Published in the Western Standard, April 12, 2004, p. 33. (Also available in a pdf scan.)

Reclaiming Our Liberties Means Repealing Laws, Not Writing More
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

Among the three contenders, Stephen Harper was the best candidate to lead the Conservative party. Belinda Stronach was much too 'motherhood and economic pie.' Perhaps her lack of political experience would have helped shake the monkeys, but more likely, she would have been eaten alive. As for Tony Clement, nobody who has been health minister anywhere should ever be trusted, for this breed will coerce you for your own good as defined by the public health industry. Harper's real challenge will not be to defeat the corrupt Liberal party, but to bring real change after he is anointed King of Canada. As Kipling could have said, for a man who could be king, crossing that bridge may not be fun. The problem can be seen as follows. Every government, whether red, blue or grey, spends its mandate piling up new laws and regulations. New governments very seldom repeal previous legislation, and when they do, it's usually to replace them by thicker, more onerous and more dangerous ones. We thus end up with a sedimentation of diktats representing the good intentions and entrepreneurial drive of all statocrats of the past, and the rewards to all their political clientele. At least 5,000 pages of federal laws and regulations are adopted each and every year. The mere index of federal statutory instruments (mainly laws and regulations) from 1955 to 2003 covers 413 pages (English only), and increases by a few pages every year. The net result is an estimated minimum of 15,000,000 words, or 50,000 pages of federal laws and regulations that are actually binding us. And "binding" is not a figure of speech, as jail is the ultimate punishment for disobeying (assuming one does not forcefully resist and get shot). Call it "the mad-state disease." "We say that ignorance of the law is no excuse," ironically wrote legal theorist Georges Ripert half a century ago, "but those who know it do deserve some credit." Indeed, reading the annual production of federal laws and regulations at two minutes per page would take more than one month, full time. Reading the 50,000 sedimented pages would waste an entire year. We can easily imagine the Conservative rookies descending on Parliament Hill with the devastating intention of doing good by forcing the citizens to do something different, while the bureaucrats lick their chops. What the Conservative party needs to learn is how to repeal laws. Don't add, don't amend, don't replace. Repeal. R-E-P-EA- L. This is not an easy task. Many of these laws have created constituencies that will fight for their turf. Moreover, the bureaucrats themselves are major stakeholders; fewer laws mean less power for the bureaucrats. Finally, I suspect that repealing is a technical tour de force, as the typical law refers to previous laws, and through amendments, to posterior laws, which themselves refer to it and to others, and so on. Kafkaesque! Tacitus was right: Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges--"the more the state is corrupted, the more numerous are the laws." But we don't have to accept being glued into an ever more complex web of obligations, prohibitions and surveillance. Slowing down legislative sedimentation is not enough. Conserving the sedimentation at its present level is conservatism in the worst sense of the word. What is required is to aggressively remove layers. When a bad law is, in the short term, impossible to repeal, the new rulers should use their imagination to find and kill strategic sections, or chapters in it. Don't fiddle, don't fine-tune. Cut, erase and delete. This is the way to start reclaiming our liberties. In many Western countries (including the U.S., France, the U.K. and Canada), we have known conservative leaders who have not only conserved the monstrous state they took over, but have made it worse. Will Harper do otherwise?