EDITORIAL: Trudeau is toying with a unity crisis

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is risking a national unity crisis by publicly musing about limiting the use of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause by the provinces.

That raises the question of why is he doing it?

Canadians today are focused on the high cost of necessities such as food, energy and shelter, long wait times for surgery, overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms and hallway medicine.

They don’t need the federal and provincial governments losing focus on those priorities by squabbling over the notwithstanding clause — Section 33 of the Charter — which allows the federal, provincial and territorial governments to override certain provisions of the Charter by passing a law subject to review every five years.

Intended to make elected politicians, not unelected judges, the final decision-makers on key legislation, its inclusion in the Charter was necessary to win provincial approval for then prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s patriation of Canada’s constitution from Great Britain in 1982.

Trudeau said over the weekend he opposes the provinces invoking the notwithstanding clause “proactively” and “pre-emptively” because given the “rise of populism” it could be used to deny fundamental rights.

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He noted he is considering asking the Supreme Court of Canada for a ruling on limiting its use.

That may have been intended as a shot at Ontario Premier Doug Ford — Trudeau criticized Ford for his recent and now aborted plan to invoke the notwithstanding clause to override public sector bargaining rights, which Trudeau said was “wrong and inappropriate.”

But it was Quebec Premier Francois Legault who was first to condemn Trudeau’s comments in an interview the PM did with La Presse.

“This desire expressed by Justin Trudeau is a frontal attack on our nation’s ability to protect our collective rights,” Legault responded on social media. “Quebec will never accept such a weakening of its rights. Never!”

Quebec legislatures have used the notwithstanding clause to prevent the courts overturning its laws on language, education, secularism and other issues.

While many federal Liberals have long opposed the notwithstanding clause — even though it was a federal Liberal government that agreed to it — for Trudeau to pick a fight with the provinces on this issue would further divide an already bitterly divided country.

Trudeau should focus on ways to unite Canadians, not divide them.