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In 2019, Danielle Smith was a Calgary broadcaster with a talent for reflecting Albertans’ anger back at her audience.

At the time, four years into Justin Trudeau’s first term, collapsed oil prices were crippling the provincial economy, pipelines had been cancelled and Albertans were angry about Liberal legislation affecting the energy sector.

“Election day is shaping up to be the most disunifying event in Canada in recent history, but it doesn’t have to be,” Smith wrote in her regular Calgary Herald column, just days before the 2019 federal election. “It could also be the moment where Alberta finally decides to stop acting like a national doormat and take charge of its future.”

More than five years later, Smith is now premier, and Albertans — and other Canadians — are musing openly about just what election 2025 could do to national unity.

“I want Canada to work … I also want Canada to work for Alberta, and it hasn’t for the last 10 years because of terrible policies by the Liberals,” Smith said recently.

Live from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET: Video and analysis from the English debate

The man Smith replaced, Jason Kenney, says that in 2019, when he was premier, the reasons for the anger were easy to find — Bill C-69, C-49, the cancellations of the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipeline. Now, Kenney says, it’s more basic: Albertans are simply baffled that the Liberals under Mark Carney could possibly be re-elected.

“There’s a general sense in Alberta that the Liberal party is hostile to our core industries, and a frustration that despite the manifest incompetence of the government on virtually every issue over the past decade — which would be a view held by like three-quarters of Albertans — that it’s a government that might get re-elected,” Kenney said.

As premier, Smith is rattling Confederation with talk of alienation, national unity crises and provincial rights. This, coupled with her diplomatic efforts south of the border and engaging with Trump-friendly audiences, have made her a lightning rod for a certain sort of Canadian — especially at a time when patriotic sentiment is soaring, and very much a ballot issue.

Those Canadians — generally those from outside Alberta and Saskatchewan, although she has her local critics, too — see her diplomacy and her national-unity musings as a kind of treason, even if Smith would argue she’s trying to improve Canada, not destroy it.

“I really hope that we can get Canada on Team Alberta because Team Alberta has always been on Team Canada,” she said recently.

There are three key things that are driving her critics mad, and rippling through the federal campaign.

The first: her visit to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump in January, her appearance alongside U.S. podcaster Ben Shapiro in Florida in late March, and comments made to a Breitbart podcast saying Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was more “in sync” with the Trump administration than his opponent. The second: her decision to remain offside with the other Canadian premiers’ united response to U.S. tariff threats. And, third, her insertion of nine demands onto the national electoral agenda, lest there be an “unprecedented national unity crisis.”

“The idea of a national unity crisis is probably more real than a lot of people in Ottawa would like to think, and at the same time, not as real as the biggest pushers of Alberta separation would like to think,” says Brad Tennant, a long-time conservative activist in Alberta, who’s also with Wellington Advocacy.

It’s enough to have caught the attention of The New York Times, which this week described Smith as being on the vanguard of the Canadian right. And, in contrast to the bullish response from the federal Liberals to U.S. intransigence, Smith is taking a different tack.

“I’m happy to be good cop,” she told the Times.

Smith, as she did in her days as an incendiary columnist and radio host, is channelling and perhaps fuelling Albertans’ anger, and directing it outwards. It’s an altogether different environment than it was in 2019, when a bunch of big-rig truckers set off for Canada’s capital in the first iteration of the convoy to Ottawa.

—

Each year in Ottawa, the biggest names in Canadian conservatism gather for an annual conference hosted by the Strong and Free Network. It’s a place where conservative fellow travellers can meet and network and otherwise further the evolution of Canada’s conservative movement.

Smith told the conference that Albertans are “soured” on a Liberal government, blaming the policies of former prime minister Justin Trudeau for a “beaten down” economy. Whether or not there will be a national unity crisis precipitated by Alberta depends on how the next government — Liberal or Conservative — acts, she said.

“It depends on what the reaction is. If they don’t address those issues, then we’re going to have to see what the reaction of Albertans are,” Smith said.

In that, Smith was referring to the nine demands she made to Carney the day they met in late March. They include scrapping the Liberals’ clean-electricity regulations, reforming the regulatory regime established by Bill C-69, ending the ban on single-use plastics, and others.

