Toronto’s Globe and Mail has long been recognized as Canada’s “paper of record,” and two recent editorials give us yet another glimpse of where the progressive establishment intends to take us.
On September 28, the Globe and Mail published an editorial by Sheema Khan titled “Canadians must not stand for the notwithstanding clause’s pre-emptive use.” The photo accompanying the column was, of course, of an LGBT rally outside the Regina legislature in Saskatchewan protesting the province’s Parental Bill of Rights.
For context here, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives the courts the power to enforce constitutional rights — and indeed, to interpret them however the current justices see fit. That is how we got a Supreme Court ruling that found the right to suicide in the right to life in Carter v. Canada. But because of concerns about judicial supremacy, section 33 of the Charter — the notwithstanding clause — was inserted as a political compromise when the Constitution was patriated in 1981-82.
This means that provincial legislatures can invoke the notwithstanding clause to override the courts in specific circumstances. Without the notwithstanding clause, the 1982 constitutional settlement that gave us the Charter likely have failed over concerns that elected legislators were being replaced by unelected judges.
Now that premiers have used the notwithstanding clause to protect parental rights, stop children from being “socially transitioned” to the opposite sex without parental knowledge and, in Alberta’s case, ban sex changes for minors, progressives predictably would like to get rid of Section 33 entirely. As Khan noted that this legal but angrily demands to know if it is “just,” writing that Section 33 is being used to “take our vulnerable minorities’ freedoms away without legal recourse.”
In other words, the notwithstanding clause has been used in a way that Canada’s LGBT activists do not like. Therefore, it should not be tolerated. Nothing can stand in the way of their agenda — not even the Charter itself. The rule of law is only praised when it can be changed, amended, or bent to suit the aims of the sexual revolution.
Now let’s take another Globe and Mail editorial, published on October 6. It is authored by euthanasia activist Andre Picard and titled “It’s well past time for Catholic hospitals to be secularized.” According to Picard, “One hundred and twenty-nine of Canada’s 1,087 hospitals are Catholic. Most refuse to perform medical assistance in dying, abortion, tubal ligation, hysterectomy, vasectomy, gender-affirming care, or provide birth control to patients … ” Picard adds grimly: “Many long-term care homes with religious affiliations also refuse to allow MAID on their premises.”
He concludes that “MAID has become the catalyst for long-overdue change. Religious hospitals need to either offer care without discrimination or get out of the business altogether.”
In less than a decade, euthanasia activists went from howling about “choice!” to “either you get us kill people in your hospital, or we’ll take it from you.” For Picard, Canada’s euthanasia regime provides a good opportunity to purge Christianity — which was founded and administered life-saving care for generations — from the medical system. After all, these institutions also oppose killing children in the womb, sterilizing patients, and conducting sex change surgeries.
Editorials like this should not be dismissed as the cranky opinions of anti-Christian bigots. They are intended to both frame and shift the debate — and the Globe and Mail has done this before. As F.L. Morton put it in his seminal history of Canada’s abortion debate:
Short-term success was unlikely without a sympathetic portrayal by the national media. Events are not “news” unless they are reported. Reporters, editors, and producers have the discretion to “make news” and to couch issues in either a positive or negative light. Normally, the policy recommendations of professional organizations are not front-page news, and politicians rarely feel pressed to respond to much else. It was thus the good fortune of the pro-(abortion) forces to find not just a friend but a veritable ally in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Beginning in 1961, the Globe and Mail mounted an editorial crusade for abortion law reform. Abortion-related news was routinely accorded front-page coverage, while scores of editorials were used to cheer reformers, chide the timid, and castigate the opposition.
Morton added, “By the fall of 1967, the Globe’s persistent and partisan coverage had achieved its intended effect. It had nudged the abortion issue out of the backwaters of legal and medical journals and onto the centre of Canada’s political agenda.”
Not all non-Christians agree with Picard, by the way. As author Catherine Frazee, an author with disabilities, put it, “On the question of religious hospitals, despite being a lesbian couple, Patricia and I would tolerate life-size crucifixes in the treatment room if it meant being safe from MAiD.” As Stanley Hauerwas said, “If in a hundred years Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well.” It won’t take that long. People will be desperate for places that will not kill. Most of those places will be Christian.
