Ezra Levant interviews Bruce Pardy, a Queen’s University law professor and Rights Probe director, exposing Canada’s Charter of Rights as a tool for identity-based discrimination. Pardy highlights Section 15.2’s flawed assumption of white privilege, the Supreme Court’s shift to "substantive equality" (equity), and a 2020 RCMP case where unequal rules were imposed to favor women. He criticizes equity logic for ignoring demographic realities, like recent immigrants’ lack of historical disadvantage, and dismisses Justice Minister Arif Virani’s 2023 reparations push as legally unjustified. Pardy warns this framework risks societal backlash by alienating groups like white working-class Canadians, urging bold reforms—such as overriding Charter interpretations—to restore legal neutrality. [Automatically generated summary]
Name for me a single freedom-oriented law professor.
Can you do it?
It's a pretty short list, but the name at the top has got to be Professor Bruce Party of Queen's University, a freedom lover and an activist and a journalist.
He's our special guest today.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, does our Canadian constitution even protect our equality before the law?
Or is it all liberal mumbo-jumbo about equity?
It's October 23rd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
If you think it's tough being a freedom-oriented person in general, imagine how hard it is to be a freedom-oriented person in the bosom of the establishment at one of the finest law schools in Canada.
a place where conformity is perhaps rewarded and cancel culture thrives.
At least I think that's how it is.
But there is an anomaly at Queen's University.
His name is Professor Bruce Party.
He is a freedom-oriented law professor there.
He's also the executive director of Rights Probe, which, as it sounds, is a think tank devoted to freedom and civil rights.
And he is not only a force in nature and a professor, he is a public intellectual who writes about freedom in various places.
He recently had a study published by the Aristotle Foundation, an excerpt of which ran in the National Post.
What a pleasure to spend the course of the next half hour with Bruce Party.
Bruce, great to see you again.
Great to see you, Ezra.
I was good to chat.
Well, that's nice to say.
I hope I haven't unfairly characterized what it's like to be a professor at Queen's University.
Obviously, if they have you there, they have a certain tolerance for ideas, but I'm afraid that other universities like TMU, formerly known as Ryerson, they might not be as hospitable to someone with your point of view.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Certainly, listen, I should say that here at the Law School at Queens, I am very welcome to say what I think to their credit.
So I don't want to place them in a light that's not deserved.
But at TMU, at the new law school they're going to put in place, they have set aside three quarters of their student seats for people of particular identities.
And now, to be sure, this is not the only institution that's doing this.
Equity vs. Equality00:15:13
This is just the latest example of an equity-driven educational program.
And It shows how far down the road Canada has traveled in terms of replacing the idea of equal treatment by the law from that idea, equal treatment, to equity.
And what we are seeing now at TMU and other educational institutions, not to mention jobs and government programs of all kinds, are now based upon equity instead of equality.
And that means that your entitlement to apply for jobs or to apply for seats or to apply for programs depends upon your identity.
And some people, and let's just call a spade a spade, certainly straight white males would be the first on the list, are not eligible for these things.
This is a form of discrimination in the name of equality, which is not the thing at all.
You know, it's been a while since I was in law school and dealt with Section 15.2 of our Charter of Rights.
Section 15.1 of our Charter of Rights gives everyone equality before the law based on characteristics like race or sex or religion.
But immediately afterwards, Section 15.2, this is hardwired right in our Charter of Rights.
It basically says, well, except when, well, I'll read the wording, it does not preclude any law, program, or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups, including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability.
Now, that assumes that if you're a minority, you're disadvantaged.
And it assumes if you're white, you have privilege.
And by the way, I don't even know what the word minority means anymore, because in Toronto and Vancouver, for example, whites are the minority.
And we get into all sorts of weird issues like how do you test someone's race?
How much of a minority do you have to be to qualify?
I think this is a ticking time bomb that has been in our charter for 40 years.
And now it's really starting to explode, isn't it, Professor?
Yes.
Well, this is so the mistake was to include the exception in 15.2 that you read.
But there's been more mistakes than that.
