HARDING: A decade of well-timed court wins for the Liberals

The guilty verdict in the Lich-Barber mischief trial is only one of three controversial decisions in the last decade whose timing and content distinctly benefitted the Liberals.The 2022 Freedom Convoy led by Lich and Barber was a political embarrassment for the Trudeau Liberals, a loud and public defiance of vaccine mandates imposed by Ottawa. Despite regular conversations between police and convoy leaders, the Liberal government brought down the hammer through the Emergencies Act. Only afterwards were Lich and Barber arrested.The invocation of the Emergencies Act against a clearly non-violent protest was so controversial in itself, a public commission was made to assess whether it was proper. That commission, headed by Trudeau friend David Johnston, defended the Liberal government, while strangely admitting the evidence might lead someone to a different conclusion.In his January 2024 ruling, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley did just that. He ruled there "was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act.” Thank you, Justice Mosley..But, back to the Lich-Barber trial. Despite her 5’0” frame, Lich was put in stocks like a violent offender in her early court appearances. She and Barber were prosecuted with all the legal vigor an alleged public enemy could inspire. Last August, the longest mischief trial in Canadian history finally wrapped up and the date of March 12 was set for the verdict.However on February 27, a new date of April 3 was announced, allegedly owing to court backlogs. Why? This trial of national importance had already dragged on way too long and deserved resolution. Couldn’t other cases work around it? If Lady Justice holding the scales is truly blind, that’s just how things went. After all, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey already said last August that she had a full plate in the months ahead..On the other hand, a lot has changed politically since then. Support for the Trudeau Liberals collapsed. On January 6, 2025, Trudeau announced his pending resignation as Liberal Leader and Prime Minister. A Liberal leadership race began, and, as often happens in these circumstances, the party’s popular support grew during the constant media attention.If the polls are to be believed, the Liberals steadily rose from dismal 20% support to a remarkable 44% by April 3. When Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership race on March 9, he was still six points behind the Conservatives, but his rise continued until early April when he was six points ahead.Do you know what would have interrupted this momentum? The originally scheduled verdict in the Lich-Barber trial..March 12 was three days after Carney was chosen as leader and two days before his March 14 swearing-in as prime minister. Canadians would have “changed the channel” for a day or two, but instead, the Liberal train kept rolling down the tracks.Think back ten years and the fact Trudeau ruled at all was owing in part to a verdict made in the middle of his 2015 campaign.On September 15, 2015, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the Conservative government had wrongly implemented the requirement that people show their face when swearing the oath to become a Canadian citizen..The ruling in favour of niqab-wearer Zunera Ishaq didn’t say the federal government’s stance was unconstitutional, only that this change should have been made by an act of Parliament, not an Order-in-Council. As a Maclean’s article explained at the time, “Canadian law gives citizenship-court judges the discretion to allow the greatest possible religious freedom in swearing the oath.” In the appeal decision, judges backed up the power of other judges.Only two women in the previous four years had declined to go through swearing-in ceremonies for being required to show their face. Nevertheless, the day after the October 19, 2015 election, a Vox magazine headline read, “How Stephen Harper’s Islamophobic gambit backfired and lost him the election in Canada.” Despite the leftist lens of the publication, its assessment is correct.While the Bloc Quebecois and Stephen Harper Conservatives stridently opposed the ruling, the NDP and Liberals deferred to the judge. This led to a collapse of NDP support in Quebec, helping those opposed to Harper coalesce on the Liberals and hand them a majority win. Post-election polls suggested 65 per cent of Muslims voted Liberal in 2015, 10 per cent NDP, and 2 per cent Conservative.The courts would benefit the Liberals again in a few short years. However, its progress remained bogged in regulations, partly due to the tone set by the Liberal government itself, and, on May 29, 2018, the same government offered in the “national interest” to buy the pipeline from Kinder Morgan..On August 30, 2018, shortly before the shareholders were to decide whether to take the deal, Justice Eleanor Dawson overruled the pipeline’s regulatory approval. She said that native groups weren’t consulted enough and the National Energy Board gave inadequate thought to whales. The number of killer whales had dropped from 82 to 75 since the NEB approval, and the project would increase the number of oil tankers from 5 per month to 34.The shareholders were no dummies. With this surprise and unwelcome news, 99.98 per cent of shareholders took the $4.5 billion government offer to take the stalled pipeline off their hands.Native groups challenged a subsequent re-approval. However, in 2020, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against them. Suddenly neither the whales nor the indigenous were an issue.Unfortunately, judges are willing to intervene for a handful of Muslims and a few dozen whales, but not the life and health of millions of Canadians. In 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal from surgeon Dr. Brian Day following his decade-long battle to end the ban on private health insurance and extra-billing in British Columbia.Of course, a Day win would have been most inconvenient for Ottawa.Courts have an enormous impact on what they do, when they do it, and even by what they fail to do. For good reason, some of us suspect some political grains are falling on the scales of justice and tipping the result.

HARDING: A decade of well-timed court wins for the Liberals

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