What does Stephen Harper dislike that almost all Canadians like? The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that’s what.

It has consistently enjoyed approval ratings of 80 per cent and more. No other people, anywhere, are known to have had such a sustained love affair with a law.

Tuesday was the Charter’s 30th anniversary but the prime minister refused to celebrate.

Perhaps he does not like it for precisely the reasons that Canadians love it. It has advanced free speech, freedom of religion, women’s equality, aboriginal rights, English and French linguistic minority rights, gay rights and the rights of immigrants, refugees and multicultural minorities.

Or, it could be that he hates anything Liberal. The Charter was ushered in by a Liberal government — that, too, by Pierre Elliot Trudeau who was too French, too rich, too arrogant and too socially progressive for many conservatives. They loathed him. He, in turn, couldn’t care less what they thought, which made them madder still. Their hatred and his disdain made for quite a show.

But let’s not forget that at the historic 1981 First Ministers’ Conference, which hammered out the Constitution, Trudeau won the backing of nine premiers, none of whom was a Liberal and as many as seven were Conservatives. Even Brian Peckford of Newfoundland and Sterling Lyon of Manitoba, who disliked Trudeau intensely, signed on. And it was a Tory premier, Bill Davis of Ontario, who helped broker the deal.

Such non-partisan compromises now seem a thing of the past.

The Charter does not belong to Liberals or Conservatives or New Democrats. It belongs to all Canadians. And the prime minister should be applauding, not belittling, it.

When cornered by the media Monday about his seeming pettiness, Harper tried, first, to detract from the Charter by noting its antecedence in(Tory) John Diefenbaker’s 1960 Bill of Rights.

That was indeed a pioneering declaration of citizens’ rights (about which Dief was justly proud, even if toward the end of his life he taxed his audiences’, and reporters’, patience by going on and on about it in just about every speech).

Trudeau himself acknowledged Dief’s feat: “I was struck by his vigorous defence of human rights and individual liberties. The Bill of Rights remains a monument to him.”

Yet as an act of Parliament that was not entrenched in the Constitution, it had been of little value in the courts in enforcing rights. That did not begin to happen until the Charter arrived. Harper no doubt knows that.

He was even more outrageous in saying that the Charter “remains inextricably linked to . . . the divisions around the matter, which are still very real in some parts of the country.”

Quebec did not sign the 1982 Constitution not because René Lévesque was knifed in the back, as he claimed, but because it did not serve his separatist purpose. Also, he was not the sole representatives of Quebecers at the constitutional table. Trudeau had the support of 72 of 75 Liberal MPs from his province.

Regardless of the myths woven by the separatists since, the Constitution has very much been the law of the land, including in Quebec. And the Charter remains about as popular there as elsewhere in the country.

There are arguments, for sure, over what followed 1982.

Many believe that leaving out Quebec necessitated Brian Mulroney’s bid to “bring Quebec into the constitutional fold.” He did so through the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords, the spectacular failures of which triggered the 1995 referendum in Quebec, when the separatists came scarily close to winning.

Others argue that while there was a need to reach out to Quebec, he was inept in how he did it. More crucially, that he had sown the seeds of his failure by pandering to Quebec nationalists. He had wooed them into the Tory fold by parroting separatist lingo of how Quebec had been robbed.

Harper himself used to decry such appeasement of Quebec sovereigntists. But in 2006, as prime minister he had Parliament recognize the Québécois as “a nation within a united Canada.” (It was his way of neutralizing the Bloc Québécois. Fair enough.)

Another debate — which has receded since 1982 but not gone away — is over whether the Charter leads to “judge-made laws,” as opposed to laws enacted by elected governments. Do “activist judges” and “activist courts” undermine the supremacy of Parliament and legislatures?

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The riposte is that the Charter was enacted by Parliament, not the judiciary, which did not even request it.

These are all arguments of a vibrant democracy. But they ought not to drag a prime minister away from celebrating the law of the land, especially the Charter, a symbol of Canada to the world.

hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

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