So one of the points that this report is trying to make is that Canadians believe, and understandably so, because this is what 15.1 says.
15.1 says everybody has the right to be treated equally under the law.
In other words, justice is supposed to be blind.
And what has happened over these past 35, 40 years is that the Supreme Court has made the exception in 15.2, the general rule.
15-1 basically doesn't exist anymore.
The Supreme Court has said that 15-1 and 15-2 together require substantive equality, and substantive equality essentially means equity.
It essentially establishes license to give preferential treatments to some groups over other groups.
And I would like Canadians not to be suffering under the illusion that there is a right to equal treatment under the law, because the Supreme Court has basically said that's not so.
Is there a recent case where this has become very underlined and clear?
I mean, I think the courts and our human rights commissions have always been into affirmative action.
But is there some recent development that causes you to write this essay in the Aristotle Foundation?
Well, as I alluded to, this trend has been going on for a long time.
In fact, it began with the very first case that the Supreme Court heard under Section 15.1 of the Charter.
But most recently, the most recent case I would cite is a Supreme Court case from, I think it's 2020.
They were assessing a program put in place by the RCMP that allowed job sharing between their employees.
If you wanted to work part-time, you'd be able to by sharing a job.
And this was put in place many, many years ago.
But some women challenged the constitutionality of the program, partly because those people who opted into it, it was a voluntary program, entirely voluntary.
You could choose or not to stay full-time or part-time.
And if you chose part-time, you would also get a pension, as you would with full-time.
But your pension, of course, would be proportionate to the number of hours that you worked.
So what happened over time was, as you might guess, more women than men chose to work part-time and therefore ended up with lower pensions than the men.
And on that basis, it was challenged as unconstitutional.
You have an equal program, voluntary, same rules for everybody, challenged as being unconstitutional.
And the Supreme Court said, yeah, none allowed to do that.
In this situation, you have to have unequal rules between men and women so as to prevent a disparate impact between them.
And so this is traveling beyond the exception in 15.2 that you read.
This is now saying that 15.1 means you have to apply different rules to different groups.
And that is not what the charter says.
You know, that word equity, and I went to law school, I didn't do a lot of lawyering, but you learn about the word equity pretty soon.
And it's been around for a while.
It's not just for 40 years.
It's been around for decades, even more.
I think it's a giant fudge factor where a judge says, all right, if I apply the law, it doesn't get me the result I want.
So I'm going to use the word equity, which sort of means fairness or the way it ought to be.
And I'm going to use that to change the outcome.
Is that the wrong approach?
Give me your best definition as a law professor of the word equity and maybe compare it to the word equality.
I think everyone knows what the word equality means.
But what does equity mean?
And is it just a fudge factor?
Well, so one of the complications is that the word equity has a couple of different meanings.
One of the meanings, and not the one that I'm speaking about now, but one of the original meanings was a body of law that was based upon discretion of the courts to do what they thought best.
And so in that sense, it's related.
But the particular version of equity that we're talking about is the idea of applying different rules to different groups.
The whole notion of equality before the law is embedded in the idea of Western legal systems.
It goes back to the idea that justice ought to be blind, that your rights should not depend upon who you are, what your lineage is, who your parents are, what your race is, what your sex is.
That the law should be impartial, neutral.
If you are charged with a criminal offense, then the outcome of that prosecution should not depend upon your identity.
It should depend upon, should depend upon what you did.
And that idea is, as time goes on, going out the window.
More and more, the law is suggesting that the standards to be applied to you and the punishments to be applied to you do depend, do depend on your identity.
And that is the core of the equitable idea.
And it is being applied now more broadly all the time.
And it is being applied in favor of the predictable groups and against the other predictable groups.
And this is a situation that I would regard as intolerable.
And yet there is no end in sight.
Yeah.
You know, for a long time, there was a different standard in criminal law when dealing with Aboriginal or Indigenous defendants.
So if someone committed a crime and they were Indigenous, they, as a rule, got a lower penalty, a lower punishment, less jail time, if any jail time at all, because of their race.