If Smith was vague on what the reaction of Albertans would be, others have been less shy about stating it outright.

A group of devoted separatists, including two former Conservative members of Parliament, are organizing a delegation to Washington, D.C., hoping to meet with American officials on the possibility of Alberta becoming the 51st state. They want a secession referendum by December 2025. (Alberta has legislation that allows citizens to bring forward province-wide referenda.)

Preston Manning, the father of the Reform party, wrote in the Globe and Mail in early April that a vote for Mark Carney would be a vote for the end of Canada, as the prairie provinces stampeded towards secession.

The perception outside of Alberta, and even to an extent inside Alberta, is that this is an outright threat: Give us what we want, or we’re out.

Matt Solberg, a partner with New West Public Affairs, who worked on Smith’s transition team in 2023, says he doesn’t see those comments that way.

“This is a bit of a reality check,” Solberg said. “I think she’s saying ‘if we want to make everyone’s life easier, let’s acknowledge these priorities.’”

—

On Saturday mornings, Smith goes back to her roots. She appears on Your Province. Your Premier on the Corus radio network. A couple weeks ago, a caller phoned in, asking if the premier was a “closet” western separatist.

“It’s hard not to notice your contempt for Team Canada,” the caller said.

“I disagree,” Smith said. “I was just down in the U.S. with my Team Canada jersey on.”

At this point, what Smith has promised is a “what’s next” panel. When Kenney became premier, he initiated the Fair Deal Panel, which toured the province and revisited a number of issues that could see Alberta wrest some power from the federal government. While it’s unclear what Smith’s version of the panel would look into, she says it would listen to Albertans and see what they want to discuss.

“We just want to go around the province, see how people are feeling and see if there are any other referendum issues that they want us to put on the table,” said Smith.

The Corus host, Wayne Nelson, noted that Smith has, over the past few months, furthered perceptions of disunity in the Canadian response to U.S. tariffs and the renewed talk of Alberta independence.

“It’s nonsense. The one issue I disagreed with is we cannot have an export tax or export restrictions on oil and gas, that is the one issue that I have disagreed with and I think I am standing up for Albertans in that regard,” Smith said.

In mid-January, Smith declined to sign a joint statement of Canada’s premiers, because it included the potential use of an export tax on oil and gas as a negotiating lever with the United States.

Alberta separatism is, and always has been, a fairly niche sentiment. The Angus Reid Institute found in a recent poll that only 24 per cent of Albertans believe their province is respected by the rest of the country; 30 per cent say they’d like to see Alberta separate. A large figure, certainly, but nowhere near a majority.

But there’s a distinct partisan divide here. What separatists do exist, the Albertans who are the most incensed at Ottawa, the most angry about the structure of Confederation, tend to be conservative voters.

In 2023, Environics pollsters found 83 per cent of UCP voters said Alberta wasn’t given enough respect, compared to 37 per cent of NDP supporters. Smith’s chief of staff, Rob Anderson, is the author of the 2021 Free Alberta Strategy.

In a province where conservatives have been far more successful at deposing conservative premiers than opposition parties have, it pays to keep an eye on party sentiment. It was angry conservatives — not angry NDPers — who ushered Kenney out the door.

For Smith, keeping that base happy is crucial to her political survival. And, ironically, as much as she probably wants a Poilievre government in Ottawa, a conservative in Alberta’s going to have much better electoral luck with a Liberal in the prime minister’s office.

“She’s more than a one-note band, but her biggest note is fighting with Liberal Ottawa and if that gets taken away, she has more political challenges than if it doesn’t get taken away,” says Ken Boessenkool, a long-time Alberta political strategist.

—

On the very first day of the federal election, Pierre Poilievre launched his campaign with Parliament Hill as his backdrop.

In what was surely not the start that he would’ve wanted, Poilievre was forced to answer questions about Smith. She had told Breitbart News the Trump administration would find Poilievre more “in sync” with their goals than the Liberal alternative. She also hinted that the tariff talk was pushing Canadians towards the Liberals, undoing what, just weeks before, had looked like a surefire Conservative victory.

Poilievre largely elided the issue: “My response is that the president has said that he thinks it would be easier to deal with a Liberal, and with good reason, the Liberals have weakened our country,” he said.

