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The deepest problem is alienation of citizens from their governments. It’s habitually treated as an odd phenomenon unrelated to the state’s increasingly feeble, unaffordable and arrogant performance. But government in Canada isn’t just big and inept. It’s inept because it’s too big, in ways our traditional constitution was designed to prevent.

Yes, constitution. When problems are this fundamental, so are causes. And right now the relationship between citizens and government in Canada is upside down. We don’t control them, they control us. They have torn loose from their moorings, and we need to strap them down again.

To try to deal with these problems piecemeal is to play whack-a-mole, as Ezra Levant just said about Toronto’s selective ban on Christian advocacy in a public square. It’s good that a Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) legal challenge forced the city to back down … this time. But they’ll be back, along with a horde of academics, politicians, judges and activists delighted to limit our rights in ways they majestically consider justified in a free and democratic society.

That’s backwards. In a free and democratic society, rights cannot be infringed by the high and mighty. That’s why our Charter of Rights, like much else in our modern Constitution, is a big mess deserving a big fix.

We can’t clean it up one sensible piece at a time because the amending formula excludes the people. So let’s stop playing whack-a-mole with government arrogance and incompetence and address those famous “root causes.” Let’s put our Constitution back on its limited-government foundations.