And I think this was widely accepted.
I think one of the cases was the Gladioux case, if I'm not mistaken.
Gladieux, I think everyone sort of said, well, that there's a historical cultural anomaly here.
So we'll just, this is, you know, by the way, I think the victims of this rule are Indigenous people.
When a violent man, a rapist, God forbid, a murderer, happens to be Indigenous, they are released much more readily back into the community where they commit their crimes again.
If you look at the RCMP statistics for missing and murdered Indigenous women, the vast majority of perpetrators are other Indigenous people, men they know, because they're released into the community.
So the soft-hearted, equity-seeking judges who thought they were doing Indigenous people a favor by putting violent men back into the community are actually causing another crime wave.
But at least it was limited.
And you could say, well, there's a historical reason for it.
You could disagree with it, but you could understand it.
But giving this same special favor to newcomers to Canada who have no historical situation that needs to be ameliorated.
We didn't have a system of widespread slavery like the U.S. South.
We didn't have, we don't have an obligation.
We were not a colonial power that had outposts around the world.
We weren't a Canadian empire.
I think it was bad enough when it was Indigenous, but now, as you mentioned with this new TMU medical school, basically it's anybody but whites.
I find that weird.
Well, there is a logic to it if you put your finger on where it's coming from.
And this is not the kind of thing that the courts would identify.
But my theory, and I'm not the only one, goes like this, that this approach has embraced the social justice theory of the world.
And that theory goes like this: that there is nothing in society but power, power relationships.
And there are some groups that are privileged and some groups that are oppressed.
And the whole objective of social justice and, for that matter, the law, is to flip this power pyramid.
And of course, the white males are at the top of the pyramid.
And you can guess who's on the bottom of the pyramid.
And so it is justified to apply different standards to those people at the top versus those people on the bottom so as to invert the pyramid.
And if you think that's the logic, then everything we've talked about makes complete sense.
That, to my mind, is a violation of the central premises of the Western legal system.
But the social justice theory doesn't care about that.
I think you're right.
And it's always odd when foreign narratives of oppressor and oppression and oppressed are imposed on Canada.
I think of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I am not an expert in U.S. race relations, but I do know one thing.
They had widespread slavery in the South.
And they had Jim Crow laws and they had a lot of challenges that we frankly didn't have in Canada for historical reasons.
So to try and graft the Black Lives Matter narrative onto Canada, it never really made sense to me because we don't have that same history.
You could say the same with Occupy Wall Street.
We didn't have bank bailouts.
You could, you know, sorry, you were going to say, go ahead.
No, no, I was just going to say, Ezra, you're making the mistake of being logical and basing your ideas on history, on the facts as they actually happen.
As time goes on, those things have very little to do with it.
This is a system of belief.
And as long as you are inside that system, the whole thing is internally consistent.
It's just when you wander outside it that the thing starts to fall apart.
But let me go back to one of the main premises of the way equity is applied.
So you referred to the way legal rules are being applied to different groups of people.
And the idea that people should not be discriminated against by the law is, of course, a good one.
The law should not be arbitrary.
The law should not punish you for who you are.
But the logic of equity goes like this.
If we look at populations of people and we see that in certain contexts, there are more or less of certain people than there are the population at large.
So, for example, there are more Aboriginal offenders proportionately in prison than the proportion of Aboriginal population in Canada at large.
But the equity logic goes like this.
Therefore, because the numbers are different, therefore there is automatically a conclusion that the system of law is discriminating, which does not follow at all.
So we would not say, for example, we would not say that white athletes are being discriminated against by the NBA because there aren't as many good white players as there are black players.
And that makes, that's fine.
But when you turn it the other way around and you say, well, there are more of these people in a bad situation, well, therefore, there must be discrimination.
And therefore, we must apply the rules of equity.
You know, Jordan Peterson talks about this a fair bit when he's asked about sexism and the patriarchy and disadvantage.
And he lists the high-risk professions or occupations that are overwhelmingly male, the most physically dangerous ones that are 98, 99% male.
Actual Slavery in Canada00:05:10
Yes.