Erika Barootes, a senator-elect, podcaster and past president of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, said that interview caused some problems at the start of the campaign.

“But I think that they’ve — the premier’s office — have corrected their tactic of how to engage or speak during a federal election, and I think that that’s democratically and diplomatically the right shift that they made,” Barootes said in an interview.

Boessenkool was one of those who, nearly 25 years ago, authored the Firewall Letter to then-premier Klein, arguing that Alberta could increase its power within confederation. But he’s become a staunch Smith critic — particularly around questions of Alberta separation and talk of national unity crises.

“Look, every time she talks this way, it drives every progressive voter to say, ‘What’s my best pathway to defeat my local Conservative MP?’” says Boessenkool.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way. It’s not clear any of this is registering for voters — particularly in areas of the country beyond the Prairies where both the Liberals and Conservatives are vying for seats.

“I don’t really buy the premise that it’s actually something Canadians care about,” says Solberg.

The polling shows Canadians are concerned about issues wholly divorced from Alberta’s anger over a fourth Liberal term. Canadians tell pollsters they care about affordability, housing and Trump.

If election 2019 was “disunifying” — before the COVID-19 pandemic, before Kenney lost his job, before then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer lost his job, before his successor Erin O’Toole lost his job — election 2025 must be orders of magnitude more important, at least for Smith.

She may not be able to predict how Albertans will react, but the pundit premier will continue to channel that sentiment. And everyone else in Canada will wonder what she means by it.

• Chris Selley: Meet Danielle Smith, patriot
• Whether a Liberal win threatens national unity depends on Albertans, Danielle Smith says

OTTAWA — Strawberries became an unexpected topic at Wednesday night’s French debate in Montreal, with three of the four party leaders saying they’ve stopped buying American berries amidst trade tensions.

“I buy Quebec strawberries, and I do my own shopping by the way,” Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet told debate moderator Patrice Roy, when asked to name one U.S.-made product he no longer buys.

Blanchet’s aside was a cheeky shot at Liberal Leader Mark Carney, who acknowledged to Radio-Canada earlier this month that he doesn’t buy his own strawberries anymore, now that he has a staff to do his daily chores as Canada’s prime minister.

Radio-Canada journalist: Are you still gonna buy American strawberries?

Mark Carney: Whoah lady, I don’t buy my own groceries, that’s nuts pic.twitter.com/mHtomUkcyw

— Elias Makos (@eliasmakos) April 4, 2025

Not to be left out, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh told the moderator that he now goes out of his way to buy a range of Canadian-grown produce, including both strawberries and apples — a fruit Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre famously chomped on in a viral 2023 video .

“I do my own shopping, and I cook at home,” Singh said, one-upping Blanchet.

“Everybody is eating a lot of strawberries today,” quipped Roy following Singh’s response.

Poilievre called the lighthearted exchange a “delicious conversation” and added that Canadian sourced beef is the top sirloin in his household.

“I buy Canadian beef, it’s the best beef in the world,” said Poilievre, throwing red meat at his Conservative base in Alberta’s cattle country.

“But I never buy American strawberries either,” he added.

For his part, Carney said that he’s stopped buying U.S. beer and wine — though the LCBO’s ban on American booze prevents residents from purchasing those products.

The English debate is scheduled for 7 p.m. ET on Thursday.

National Post

rmohamed@postmedia.com

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

• Why Jagmeet Singh lost his cool during the French-language debate
• Jabs and jokes as leaders fight each other for Francophones' vote during first debate

What started as a call for threatening behaviour ended with weapon and drug charges for a 44-year-old from the GTA after Kingston Police discovered fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine stuffed inside a whole rotisserie chicken.

OTTAWA — What is going on with the polls this federal election campaign?

Click here to review the Q&A with Leger pollster Andrew Enns.

 

Things are looking tighter between Mark Carney’s Liberals and Pierre Poilievre ’s Conservatives with just over 10 days left before the votes are tallied. That’s still a massive and shocking shift for the Tories, who had held a strong lead for over a year before President Donald Trump began threatening Canada’s economy and Liberals brought in Carney as their new leader, after the resignation of the unpopular Justin Trudeau in January.

How did the Conservatives suddenly fall into second place, despite the fact that their polling support numbers are higher than they’ve been for the last two elections?

