A Magna Carta for Canada
By Brian Peckford
Former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford, the last surviving first minister from the constitutional process that gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, spoke at the George Jonas Freedom Award dinner in Burnaby, British Columbia on July 13, 2022. The Freedom Award was to be presented to Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich, but she was unable to attend as she remains behind bars in Ottawa. Below is the text of Peckford’s remarks, which is being republished with permission and has only been edited for the purposes of formatting.
It is a real honour to be asked to speak to you on this very important occasion for freedom. Especially to honour someone I have met and with whom I participated at the Trucker Convoy in Ottawa. And most particularly, our participation at the impromptu press conference to foreshadow a dark day in our constitutional history when our elected representatives invoked the unconstitutional Emergencies Act. Equally momentous was meeting Tamara’s Board of Directors: honest, hard working Canadians fighting for our rights and freedoms on the precincts of our federal Parliament.
Those days and hours will not be forgotten — by me or by many Canadians. It reminds us of just how fragile democracy really is.
Individual Freedom is a hard fought idea but one that has remained active in human governance for millennia. Socrates, appearing before the Athenian jury over 2500 years ago, is a historic moment that captures us all when considering this idea, fighting for his right to free speech. The great Cicero, in the first century BC, fighting for the taxpayers of Sicily before the Roman Senate, and the English Magna Carta in 1215, individuals fighting for rights of redress, less power for the monarch.
Then there is the American Declaration of Independence, its Constitution and Bill Of Rights and the Federalist Papers, and the early French Revolution of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
And then there are the great western thinkers like Montesquieu, Locke, Voltaire, Mill, Paine, and Burke. And Americans like Jefferson, Jay, Hamilton and Madison. Later important political thinkers include Hayek, Popper, Hoffer, Arendt, Kirk and Sowell.
With the exponential growth of the administrative state in the later part of the twentieth century and the first decades of the 21st, the individual rights in America’s Bill of Rights and the more recent individual rights and freedoms in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada, have come under attack, culminating in the attempted wholesale slaughter of these rights during the past almost two and one half years of the so-called pandemic. Judicial activism was unleashed — and the intent, spirit, and even plain meaning of a Constitution was undermined. As American Judge Robert Bork exclaimed in his 2002 book ‘Coercing Virtue’: