British Columbia’s longest-serving premier was W.A.C. Bennett, affectionately known as “Wacky” Bennett. Bennett was premier from 1952 to 1972, and leader of the BC Social Credit Party from 1952 to 1973. He built much of BC’s modern infrastructure.From February 5 to 7, 1968, a federal-provincial Constitutional Conference was held in Ottawa. Among the topics to be considered was then-federal justice minister Pierre Trudeau’s proposal to add a charter of human rights to Canada’s Constitution. Some premiers had concerns with it.The premiers were each given time to speak to the proposals, and Bennett was most direct in offering a critique of Trudeau’s charter. He recognized that Trudeau was trying to undermine Canada’s historic British parliamentary system and replace it with an Americanized version. As he said pointedly, “even an incomplete study of these proposals reveals that we are being invited to discard the constitutional philosophy of 1867 and embrace the constitutional philosophy of 1776, as frequent references to French and American thought of that period clearly indicate.”For over 100 years, Canada had been governed under parliamentary or legislative supremacy, which meant that elected officials (at the federal and provincial levels) were the ultimate decision-makers in political matters. Politicians could be held accountable by voters for laws and policies at both major levels of government in Canada.Bennett recognized that Trudeau wanted to undo parliamentary supremacy, and at the same time reduce provincial powers: “The national government’s proposal to entrench certain areas of legislative capacity by their confinement within the formal words of constitutional enactment is not only a restriction of the principle of legislative supremacy, which has so far been the underlying philosophy of our parliamentary system in Canada, but it is, as well, a drastic re-arrangement and reduction of legislative competence, mostly at the expense of provincial jurisdiction within Canada.”.Of course, moving away from legislative supremacy meant that political power shifted from elected officials to unelected officials — namely, judges. As Bennett put it, “the character and role of the judiciary is changed by these proposals in that the courts would have very wide power, indeed the duty, in much wider fields than at present, to strike down legislation in the municipal, provincial, or national field which appeared at variance with the reformed constitution.”Giving the courts a political role was an explicit part of Trudeau’s proposal and clearly involved Canada adopting a more Americanized constitution. The US Supreme Court had taken upon itself a much more political role after World War Two, and Trudeau wanted the same for Canada. Bennett saw clearly what Trudeau was trying to do. In his critique of the charter proposal, he said: “The ultimate development, of course, would be the altered role of the Supreme Court of Canada, which would become, as in the United States of America, an arbitrator of social doctrine by judicial interpretation and indeed judicial legislation. Thus a role until now wholly exercised by the national or provincial parliaments in Canada by legislative enactment would, for future development, depend on the courts or an unlikely constitutional amendment.”In other words, if Trudeau got his way, judges would make Canadian law. This is precisely what happened after the Charter of Rights was adopted.Another line of critique Bennett offered was the fact that the desire for a charter of rights did not come from the common people. There wasn’t a public demand for something along those lines. In his words, “it must be observed that there is not at the doors of the national or provincial parliaments of the country a public outcry that the matters proposed for entrenchment have been neglected either by the developing common law or the legislative and parliamentary enactment of the country thus far.”.That is, the demand for a charter did not come from the bottom up, but from the top down. It emanated from Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal government, not from the common citizens.Clearly, Bennett’s critique of the charter proposal was bang on.Fortunately for the federal Liberals, Bennett lost the 1972 provincial election and was thus removed as an obstacle to Trudeau’s plan to remake Canada into a different kind of country. Bennett had been one of the few high-level political leaders to confront the threat Trudeau posed to Canada’s historic identity. With him off the scene, one more obstacle was removed from Trudeau’s path. We could sure use a man like Wacky Bennett again.
