Article content continued

If it is undemocratic and profligate for elected governments to fabricate patently unconstitutional laws, this one is surely much worse than most of the ones the Liberals raised such a clamour about in the old days. And that holds true, whatever your opinion of doctor-assisted suicide happens to be. But there is an important difference you may be forgetting. The difference is that when the Liberals trample the Charter, they are trampling what much of the media consider to be their personal property. Having given us the thing, they are surely entitled to clean their boots on it.

To find an example of this thinking, you need only point your web browser’s nose at the Globe and Mail’s daily politics briefing for Tuesday morning. There we find John Ibbitson, a Globian who, with the impending retirement of Jeffrey Simpson, is in line to become the living embodiment of conventional wisdom. He comments thus on the kerfuffle over C-14 now taking place in the Senate: the “real issue” with the bill “is that it’s people-compliant, not court-compliant.”

In the bad old days we used that word “unconstitutional,” but Liberal legislation is never that; it’s “people-compliant.” Ibbitson, his nerve steeled by a change of government, cites polls showing that the Canadian public does not want a right to assisted suicide that might include an otherwise well person who is merely in excruciating pain or experiencing pathological anguish. The Conservatives used to hammer the polls in just this fashion when they had a tough crime bill in the pipeline, but … times have changed. When the government is Liberal, newspapermen will cite the polls on its behalf.