lawyers and teachers. Instead of protecting citizens from overreach, the courts have become the instrument for enforcing tyranny.

As the Toronto Star reported on the first press conference by Chief Justice Richard Wagner in 2018, he said his court was “the most progressive in the world.” Today, progressive is synonymous with the absurdities that Dr. Peterson ridiculed. Wanjiru Njoya, a legal scholar at the University of Exeter has been quoted as saying that the courts automatically define as unreasonable any perspectives falling outside progressive boundaries.

A further foundational problem is that judges now routinely preside over cases where they have an obvious bias or personal connection, and then defer to those interests. Canadian judges should follow this admonition in the American Judicial Code? “Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge … shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Justice Paul Schabas wrote the Decision for Dr. Peterson’s appeal before Divisional Court. However, he had previously been involved, personally, on the side of the argument opposite that of Dr. Peterson. In June 2018, as head of the Law Society of Ontario (LSO), he oversaw the imposition on lawyers of their controversial Statement of Principles (SOP). As a condition of licensing, it required a commitment to Equity, Social and (Corporate) Governance (ESG). Later, the LSO withdrew it following protests like African-Canadian Elias Munshya’s in Canadian Lawyer: “Lawyers play an essential role in our society; that role, however, does not include becoming state agents that parrot state-sponsored speech.”

Chief Justice Wagner  recently confirmed that courts may now freely override common law precedent. He said that: “Apart from considering [historic] decisions as part of our legal cultural heritage, no one today will refer to a decision from 1892 to support his claim.” He added that “sometimes a decision from five years ago is an old decision ….”

Accordingly, the Supreme Court had simply disregarded century-old precedents when declaring Marc Nadon ineligible to join their club. My book Justice on Trial explains that many earlier appointments did not meet their newfound qualifications.

The subjective word “reasonable” supports much of Canada’s problematic jurisprudence. Absent objective criteria, judges reward friends and crush others as they may.

Justice Schabas said several comments similar to this one were unacceptable: “Dr. Peterson posted a tweet in May 2022, in which he commented on a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover with a plus-sized model, saying: ‘Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.’”

Dr. Peterson objected that the CPO’s Code of Ethics should not constrain such “off duty opinions.”  The Code says “[p]ersonal behaviour becomes a concern of the discipline only if it is of such a nature that it undermines public trust in the discipline as a whole or if it raises questions about the psychologist’s ability to carry out appropriately his/her responsibilities as a psychologist.” So which magazines’ cover pictures are not of public interest?

Justice Schabas continued, “The [CPO’s investigating] Panel also noted Dr. Peterson’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s decision in Grant v. Torstar, 2009 SCC 61, [2009] 3 SCR 640, a defamation case which held at para. 42, that “freedom of expression and respect for vigorous debate on matters of public interest have long been seen as fundamental to Canadian democracy … all Canadian laws must conform to it.” Why did Justice Schabas override this settled law?

Europe’s Charter of Fundamental Rights says, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” So how can a right be fundamental in other free and democratic countries but not in Canada?

And why did the court of Chief Justice Wagner decline to hear Dr. Peterson’s appeal and allow Justice Schabas’ decision to stand? No prize for your answer!

As long advocated by The Globe & Mail and The Toronto Star, Dr. Peterson’s case shows the need to end self-regulation and in-house discipline for lawyers and judges. That happened for lawyers for England and Wales in 2007. So why not in Canada?

Ottawa resident Colin Alexander’s latest books are Justice on Trial: Jordan Peterson’s case shows the need to fix a broken system; and Ballad of Sunny Ways: Popular traditional verse about living, loving and money.

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

It’s Time To Stop Church Arsons And What Fuels Them

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Religious freedoms and the right to worship have been a recognized hallmark of civilized societies for centuries. The preamble of Canada’s constitution says our country is built on the principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God and the rule of law. In defiance of both, almost 600 Canadian places of worship have suffered arson in recent years. Nothing could be more unCanadian.

The stats were revealed by Member of Parliament Marc Dalton following a formal inquiry to the federal government. The response showed 592 arsons had been set on places of worship between 2010 and 2022. they rose from 58 in 2020 to 90 in 2021, then down to 74 in 2022.

The peak coincides with claims made in May of 2021 that the remains of 215 school children had been discovered on the site of the former Kamloops Residential School.

Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a subsequent wave of church burnings “unacceptable and wrong” he also called their likely motivations “real and fully understandable.” This hardly doused the flames.

These arsons far outnumber those made on Canadian churches in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed non-Protestants and non-whites. In those years the KKK desecrated Sarnia’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. They killed ten people when they set Saint-Boniface College in Winnipeg on fire. They also burned the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. In 1926, three Klan members were jailed after they blew up St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Barrie, Ont.

The Klan soon fizzled out, seemingly unlike these recent church burnings. The 110-year-old Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses Catholic church burned down in Trois-Rivières, Quebec last month, but whether arson was involved has not been confirmed.

The presence of bodies underneath the former residential school in Kamloops has not been confirmed either. A 1924 septic field could also account for soil anomalies found there by ground-penetrating radar. Eight million federal tax dollars spent to investigate the site have yielded no remains and details on how the money was spent are sketchy. It’s high time the site was excavated to confirm or rule out the graves and do autopsies on any corpses found there.

Federal funds also fuel the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), the Orwellian title for a group that fuels resentment against socially conservative organizations with negative characterizations. On August 7, CAHN published “40 Ways To Fight The Far-Right: Tactics for Community Activists in Canada” thanks to $640,000 from Ottawa.

“White boys and men make up the majority of people involved in hate-promoting movements,” the handbook explains. Pro-life and pro-parent groups, CAHN says, are among those “characterized by racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQ+ views, and pro-colonialist/ anti-Indigenous bigotry.”

CAHN says the Catholic-dominated, pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition is a “hate movement.” Liberty Coalition Canada, a legal defence organization, and the activist organization Action4Canada are similarly denigrated for their alleged belief that Canada was founded on Christian values and attempts to reassert such values.

Meanwhile, the CAHN guide advocates “antifascist” doxing, including infiltration of right-leaning organizations. getting people fired, and ending friendships.

Dalton’s Bill C-411 the “Anti-Arson Act” would do more to deter hate-motivated crimes than CAHN ever will. The legislation would punish those who set fires and explosions at religious places. A first offence would get a mandatory five-year jail sentence, while subsequent offenses would prompt seven years.

When respect for the supremacy of God and the rule of law fail, rights give way to wrongs. It’s time to stop the fires and the disputable claims that fuel them, and restore respect for people of faith, their right to worship, and their places of worship.

Lee Harding is a Research Associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Another Mass Grave?

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No. One outrageous lie was quickly discounted, yet another lives on, to the detriment of everybody involved.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

The  Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried  all across Canada.

“My brother Rufus saw them take all those children and stand them up next to a big ditch, and then the soldiers shot them all and they all fell into that ditch. Some of the kids were still alive and they just poured the dirt in on top of them. Buried them alive.”

This mass murder happened in 1943 — not in Nazi-held Europe, but in Brantford, Ontario.

So, there you have it — the personal story of a residential school “survivor” describing the day the Canadian Army lined up 43 Indian children in front of a residential school at Brantford, Ontario, shot them and dumped their bodies into a mass grave. The May 27, 2021 announcement that the remains of 215 former students of the Kamloops residential school wasn’t the first time that a claim  about sinister residential school deaths and clandestine burials had been made.

This Brantford story is obviously untrue. Any reasonably well-informed person with a lick of sense would know that at a glance.

But that didn’t stop the claim from making the social media rounds for years. According to the fact-check tens of thousands of people have read this bogus claim over the years, and many appear to have believed it completely. In fact, despite the fact checks proving that the claim was entirely false it continues to circulate today.

Both the Kamloops and Brantford claims came basically from the same place — the strange mind of a defrocked United Church Minister, Kevin Annett. It was Annett who created the bogus Brantford claim. In a strange twist, the picture at the top of the page — said to be from Brantford — is actually a photo of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, as it looked in the 1920s. 

And it was Annett who inspired the TRC’s misguided “missing children/unmarked graves” wild goose chase that, in turn, inspired Chief Rosanne Casimir to make the Kamloops claim. Both claims were equally and obviously false: The Kamloops claim was that the “remains of 215 children were found.” In fact, only radar blips (anomalies) were detected- blips that turned out. to most likely be from previous excavations, and not graves. Casimir and Annett both knew that they were making false claims.

Annett’s bogus claims come from his imaginative reworking of stories of “survivors” that he publicized in his blogs, books, interviews and movies.