In fact, some Conservatives are skeptical that the polls truly reflect the reality on the ground, given that Poilievre has been holding massive rallies , at times with more than 10,000-people strong, and Carney’s campaign has been unsettled by controversies and gaffes. Are the polls really capturing all the Conservatives’ supporters who tend to be younger and have been less politically engaged in the past?

Meanwhile, the NDP ’s support appears to have collapsed compared to previous campaigns and the Bloc Québécois is struggling to keep up with the Liberals for support in Quebec. Where have these supporters gone, and why did they suddenly switch so early in the campaign? Does that also mean they could switch back? What happened to Quebec’s strong nationalist voters?

Well, it depends who you ask. Different pollsters are showing different results, with some polls even showing the Conservatives tied with the Liberals or in the lead. The latest Postmedia-Leger poll also shows that Liberal support is overwhelmingly based on fear of Trump, while Conservative support is heavily based on hope for a better future. Results from various pollsters nevertheless show consistently that Carney is perceived by more voters to be able to handle the tariff war with Trump, while Poilievre is considered stronger on domestic issues including cost of living, immigration, and law and order.

Andrew Enns, executive vice president of Leger, the official pollster for Postmedia and the pollster with a consistent record of accuracy answered reader questions on Thursday. The latest Postmedia-Leger poll came out Wednesday, and Andrew took questions about it, about what’s really happening with the polling this election campaign, and how pollsters are measuring support given the difficulty in reaching certain segments of the population. The conversation was moderated by Stuart Thomson.

This is a historic election and a lot could still change in the next 10 days. Review Enns’ answers in the comment section below.

National Post

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

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The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, examined environmental DNA to determine the levels of bacteria, fungi and viruses previously shown to be harmful to wild salmon.

The cities of Prince George and Kamloops are both cut in half, with their residents lumped in with voters living hundreds of kilometres away.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre landed a few pretty solid blows against Liberal leader Mark Carney during the French-language debate in Montreal on Wednesday night. Whether those blows will matter to Quebecers, who will have comprised the vast majority of the audience for the debate, it would be foolish to prognosticate.

But they were pretty good burns.

“Your Liberal government for 10 years has the worst track record on immigration, on housing, on immigration, on crime,” Poilievre said Carney. “Doesn’t it embarrass you to ask for a fourth term of office?”

“I’ve just become leader. I’ve been prime minister for one month,” Carney rebutted, noting his trade outreach efforts both domestically and internationally.

In the very unlikely event I had been advising Carney on how to assume the Liberal leadership, which he had very clearly been contemplating for quite some time, I would have advised him to take his time to assemble a campaign team that put some distance between him and Justin Trudeau — precisely to fend off accusations like Poilievre’s.

Instead, Carney launched his campaign with Tom Pitfield as the campaign’s executive director — Pitfield being a longtime friend of and campaigner for Trudeau, husband of former party president and current Montreal MP Anna Gainey, and guest on Trudeau’s infamous jaunt to the Aga Khan’s island in 2014 . Nothing at all about Carney’s campaign screams “change,” with respect to how the next government might operate.

Carney fronts an altogether spent force of a party seeking a fourth term in government — a government that would include several ex- and presumably potential future ministers who hastily un-resigned from politics once they saw the polls suddenly shifting in Liberal favour. By rights, the Liberals should be sent to their room to think about what they have done over the past decade or so.

Being sent to their room is more or less what rightly happened to Stephen Harper’s government after roughly a decade, and what rightly happened to the Jean Chrétien/Paul Martin Liberals after quite a bit more than a decade. It’s healthy, especially in a country where the two leading parties don’t really disagree passionately on all that much, least of all the central question posed by Wednesday night’s debate, which was what to do about Donald Trump.

Answer: Fight! Borrow money and give it to people! Buy Canadian! Etcetera! Unanimous!

Carney’s “it’s my first day” protestations are all well and good, but he had clearly been thinking about taking this plunge for a very long time. How is it possible he didn’t assemble a better team — a team that might be more aware of his glaring weaknesses?

