by The Honourable A. Brian Peckford
February 19, 2023
For the past almost three years I have pondered almost every day the nature of our present society, nation, country.
Being only 7 years old when Newfoundland joined Canada as a result of a very close referendum I was just old enough to remember that something momentous was happening.
It never dawned on me in the years since , at school, university, in public life and private business and especially during the Constitutional discussion of 1980, 1981 that this county would be in the position that it now finds itself.
Its health and education systems in decline , its economy more and more tied to a universally failed socialist idea —-where the results are clear: lowering productivity and innovation and where it is 122 nd in the world of nations of how long it takes to get an electrical permit. That’s according to the Wold Bank. That was two years ago . The Bank has ceased doing such things . Need not wonder why.
Growing up we all assumed that our vaunted universal health system would just go on humming , our education system would just go on humming. They were on some sort of god like auto pilot.
If you questioned it you were a bad Canadian . I remember once at a First Ministers Meeting in the distant past of the 1980’s suggesting that Canadians were unaware of just how much their health care was costing and perhaps we should be sending out bills so everyone could see after a hospital stay just how much it cost and it was zero cost directly to them , for example. I was laughed at! Today millions are without a family physician.
I remember when wages and price controls were implemented with socialist advice of J.K. Galbraith and others . Some western provincial leaders and yours truly objected. We were scoffed at.
State incursion seemed to becoming natural !!
And debt was becoming a nice word —you just labelled a lot of borrowing ‘ investments’ and used fancy formula like debt /gdp ratio. Meanwhile the debt kept growing.
Then I realized a lot of this was not a game, but an ego driven , real power game over the nature of this country.
My fights over fisheries and offshore resources and a better deal in Labrador power were suppose to be bargaining chips not legitimate concerns in their own right. I had high powered political leaders and prominent Canadian businessmen sent as emissaries from the PM to do deals. Trading fish for hydro power or oil.
The Constitutional Process of 1980/1 was revealing. It was the first time we saw clearly a determination to fundamentally change the county . The Federal Government attempted to disfigure the Confederation Project. And failed ! Interesting that many people, if not a majority, still do not know that Trudeau Sr and company were rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada.
You did not know , I now realize, because you are not suppose to know. The powers that be were shocked that they lost. And to this day it is played down in history’s recording of it —-a Constitutional Principle becomes a matter of legal wording gymnastics. And the subsequent Patriation Agreement with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms becomes a process that tries to erroneously put the elites in control. A scrap of paper in a hotel kitchen . The intrigue of it all. The documents I presented still being denied by silence.
On the economic front it began with the national energy program and now sees it played out with a carbon tax, over reaching environmental legislation, the thwarting of true federalism . The Atlantic Accord was a brief respite . We are now seeing its dismantling to the power centre .
Socially , the centralization is almost complete with Provinces demanding more health money in an area that is totally in their jurisdiction.
And no one says a peep.
Bring on more debt, and less provincial power. Let’s complete the project.
Meanwhile the judiciary for its part was not asleep at the wheel.
It sensed the reordering was underway and with sense of purpose and in full throttle began the practice of implementing the living tree dogma of constitutional interpretation , the original wording, intent and spirit and even the convention principle that stopped Trudeau Sr in 1981 very much in jeopardy.
Now judges are telling me as one of the signatories to the Charter what God I had in mind in the opening words to the Charter—‘supremacy of God. ‘ The arrogance ——and mis reading of constitutional history.
And now , not only the re-emergence of the concept of Upper and Lower Canada rears its ugly head but the vey core of the 1981 Charter—individual rights, freedoms and self worth , and individual autonomy undermined in this central government , statist , economic . social and judicial shift .
And the fake ‘pandemic’ completed the project.
Even former media mogul , Conrad Black, sets the bar so low that the cowardly Conservative leader qualifies to be PM because of his bashing of CBC—not that he is unqualified because of his silence on our VERY CONSTITUTION —-our CHARTER —our RIGHTS and FREEDOMS —-being taken away in the greatest coup in our history.
The State takes a bow as its appointed Commissioner with Government setting the terms of reference does an assessment of its master on robbing citizens of its rights and freedoms , predictably white washing the theft.
Canadians dutifully lined up to appear before the charade —the Commission —( not one spokesperson addressed the falsity of it all) confident in their deception that justice would be done.
And democratic Canada died.
