A Dream Destroyed

Douglas Farrow and William Gairdner

The Windsor Star, 5 February 2022

Paul Martin Sr. had a dream. He dreamt of a Canada that was a bright beacon of freedom – a Canada dedicated to the principles of human rights in all their ramifications, “particularly those concerning the sanctity and inviolability of the family as the fundamental unit of society.”

This dream, recorded in Hansard, found expression in the preamble to our 1960 Bill of Rights, which he helped to write. The Bill of Rights affirms that “the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the protection of the family in a society of free men and free institutions.”

What Paul Martin Sr. never dreamt was that his son, having been elevated to the office he himself never quite reached, would table legislation destroying the foundations of our freedom. And that is just what Paul Martin Jr. is set to do, through a bill (C-38) that declares the view of marriage held by his father to be discriminatory and unconstitutional.

By means of this bill, the Canadian state will complete a sinister process begun by our provincial courts. It will seize the institution of marriage by force and redefine it in such a way as to sever its link with the family. It will give us back marriage without gender, biology, or procreation. And when marriage is no longer formally connected to the family, the family will no longer have legal standing. It will no longer be recognized under law as the fundamental unit of society. It will no longer have anything like its former sanctity and inviolability.

Marriage, for its part, will remain for a time (though probably not a very long time) as a legal institution. But it will not be a bulwark against the encroachment of the state on the freedom of its citizens. It will not be a bastion of human rights. Why? Because it will not serve to say to the state that the state is a secondary, not a primary, form of human community. It will no longer insist that the natural community of father, mother, and children is prior to the state and capable of pressing its own claims over against the state.

The Supreme Court of Canada did not compel the Government to table this legislation, a fact that many of us have noted and applauded. But it did insist that the legislation was lawful. It delivered marriage wholly into the hands of the state by explicitly rejecting the claim that marriage is a “pre-legal institution.” By doing so, it struck a blow, whether intentionally or not, against basic human freedom. In effect, it denied the natural priority of the father-mother-child relationship over the state-citizen relation.

Paul Martin Sr., were he with us today, would find all of this very troubling indeed. He knew that the sanctity and inviolability of the family, as represented by the institution of marriage, does not derive from the law but is brought to it as a necessary condition for legal integrity – for law that respects human rights. The forcible exclusion of the family from the very concept of marriage is a repudiation of this fact, and it sets Canada on the path to tyranny.

The Prime Minister is presenting himself as a champion of human rights, in the image of his father. In moments of doubt about the consequences of same-sex marriage, he falls back on the claim that human rights is the reason why he was bound to table this legislation. But a house divided against itself cannot stand. If the sanctity and inviolability of the family lies at the heart of human rights, then defining the family out of marriage – and subjecting marriage itself to forced manipulation – cannot possibly be a valid defence of human rights.

So whose view is correct, Mr. Prime Minister? Yours or your father's? You can't both be right. Your father, as you know, was a defender of Section 33, and he would surely invoke the “notwithstanding” clause today in defence of the family and for the sake of freedom. You say that you will not even allow your cabinet a free vote. Will the legacy you leave spell the end of your father's dream?

Douglas Farrow, associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University, is co-editor of Divorcing Marriage . William Gairdner is a former professor of English Literature at York University and author of The War Against The Family and many other books. Both are steering committee members of Enshrine Marriage Canada (www.enshrinemarriage.ca).

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