“You don’t want change,” Poilievre alleged of Carney, who attempted a rejoinder — by arguing this election is all about who can stand up to Donald Trump — and then Yves-Francois Blanchet pounced:

“It the same party, the same ministers, the same focus, the same ideology,” the Bloc Québécois leader charged. Changing the party leader doesn’t change all that when everything else remains the same, he said. And he’s right. Carney, like former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff before him, doesn’t even seem to be in charge of his own campaign.

But was anyone watching?

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

• Chris Selley: Abolish the Leaders' Debates Commission, salt the earth
• Chris Selley: Poilievre has a great case for the notwithstanding clause. He'll need to make it

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

Sgt. Chris Harris has spent nearly two decades with the Saskatoon Police Service, most recently patrolling its downtown core. He says there are misconceptions about homelessness and addictions in the city and how they could be fixed.

As Canadians are set to mark the 43rd anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on Thursday, Pierre Poilievre promised this week that his government would invoke a never-before-used section at the federal level to keep mass murderers in prison until death.

The Conservative leader first pitched the idea of utilizing Section 33 last year, but his new pledge comes as Canadians are about to head to the polls with crime and safety still a major issue, even in the shadow of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the ongoing affordability crisis.

However, unlike those issues and others influencing decisions on April 28, it’s likely that for many voters, the complexity of the notwithstanding clause may require added context as a campaign topic.

Here’s what you need to know.

What is the clause, and how was it meant to work?

Without delving into an eye-glazing history of the Charter ’s 1982 signing and proclamation, the notwithstanding clause — sometimes called override power — is a “legislative instrument” added at the behest of the provinces to allow “provincial legislatures or the federal department to declare that an Act … shall operate notwithstanding certain provisions in the Charter of Freedoms,” explained Dave Snow, University of Guelph political science associate professor, whose areas of focus include criminal justice and constitutional law.

“To be frank, most of the important rights — your fundamental freedoms in Section 2, your legal rights in Sections 7 through 14 and your equality rights in Section 15.”

Sections dealing with language, mobility, and democratic rights are untouchable.

The clause can only be applied for five years at a time, after which government must vote to re-enact the law. With mandated four-year election cycles, this allows the public to weigh in on government’s use of power.

When and where has the clause been used before in Canada?

It’s never been used at the federal level, though members of Parliament have brought forward private bills, none of which have passed.

Last year, Bloc Québécois MP Denis Trudel put forth a bill that would effectively put into law the reasonable time limits established by the Supreme Court in its 2016 Jordan decision by invoking the clause to create an exemption to those deadlines to primary designated offences — the most violent and serious crimes under Canada’s Criminal Code.

Provincially, however, it’s been used 27 times to varying degrees of success, mostly by Quebec (17), the chief critic of the Charter and the only province other than Saskatchewan to successfully use the clause for the first 15 years of its existence.

The most famous use of the clause, Snow said, was in 1988 when Quebec invoked it to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling in the French-only signage case.

• Anthony Koch: Who's afraid of the notwithstanding clause?
• https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-poilievre-has-a-great-case-for-the-notwithstanding-clause-hell-need-to-make-it

After that, “there’s this big gap between 1989 and 2018 when only one province outside of Quebec passes a law invoking” the clause, Snow pointed out.

That was Alberta, which successfully used it in a 2000 bill to limit marriage to a man and a woman, only to have it rendered useless because matrimony is under Ottawa’s constitutional purview.

In 2018, Saskatchewan became the first province to use it since 2005 , though it was later deemed unnecessary, after which Quebec employed it again, and Ontario did so twice. Saskatchewan was the last to see it succeed on a law surrounding parental consent with regards to pronouns or names their children use at school.

“The polling data I’ve seen shows that, as an abstract thing, Canadians tend to be more opposed to (the notwithstanding clause) than in favour,” Snow told National Post. On Saskatchewan’s most recent , however, he said “most polling showed that more people favoured the use of it than did not, not just in Saskatchewan, but everywhere in Canada.”

Still, Snow insisted that it’s unexpectedly become a “Quebec thing” in recent years as it’s been used to promote French language and culture.

What does the clause have to do with mass murderers?

For first-degree murder in Canada, there is a mandatory 25-year sentence before parole eligibility.

In 2011, the Stephen Harper-led government brought in a sentencing provision giving judges the power to apply consecutive life sentences for individuals found guilty of multiple murders.