You don't even have to be that exotic.
Just heavy construction work.
Sure.
You know, fishing boats that are at sea for weeks.
Right.
You know, even trucking.
I mean, you would think that would be a gender equal thing, but a lot of uncomfortable, physically unpleasant jobs are male.
And no one complains about that.
And you don't have a condition of historical disadvantage that needs to be ameliorated.
But let me throw some at you.
I think, and you're not supposed to talk about these things.
You're not supposed to notice these things.
But there are statistics kept.
And there are people who come to Canada from faraway places who do actually better than old-stock Canadians.
Oh, sure.
People from India.
I mean, some of the highest performing demographics in terms of wealth and, you know, who are the most successful Canadians and Americans.
People from India, people from Nigeria might surprise you, often do better than domestic Canadians.
So to give someone who just arrives here from China, a lot of Asian Canadians do outstandingly well economically.
I mean, look around.
You got the mayor of Toronto as a Chinese woman.
Like there's really no political or business heights in Canada where you don't have minorities.
Like I can't think of any sphere of influence where visible minorities aren't successful.
So to say, as Section 15.2 says, to have a historical disadvantage here, what disadvantages?
The fact of the matter is that in Canada today, institutionally, the actual cases of actual discrimination are vanishingly small.
I mean, there isn't really any acute discrimination now.
And you cannot point to any legal rights that one group has that other groups do not.
Ironically, the one exception is that people who belong to certain kinds of Aboriginal groups have more legal rights than other people.
But there's certainly nothing that a white man is legally entitled to do that other people are not entitled to do.
That kind of discrimination was gone a long, long time ago.
And now so we're left with chasing ghosts.
And that's what equity has become.
It's become the attempt to make into villains the descendants of those groups that originally might have had a lego.
You know, I don't know if you saw this.
It didn't make the headlines, but a couple months ago, Arif Varani, the federal justice minister in the Trudeau Liberals, introduced a position paper on black justice.
And one of the things in there was a call for reparations, which I find very odd in that Canada, the country of Canada, never had slavery at all.
Canada was born in 1867.
And even when Canada was a colony, we rooted out, we banned slavery very early.
As you know, the British Empire banned slave trade and then emancipated the slaves by basically buying their freedom with a quarter trillion dollar loan that they only paid off a decade ago.
Almost 2% of the British GDP for more than a century went to fighting against slavery.
The West Africa squadron intercepted more than 1,000 slave ships, freed the slaves, seized the boats.
Like it was remarkable.
Canada really is as close to blame-free in that whole business as possible.
There was slavery in Canada, by the way, professor, amongst the indigenous tribes.
Oh, yes.
Numerically speaking, most slaves in Canada historically, it wasn't numerically huge, but it was Indian bands in economic and warfare against other people.
Sure.
So I totally agree with you.
And the idea is crazy from that point of view, but it's also crazy from another, even more fundamental point of view, which is in our system of law, you do not hold people responsible for things they have not themselves done.
Right.
So if your uncle went and robbed somebody, they would not charge you with a criminal offense.
This just wouldn't be done.
You're not responsible for your uncle.
And yet we pretend as though that people who are alive today are responsible for something that somebody did who's long dead, and that other people who were not around, who were not alive at the time, are suffering because of something that happened that happened before they were born.
And those two ideas are not on.
That is contrary to the whole premise of the way we deal with liability in our system of law, or at least it used to be.
Targeting Black Men00:03:25
And so these calls for reparations are political nonsense.
And yet they have legs.
Well, I was astonished to see them in a Canadian government document.
You know, it's punishing people for things they did not do and rewarding people for damages they did not suffer.
I want to ask you a practical question.
I saw that Kamala Harris about a week ago announced a policy for black men.
Yes.
Yes, yes.
That's obviously because a lot of black men are not voting for her.
I think she will get the majority of black men, but even if only a few percent, 7% of Americans are black men, about 14% of Americans are black.
So about half of those are men.
And even if she loses, out of the 7%, if she loses, like typically six out of those seven would vote Democrat, overwhelming Democrat.
