Too many Canadians don’t understand that freedom has to have limits
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Freedom. It was probably the most commonly uttered word during the COVID-19 pandemic: freedom to ignore public-health orders, freedom to abstain from vaccine mandates, freedom to visit dying loved-ones in nursing homes, freedom to protest government interventions.
Anger over how those freedoms were curtailed during the pandemic boiled over in 2022, resulting in dozens of large-scale protests across the country, including a three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa. For many, freedom was on trial.
It’s no surprise, then, that Justice Paul Rouleau — in his voluminous report released last week on the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act — devoted an entire chapter to the subject of freedom. It should be required reading in every school across the country.
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“Tensions between order and freedom sit at the heart of our system of governance,” Rouleau wrote in his near-2,000-page report. His chapter on the relationship between freedom and order is a master class on how individual liberties work in a free and democratic society.
“Freedom cannot exist without order, because the machinery of order — such as procedures, laws, police, and courts — create the conditions for the protection of freedom, the enjoyment of freedom, and the mediation of conflicting freedoms,” Rouleau wrote. “While order constrains freedom — laws, for example, limit the range of permissible actions — without order’s constraints, freedom cannot exist.”
The relationship between order and freedom is not always well understood, especially among those who believe freedom is an unfettered right. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre exploits that ignorance, pledging to eliminate all “gatekeepers” to create the “freest country in the world.” His insinuation is that freedom can exist in a vacuum. It can’t.
Freedom needs order to exist. It’s a prerequisite to a properly functioning democracy. It’s not unique to emergency measures, such as those used during natural disasters or public-health emergencies. It’s a tradeoff that exists in everyday life — most people just don’t give it much thought.
“The fundamental and inevitable tension between order and freedom is a constant; it is simply more visible, and more stark in a time of emergency,” wrote Rouleau. “In times of emergency, however, freedoms that are usually unconstrained may suddenly be curtailed. This puts a spotlight on the clash of values.”
Justice Paul Rouleau (Adrian Wyld / Canadian Press files)
That’s when self-professed freedom fighters jump into action, believing — wrongly — that government is trampling on their constitutional rights.
That’s not to say people don’t have a right to protest measures employed by governments during emergencies. Quite the contrary, Rouleau points out. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of expression, even if that means disruption to society. Sometimes disruption is necessary to effect change, especially when it comes to marginalized segments of society, Rouleau wrote. The right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy.
But it’s also subject to reasonable limits as prescribed by law. When the exercise of those rights causes undue harm to society — including putting the safety and health of society at risk, as it did during the Ottawa occupation — order trumps freedom. If it didn’t, the broader freedoms enjoyed by all Canadians would be in jeopardy.
“When the use of emergency powers becomes necessary, this is generally because the order necessary to freedom is under a special threat,” wrote Rouleau. “The threshold for invocation is the point at which order breaks down and freedom cannot be secured or is seriously threatened.”
“When the use of emergency powers becomes necessary, this is generally because the order necessary to freedom is under a special threat.”–Justice Paul Rouleau
That’s a concept some Canadians have trouble understanding. They have been misled into believing freedom has no limits.
Part of the reason for that misconception is we don’t do a good job of teaching those principles of democracy in school as part of a broader social studies curriculum. Many Canadians don’t have a good grasp of how our parliamentary democracy works, including the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments and the application of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
That was evident during many of the protests throughout the pandemic.
Rouleau’s report was a stark reminder of that.
tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
Tom Brodbeck
Columnist
Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.
