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RCMP, sure. GoC, understandable. But the SCC? If there's any institution in Canada that is full of well-trained, experienced, professional, and non-partisan people, it's the SCC.
Trust in our Institutions
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Halifax Tar
Army.ca Legend
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I'm with you, but I will add I don't trust rank and file LEOs either.
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Agreed, though not because I think they are all or even mostly bad, but because all it takes is one zealot/bad one to ruin your day and potentially life.
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Legend
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Absolutely, there are defiantly shitheads in our ranks too.
Having said that I can only form my positions off of my own lived experiences.
While I have had positive experiences with LEOs. They are out weighed by the bad.
One group I have come to admire and trust are the NS DNR Officers. Every interaction, and I've had a few, has been mature, thoughtful and reasoned. I hold them in high regard.
I wish I had your faith.
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Do you have any examples of where the SCC did something (i.e. made decisions) that you thought were partisan, ideological, illegal, or just patently wrong from a legal perspective? Not trying to throw shade at your opinion, but if you have such a negative opinion of the SCC, I would genuinely like to know what you've seen for my own edification.
OldSolduer
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How about the reduction of sentences for those convicted of heinous crimes? Do you think the murderer of three Mounties ever get the chance to apply for parole?
Three life sentences was imposed by the trial judge but the SCC reduced it to 25 years citing "cruel and unusual punishment".
How about the cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on the victims and their families?
Is that a SCC issue or just bad legislation. There is a difference.
OldSolduer
Army.ca Relic
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The trial judge imposed three consecutive life sentences. The SCC made in concurrent.
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Legend
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Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Meaning Its not that I think they always get it wrong, its that I don't think they are above their own political biases, political allegiances, and personal activism.
Humans are inherently flawed and fallible and SCC Judges are no different.
Sure. But that didn’t answer the question. The SCC bases its decisions on a several things.
So either the legislation is bad. Or the things that the SCC uses to base its decisions are bad. Generally it’s the legislation.
If you don’t trust them then it normally means you think they always or mostly get it wrong. I would argue your own biases, political allegiances and activism has lead you to that conclusion. Given you are an admitted libertarian that is consistant with your ideology.
That’s why they have several of them to minimize that issue.
I would propose that most have no idea how the SCC comes to its decisions let alone what they actually do and let their own biases take over.
That’s not what happened though. He got three life sentences. A life sentence carries no people eligibility for 25 years, but Parliament allowed the courts to stack that in the case of multiple life sentences. However, as written, the law only allows for consecutive blocks of 25 years ineligibility- sloppy legislative drafting. The trial judge in Bourque sentenced him to life with 40 years of parole ineligibility. The Supreme Court ruled, correctly, that Parliament didn’t give the courts the power to split the subsequent periods into smaller chunks and knocked it back down to 25. The onus is on Parliment to fix it.
Now, parole eligibility doesn’t mean he’ll ever get parole. It just means he can ask. His sentence is still life.
So- not a partisan or ideological decision by SCC. They ruled correctly on the law as clearly written by Parliament.
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Legend
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I don't trust them, as humans, to be able to make decisions without the influence of their own biased positions, political and personal.
That's a fair assessment. I find myself normally politically homeless with leanings in all directions. I have voted from the NDP to the CPC.
FYI I just did the political compass test on this page: The Political Compass
This is where i fell:
This is their assessment of Canadian Politics as of 2025.
The Political Compass
The Political Compass: a 2-dimensional typology of political opinions
www.politicalcompass.org
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I doubt their premises (definitions/criteria) for political ideology assessment. The placements on the vertical axis are manifestly inverted; the more collectivist ideologies are not inherently more "libertarian" than the more individualist ones. It's not conservatives who most vocally demand fealty and conformity to their ideas in academia and media and entertainment and demand people be outcast for failure to do so, or seek an ordered society in which - and these are key characteristics - people serve the state and in which all the institutions fall in line behind whatever passes for an executive.
"Libertarian" means "individual liberty", not the contrived "collective liberties" that are sometimes advanced to excuse takings and coercion and necessarily limit individual liberties (eg. "freedom from fear", "freedom from want"). Fewer government powers, lesser taxes, absence of coercion, more rights to own and do whatever people please. The NDP is on the other side of all of these things relative to the LPC and CPC, as is the LPC relative to the CPC.
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Believe it or not, my results indicated I'm more libertarian than you.
Mind you, this would have me aligned with the NDP, which I absolutely do not, so maybe this isn't a great test.
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Placement depends a lot on intensity ("strongly" vs otherwise). My mapping is approximately where I expect it to be, so the questions seem to be reasonable and mostly reasonably calibrated (a few are not precise enough) but I doubt the organization's capability to honestly answer questions on behalf of political parties. Rating the NDP more libertarian than the CPC is an abject failure. The most likely explanation is the usual one: political bias, which if demonstrably capable of infecting hard science is certainly capable of infecting political "science".Believe it or not, my results indicated I'm more libertarian than you.
View attachment 98655
Mind you, this would have me aligned with the NDP, which I absolutely do not, so maybe this isn't a great test.
Rating the LPC as less left-right centrist than the NDP is also an abject failure.
Whether an individual or by committee, the "decider" has approximately the brain of a socialist who imagines he's in the political centre rather than well to the left and doesn't properly understand liberty.
[Add: the left-right placement might also simply reinforce the common sense proposition that if the middle is just the midpoint between two ideologies, then it doesn't tell us whether the leftists are moving left faster or the rightists are moving right faster. Common sense supplies the answer: the parties of the right, who are manifestly left on most positions relative to where they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, are not moving right at all.]
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