From the Fr0ntier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Judges struck down one-year minimum prison sentences for child pornography possession. Meanwhile, the chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee publicly stated that religious scriptures condemning homosexuality are “hateful.” Lee Harding says the 1982 Charter has led to an inversion of Canadian values.

Light sentences for child-porn possession collide with federal signals that biblical texts could be prosecuted as hate

Was Canada’s 1982 Charter meant to condemn the Bible as hate literature or to weaken sentencing for child pornography? Like it or not, that is the direction post-Charter Canada is moving.

For Halloween, the black-robed justices at the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a one-year mandatory sentence for accessing or possessing child sexual abuse materials amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” The judgment upheld a similar ruling from the Quebec Court of Appeal.

A narrow 5-4 majority leaned on a hypothetical. If an 18-year-old received a sexually explicit image from a 17-year-old girlfriend, that image would technically be child porn. If prosecuted, the recipient could face a one-year minimum sentence. On that basis, the judges rejected the entire minimum sentence law.

But the real case before them was far more disturbing. Two Quebec men possessed images and videos that were clearly the result of abuse. One had 317 unique images of child porn, with 90 per cent showing girls aged three to six years old forced into penetration and sodomy by adults or other minors. The other had 531 images and 274 videos of girls aged five to 10 engaged in sexual acts, including anal and vaginal penetration and, in some cases, multiple children.

The sentences were light. The first offender received 90 days of intermittent imprisonment, served concurrently, plus 24 months of probation. The second received nine months of imprisonment and the same probation period. How is this acceptable?

The judgment did not emerge without warning. Daniel A. Lang, a Liberal campaign chair appointed to the Senate by Lester B. Pearson, saw this coming more than 40 years ago. On April 23, 1981, he expressed concerns that the new Constitution could be used to erode basic decency laws. He pointed to the U.S. experience and predicted that Canada could face a wave of cases challenging laws on “obscenity, pornography and freedom of speech,” leading to the “negation of federal or provincial legislation.”

His warning has come true. If Parliament wants to restore mandatory minimum sentences, it can do so by passing a new law that removes the obscure scenario judges used to strike them down. Section 33, the notwithstanding clause, gives elected officials the power to override court rulings for up to five years at a time.

This reflects Canada’s own system. In the British tradition Canada inherited, Parliament—not the courts—is the ultimate authority. British common law developed over centuries through conventions and precedents shaped by elected lawmakers. Section 33 protects that balance by ensuring Parliament can still act when judges disagree.

There is a democratic check as well. If a government uses Section 33 and voters believe it made the wrong call, they can remove that government at the next election. A new government can then follow the judges’ views or let the old law expire after five years. That accountability is precisely why Section 33 strengthens democracy rather than weakening it.

Yet today, Ottawa is working to limit that safeguard. In September, the Carney Liberals asked the Supreme Court to rule on new limits to how legislatures can use Section 33. Five premiers wrote to Carney to oppose the move. Former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Brian Peckford, the last living signatory to the agreement that produced the 1982 Constitution Act, has also condemned the attempt as wrongful.

The judges will likely approve the new limits. Why would they refuse a chance to narrow the one tool elected governments have to get around their rulings? For decades, the Supreme Court has made a habit of striking down laws, telling Parliament it is wrong and forcing political change.

And while minimum sentences for child-porn offenders fall, the Carney cabinet is focused on something else entirely: prosecuting Bible believers for alleged hate.

The quiet part was said out loud by Montreal lawyer Marc Miller, former minister of immigration and citizenship and chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee. On Oct. 30, he told the committee, “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans, there’s other passages, there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals.”

The former minister added, “There should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges … [T]here are clearly passages in religious texts that are clearly hateful.”

That is the former minister’s view. Instead of Bible thumpers, we now have Charter thumpers who use their “sacred” document to justify whatever interpretation suits their cause and wield it against their ideological opponents. When wokeness hardens into dogma, disagreement becomes heresy. And we know what happens to heretics.

