Both Premier Doug Ford鱿鱼视频app Conservative government and the Canadian Union of Public Employees representing illegally striking education workers have behaved execrably during the past weeks. CUPE has scoffed at the law while speciously claiming justification because it says its rights are being violated by Ontario鱿鱼视频app government embedding the Canadian Constitution鱿鱼视频app so-called override clause into back-to-work legislation.
Premier Ford and his caucus presumed on their legitimate right to deploy Sec. 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in a way so high-handed as to abuse democratic propriety.
As we鈥檝e argued, the right of the government to use the override clause to prevent the strike-ending legislation from being endlessly challenged in court does not make it a rightful approach to labour negotiation or treatment of workers.
All bad enough. Then into this schlemozzle of self-righteousness parachuted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to put on a spectacle of political opportunism dizzying even by his standards. Stomping on jurisdictional turf off limits for federal politicians, the PM castigated Ontario鱿鱼视频app recently elected majority government for crushing Charter rights.
Did none among his minders remind him that his own father, as prime minister during the 1982 repatriation of Canada鱿鱼视频app Constitution, accepted the validity of the Sec. 33 notwithstanding clause鱿鱼视频app due deference to legislative authority? Patrimony aside, it should not be too perplexing for him to recognize the Charter comprises all of its 33 applicable clauses, not just those that can be cherry picked for cynical political advantage.
The PM鱿鱼视频app politicized impertinence, CUPE鱿鱼视频app legal nose-thumbing and the Ford government鱿鱼视频app obdurate tactlessness all point to failures of public conduct that cry out for a mediating institution grounded in the reconciliation of rights and what is right. We don鈥檛 mean 鈥渕ediating鈥� as formalized resolution of labour conflict. Rather, as the capacity to craft a middle path between entitlement to act and empathetic understanding of the chaotic outcome that might ensue.
The heart of Catholic social teaching is certainty that the Church is called by God to fulfill that very role. Ontario鱿鱼视频app bishops could bring the Church鱿鱼视频app strengths to the current educational conflict, then, not just as defenders of Catholic schooling nor as partisans on either the union or government side, but as mediating voices differentiating rights and right according to 2,000 years of Gospel truth, justice and wisdom.
鈥淚t is the Church that insists, on the authority of the Gospel, upon those teachings whereby鈥� conflict can be brought to an end鈥�(She) uses her efforts not only to enlighten the mind, but to direct by her precepts the life and conduct of each and all,鈥� Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum in 1891. It might just be the answer in Ontario today.