So if one or two percent move over, especially in cities like Philadelphia or Detroit that are very black cities, in swing states, that could make a difference.
So Kamala Harris is targeting black men with a $20,000 forgivable loan, $1 million of these.
So she's offering $20 billion.
I think that's just code word for reparations.
But my brain started thinking, all right, what's a man?
That's probably easy to answer.
But what's black?
Kamala Harris is half black.
Barack Obama was half black.
How black do you have to be?
And I know that sounds like a crazy question, but actually, South African apartheid, German Nazi policy, American slave policy needed a scientific answer.
Because what if someone said, you can't kill me, you can't enslave me.
I'm white.
No, you're black.
Well, so they invented a whole vocabulary, terrible words we don't use anymore.
They're archaic.
Octaroon, quadroon.
It even feels dirty to say those words because those are the words of racial oppression.
Mixling.
That's what the Nazis said, Michling.
If you are mixling first degree or second degree, you needed a science to determine who was too black, too white, too Jewish.
So here's my question to you, Professor.
And I was thinking about this with Kamala Harris, but I don't need to go to America.
Let's talk about TMU, Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly called Ryerson.
If someone says I'm black, who's TMU to say no, you're not?
If someone says I'm a woman, well, we know where that is these days.
So how do you enforce it?
How do the courts do it?
If someone says I'm black, prove I'm not.
Do they take a 23andMe DNA test?
Yeah, these things are not done with any kind of scientific precision.
And even the definitions are not really provided.
I mean, I know, I'm sure you do, people who have some Aboriginal background in them in their lineage.
And depending upon their situation, they either get their cards or they don't.
And there's no real science in it.
It all depends upon the political or social approach that is being applied by the institution.
And the institution in question, like TMU, will have a great deal of discretion about how it wants to assess these claims.
But you mentioned the United States, and we should just say this.
United But Disenfranchised00:04:34
That plan that Harris has put forward to favor black men, to encourage them to vote for her, may very well be unconstitutional in the United States.
Because last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the admission policies of Harvard University and others, wherein they preferred applicants of some races over others so as to achieve diversity goals.
The Supreme Court said, no, that's contrary to our constitutional guarantee of equal protection.
So officially in the U.S., they still do have a constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law.
And so all these kinds of things are happening in the U.S. as well, but they may be able to sort themselves out in time, maybe.
In Canada, we do not have that.
Our Supreme Court has explicitly said the other thing, which is your constitutional right to equality is a right to substantive equality, which means equity.
Yeah.
I find that terrifying because if you can no longer go to court to get justice, where do you go?
Do you grieve?
Do you indulge your grievance quietly?
Do you express your objection in some other way?
One of the things Rebel News does is we litigate.
We don't just act in the court of public opinion.
Sometimes we go to the court of law and sometimes we have marvelous victories.
We beaten Trudeau twice when he tried to ban us from his election debates.
I feel like those were important victories.
We've beat four or five cabinet ministers who silenced us on Twitter.
So I have enough success in the court that I have some faith there.
But other times it really is heartbreaking.
And I never want to lose my faith in the system because what does that do?
And that's why I'm worried about people on the right being pushed out of polite company.
Because if they're no longer allowed to be part of the system, they either have to turn off, check out, and sort of find a place to hide, or God forbid they indulge something different.
Again, to refer to the United Kingdom, so many people feel disenfranchised.
In that country, it's the indigenous white working class who feel totally shut out.
And there was race riots a few months ago.
And because there's no place for those people in the entire system, legally, politically, journalistically, culturally, they've been canceled.
And there's an old poem by Rudyard Kipling called When the English Began to Hate.
And he wrote it 100 years ago.
And I'm worried about that, Professor, because we've got to keep everyone in the system.
Everyone has to believe that the system will give them a fair shot.
And what you're saying is that is clearly not the case.
Yes, this is the danger, that people will review the system as fair and legitimate as long as they perceive that they will get a fair shot.
But if that system begins to explicitly say that certain kinds of people are not equal, they're not entitled to the same rules as everybody else, we're traveling down a bad road.