A country that lets child-porn offenders off easy while it hunts down Bible believers for fines and possible prison has lost its way. Most Canadians would reject this trade-off, but their rulers do not, whether in cabinet or on the judges’ bench. A dark shadow is settling over the country.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

From Energy Now

By Margareta Dovgal

Playing politics with pipelines is a time-honored Canadian tradition. Recent events in the House of Commons offered a delightful twist on the genre.

The Conservatives introduced a motion quoting the Liberals’ own pipeline promises laid out in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Alberta, nearly verbatim. The Liberals, true to form, killed it 196–139 with enthusiastic help from the NDP, Bloc, and Greens.

We all knew how this would end. Opposition motions like this never pass; no government, especially not one led by Mark Carney, is going to let the opposition dictate the agenda. There’s not much use feigning outrage that the Liberals voted it down. The more entertaining angle has been watching closely as Liberal MPs twist themselves into pretzels explaining why they had to vote “no” on a motion that cheers on a project they claim to support in principle.

Liberal MP Corey Hogan dismissed the motion as “game-playing” designed to “poke at people”.

And he’s absolutely right to call it a “trap” for the Liberals. But traps only work when you walk into them.

Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty deemed the motion an “immature waste of parliamentary time” and “clearly an insult towards Indigenous Peoples” because it didn’t include every clause of the original agreement. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson decried it as a “cynical ploy to divide us” that “cherry-picked” the MOU.

Yet the prize for the most tortured metaphor goes to the prime minister himself. Defending his vote against his own pipeline promise, Carney lectured the House that “you have to eat the entire meal, not just the appetizer.”

It’s a clever line, and it also reveals the problem. The “meal” Carney is serving is stuffed with conditions. Environmental targets or meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities aren’t unrealistic asks. A crippling industrial carbon price as a precondition might be though.

But the prime minister has already said the quiet part out loud.

​Speaking in the House a few weeks ago, Carney admitted that the agreement creates “necessary conditions, but not sufficient conditions,” before explicitly stating: “We believe the government of British Columbia has to agree.”

​There is the poison pill. Handing a de facto veto to a provincial government that has spent years fighting oil infrastructure is neither constitutionally required nor politically likely. Elevating B.C.’s “agreement” to a condition, which is something the MOU text itself carefully avoids doing, means that Carney has made his own “meal” effectively inedible.

Hodgson’s repeated emphasis that the Liberal caucus supports “the entire MOU, the entire MOU” only reinforces this theory.

This entire episode forces us to ask whether the MOU is a real plan to build a pipeline, or just a national unity play designed to cool down the separatist temperature in Alberta. My sense is that Ottawa knew they had to throw a bone to Premier Danielle Smith because the threat of the sovereignty movement is gaining real traction. But you can’t just create the pretense of negotiation to buy time.

With the MOU getting Smith boo’ed at her own party’s convention by the separatists, it’s debatable whether that bone was even an effective one to throw.

There is a way. The federal government has the jurisdiction. If they really wanted to, they could just do it, provided the duty to consult with and accommodate Indigenous peoples was satisfied. Keep in mind: no reasonable interpretation equates Section 35 of the Charter to a veto.

Instead, the MOU is baked with so many conditions that the Liberals have effectively laid the groundwork for how they’re going to fail.

With overly-hedged, rather cryptic messaging, Liberals have themselves given considerable weight to a cynical theory, that the MOU is a stalling tactic, not a foundation to get more Canadian oil to the markets it’s needed in. Maybe Hodgson is telling the truth, and caucus is unified because the radicals are satisfied that “the entire MOU” ensures that a new oil pipeline will never reach tidewater through BC.

So, hats off to the legislative affairs strategists in the Conservative caucus. The real test of Carney’s political power continues: can he force a caucus that prefers fantasy economics into a mold of economic literacy to deliver on the vision Canadians signed off on? Or will he be hamstrung trying to appease the radicals from within?

Margareta Dovgal is managing director of Resource Works Society.