There is nothing more embarassing about human existence that the principle “if you say enough, it it will be true”. No greater example of this exists than the phrase “activist judges” which has been successfully shoved into the parlance by axe-grinders. Sadly, though not unexpectedly, the current poll leader in the Federal election has trotted out this sham:
Stephen Harper says some judges appointed by the federal Liberals are activists working to promote their own social agendas, statements that drew heavily from his tenure in the old Reform and Canadian Alliance parties. The assertions by the Conservative Leader, whose party leads the public opinion polls, mark one of the few times during a tightly scripted election campaign that he has strayed far from the centre of the political highway.
A thinking person’s first response to this ought to be somewhat similar to hearing that our Foreign-Minister-in-Waiting, Stocky, will have difficulty dealing with visits to Kenya giving their obviously heretical and slanderous position on the meaning of the Rift Valley’s contents.
How is it that claims of a secret agenda of the right is a farce but the secret agenda of judges is lapped up by the willing and the weak? How is it that one part of the constitutional structure can so misrepresent another part of it and not be labelled as disloyal to the core by traditionalists (not to mention the sentient) as finger-pointery folk offer up freely for anyone who suggests, say, that Arctic paratrooper capability as a defence against sub-ice-cap submarines might not be the best use of military resources? It is clear from all objective considerations that, by body count at least but more so the right to hit the brakes, the responsible authors of constitutional change brought on by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms were the mainly conservative premiers who signed up for it and did so rightly as it expresses the complex nature of Canadian democracy and details it more and more as it is unfolds through each ruling. The courts, in doing so, play the role demanded of it with honour and intelligence (but without political pressure though as humans) through the combination of the facts of its historical constitutional existence and the task asked of it by the legislators.
“Activist judge” is just another way of saying “person who disagrees with me”. Shammery and wilful blindness from the same folk who would restructure the Senate to actually give it power and distribute that power unequally to the low population zones of the nation. Another step by a political minority seeking to remake the nation and impose it on the rest of us. You have to at least admire their gall.