jesssloss: Creative Commons license
"Whereas Canada is founded on principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law": the words proved controversial in Parliament's drafting of the Constitution Act, 1982.
The words are meant to anchor the larger project of the Constitution, to build a firewall against the rise in Canada of a totalitarian power, a dark advent that would see a government entrench itself despotically against the people.
They were set out, borrowing from Trudeau, as emblematic of the project of the Canadian constitution as "an act of defiance" against the political history of our species. A history, as Giorgio Agamben shows, of sovereign power bent on the reduction of human life to "bare life", the dissolution of the hope of the polis - the free city - before the acid will of the camp.
They were to save us from the rule of man, and preserve us for the rule of law.
Their invocation of a broader, indeed absolute, context for the political life in Canada continues into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, the constitutional enshrinement of the rights and freedoms of "everyone" in Canada is "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". This is aspirational, maybe even asymptotic - pointing us to a future condition, a democracy to come.
Are we there yet?
The words are meant to anchor the larger project of the Constitution, to build a firewall against the rise in Canada of a totalitarian power, a dark advent that would see a government entrench itself despotically against the people.
They were set out, borrowing from Trudeau, as emblematic of the project of the Canadian constitution as "an act of defiance" against the political history of our species. A history, as Giorgio Agamben shows, of sovereign power bent on the reduction of human life to "bare life", the dissolution of the hope of the polis - the free city - before the acid will of the camp.
They were to save us from the rule of man, and preserve us for the rule of law.
Their invocation of a broader, indeed absolute, context for the political life in Canada continues into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, the constitutional enshrinement of the rights and freedoms of "everyone" in Canada is "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". This is aspirational, maybe even asymptotic - pointing us to a future condition, a democracy to come.
Are we there yet?