Two likely come to mind for Canadians: 2014 New Brunswick Mountie-murderer Justin Bourque and Alexandre Bissonnette, who massacred six Muslim people at a Quebec mosque in 2017.

Bourque got 75 years before parole, while Bissonnette was dealt 40.

However, both sentences were reduced to the standard 25 years without parole , and the Harper-era provision was neutered following the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2022 ruling against the Crown’s appeal to make Bissonnette wait 50 years for parole eligibility.

Multiple murderer Alexandre Bissonnette ruled eligible for parole after 25 years — not 40

“Under this provision, a court has the power to sentence an offender to imprisonment for life without a realistic possibility of parole for 50, 75 or even 150 years,” wrote the nine judges, led by Justice Richard Wagner.

“In other words, in the context of multiple first-degree murders, all offenders to whom this provision applies are doomed to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, and the sentences of some offenders may even exceed human life expectancy. Not only do such punishments bring the administration of justice into disrepute, but they are cruel and unusual by nature.”

Toronto criminal defence lawyer Danielle Robitaille, who served as an intervenor on behalf of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association in the case, said the decision, which she heralds as “eloquent and moving,” firmly established that everyone — “even the vilest criminal” — is owed a shot at rehabilitation within Canada’s justice system.

“What the court found is that what’s important for the system in a life sentence is that you don’t extinguish the possibility of parole, even though everyone concedes that in these cases of multiple murder, it’s extremely remote that parole would ever be granted and we’ve seen that with our most notorious historical cases of multiple murders,” the managing partner at Henein Hutchinson Robitaille LLP told National Post.

Snow countered, saying the decision made assumptions about Canadians’ feelings regarding stacked sentences without any evidence of those feelings.

“It’s in these instances where I think it’s perfectly appropriate, whether I agree with the policy or not, for Parliament to say ‘we disagree with this interpretation of rights, we disagree with the way the Supreme Court has determined what both cruel and unusual punishment is, and what a reasonable limit on that is, and we’re going to offer an alternative interpretation.’”

How are Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives proposing to use the clause?

Poilievre, who cited both Bourque and Bissonnette when making the campaign commitment, said a Tory-led Parliament would use the notwithstanding clause to restore the sentencing provision.

“The worst mass murderers should never be allowed back on our streets,” he said Monday morning . “For them, a life sentence should mean what it says: a life sentence. They should only come out in a box.”

The Conservatives say the victims’ Charter rights and those of their families forced to testify and relive the trauma at mandatory parole hearings, along with the rights of law-abiding Canadians, are at risk from murderers potentially released.

In their view, a murderer’s punishment should be proportional to the number of people they killed.

“I will use the Charter to protect the Charter,” said Poilievre, who also vowed to only use Section 33 to “fight crime.”

On the campaign trail, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he was already worried about the provinces using the clause “more and more,” while Liberal leader Mark Carney called it a “very dangerous step” that could lead to further “politicization” of criminal justice.

“We have a Charter of Rights and fundamental freedoms in this country, and it’s the responsibility, in my view, of the prime minister of the government of Canada to defend that Charter, those fundamental rights.”

Because few, if any, would stand up for the rights of a mass murderer like Bissonnette, Robitaille recognizes most voters will feel strongly about the topic. But she’s critical of the clause being used to stoke the already “inflamed passions of the Canadian public.”

“Because it’s precisely in this context that the constitutional balance is set up in a way that the Court is responsible for safeguarding and protecting the most outcast, the most vulnerable, protecting the minority against the rage of the majority.

“To use and wield the section to usurp that protection, I think, is irresponsible and distasteful.”

Her biggest fear is seeing Canada’s justice system start to resemble that of the United States, where prisoners are sometimes given sentences longer than any human could imagine living.

Snow disagreed, downplaying any notion of long-standing rights being infringed and said it can be good for a democracy to have elected representatives disagree with the courts on this particular issue.

Politicians leaving everything to the courts, he said, sidesteps a degree of responsibility on topics on which Canadians should be engaged and informed in the event the court gets it wrong.

“I think we’re a healthier country when we at least debate the merits of having some involvement from our democratically elected representatives on these contentious issues of rights, on which I should say reasonable people disagree, reasonable judges disagree, and which in this instance is of a very new interpretation by the Supreme Court of Canada just three years old.”

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