His most famous movie is Unrepentant. This movie has been viewed by tens of thousands of Canadians, particularly in indigenous communities, such as the Tk’emlups community at Kamloops.

It has won awards, and been praised by eminent people, such as Noam Chomsky. Despite being every bit as false as the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, it actually convinced Member of Parliament, Gary Merasty, that it was accurate history. It is nothing short of amazing that this highly suggestible MP  was then able to convince the equally gullible, and newly appointed TRC commissioners that there were many thousands of such “missing children”, as Annett alleged.

The TRC commissioners then launched their “missing children/unmarked graves” campaign despite having no mandate from the federal government to do so. (Independent researcher, Nina Green, describes this in detail here.)

You see, the  Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried  all across Canada. 

Indigenous people became hooked on these stories.

Annett’s most famous book is his 393 page opus, “Hidden No Longer.” That book introduced the idea that the deaths of these thousands of “missing children” (his estimates range from 50,000 to 250,000, depending on the telling) constituted  genocide. It is absolutely shocking that our MPs actually voted to condemn Canada of genocide based essentially on Kevin Annett’s bogus claims.

Based on those same bogus claims Annett was hired by the Brantford Mohawk community in 2011 to dig up the graves that he claimed existed in the apple orchard area of their residential school. According to Annett, these were the graves of indigenous students who had been secretly killed and buried in the apple orchard at the school, with the forced help of fellow students. 

Sound familiar? It should. That was essentially the same grisly tale repeated by Chief Rosanne Casimir years later in Kamloops. (See above.)

Except that the wiser folks within the Brantford Mohawk community twigged on to Annett’s tricks. And when Annett was found on the streets of Toronto, waving around chicken bones, and pretending that they were the bones of children he had unearthed at Brantford, the Mohawk elders came together and publicly denounced Annett as a fraud at a community meeting.  They then banished him from their community. 

Unfortunately, Casimir became a useful idiot for Annett — just as the gullible TRC commissioners did — and no such leadership has yet come forward from the wiser elements within the Kamloops indigenous community. Those folks are silent, while the more vocal contingent are still sticking to their story that the  soil anomalies are the “remains of 215 children,” and not what they almost certainly are — 1924 septic excavations. 

So, the questions should be asked: Is the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, and dumped them in a mass grave, any more or less believable than the claim that priests killed and secretly buried 215 children at Kamloops, (or any of the copycat claims that followed it?)

What is it about that Mohawk claim that gives it appeal to only the most gullible among us, while the equally improbable Kamloops claim is still taken seriously by so many people?

On the surface, both claims are outrageous, and have no real evidence to support them. Quite the contrary, every Canadian history book ever written is cogent evidence  that both stories are false. But the Mohawk claim was dismissed as the nonsense it obviously was, while the Kamloops claim lives on.

At least part of the answer to those questions appears to be in the response of the government in power, and the media to the claims. If the Brantford claim had been met by a prime minister who immediately ordered that flags be lowered, and offered hundreds of millions of dollars to any other indigenous communities who wanted to make similar claim, no doubt that Brantford claim would have been taken seriously.

Or, if the Brantford claim had been made in a time when a highly ideological CBC would ask no questions, and blindly promote the claim, the results might have been entirely different. As it is, the Brantford claim died a merciful death, while the equally specious Kamloops genocide claim still languishes like a stinking albatross around the neck of every Canadian.

Although the international community is increasingly broadcasting the obvious fact that the Kamloops claim is bogus Canada’s media remains asleep. That is not likely to change until leadership changes in Ottawa, and at the CBC. Pierre Pollievre, when questioned on this topic, stated clearly that he stands for historical truth, accuracy, and a full investigation into all questions pertaining to claims about residential school deaths. Hopefully, that means that excavation and a full inquiry will follow.

But Tk’emlups indigenous elders better wake up, like the Mohawk elders did. You are not doing your communities a favour by letting politicians and journalists treat you like children, by pretending to believe your bizarre claims. These false claims are already doing great damage.

Fortunately, there are many thoughtful indigenous people who do not blindly accept the claims about murderous priests and secret burials.

Here is one such wise indigenous person. He is a priest, and he is willing to do what our federal government and our CBC failed to do from the beginning namely to intelligently discuss the issue.

Thoughtful people like this need to be involved in a full investigation that will clear the air about the Kamloops claim, and get Canada back on track.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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