I'm just going to read one stanza from that poem.
I refer to Kipling too often, but other than Shakespeare, he's my favorite poet.
And he was only around 100 years ago or so, but it's like he could see so many things.
The poem is actually called The Beginnings.
And I'll just read the first stanza.
It's, it was not part of their blood.
It came to them very late, with long arrears to make good when the English began to hate.
They were not easily moved.
They were icy willing to wait till every count should be proved ere the English began to hate.
I'm almost done.
I'll just finish it.
Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
They were neither sign nor show when the English began to hate.
I won't finish.
But so 100 years ago, he said there's only a certain amount of patience.
And I can only imagine what he would say today.
Canadians are not hateful.
They're the most easygoing people, I think, in the world by some measures, most tolerant.
But I detected change out there.
I see the new polls about immigration.
Immigration's Complex Legacy00:07:05
And there was a political consensus, at least among the political parties in Canada, that immigration was a good thing.
Now I see new polls that two to one, Canadians say it is positively a bad thing.
And I'm not saying that.
I know of no Canadians who would object to the idea of fair competition between people of different identities and backgrounds and lineage that they would all agree with the idea that that kind of thing should not matter.
So if you're applying for a seat in a medical school, that the fact that you are white or black or indigenous or whatever should not matter one bit.
And so in that sense, Canada is a not racist country.
But there is a different kind of racism now that's being applied.
And that racism is against the white and in some cases the Asian occupants of this place.
And yeah, your take is well deserved.
It makes me sad.
And by the way, the people who have come here en masse, and I'm speaking about immigration again for a moment, in a way, you can't blame them.
They were invited in.
They were let in.
Most of them are not here illegally, by the way.
They were allowed in through some legal process.
And it's the courts that we're talking about now.
I don't know.
How does that get fixed, though?
I think one of the, if I had to list two failures of the Stephen Harper government, I think it was an excellent government.
It was very incremental, but in many ways, it was very timid.
Yes.
It didn't take on the CBC, which is one of the reasons they got pounded so badly in the 2015 election.
They had a chance to reign in the CBC.
They did not.
And to this day, it is a tremendous distortion in the political discussion.
I think the second and maybe larger problem was the courts.
I don't think that Stephen Harper prioritized putting freedom-oriented judges on the court.
Donald Trump had the Federalist Society to help recruit and vet outstanding lawyers who could be candidates, judges who could be candidates.
And one of Trump's great achievements was his courts.
Trump himself, I don't think, knew anything about it, but he delegated it to outstanding people.
I think Stephen Harper let log-rolling patronage politicians put duds on our Supreme Court, with maybe one or two exceptions.
And the court we have, while Harper actually appointed many of them, is indistinguishable by radical leftist appointments.
I think that's a fair assessment.
The problem now is that equity is embedded in our Constitution over a long period of time by a great deal of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Now, governments are not helpless, but they would have to be determined and courageous and strategic about how they would start to reverse this.
But let me give you an example.
If you were a government, either provincial or federal, and you saw this problem, then you would have to do something like the following.
Could enact a statute that established the rules about equal treatment the way you thought it ought to be.
And you could include the notwithstanding clause saying we are going to treat everybody equally without regard to identity, notwithstanding the Charter of Rights.
And we have to do that because the Supreme Court has declared what the Charter of Rights means.
Wow.
And then you could go on and you could do things like dismantle the human rights codes and the apparatus that exists to basically achieve the same thing.
But you'd have to be deliberate and courageous and strategic, and you have to be, it would be politically daring.
But that is the kind of thing that would have to happen next in order to start to reverse this trend.
I think that Pierre Polyev is quite likely to be the next prime minister.
A lot can happen between now and the next election, but every single poll for the last year suggests it.
I think he's been very disciplined.
He's focused on economic matters.
He's recently started talking very carefully about immigration.
But I have really not heard anything from Pierre Polyev about matters such as we've discussed here today.
And I think it is perhaps unlikely that he would take the bold step you outlined.
Maybe he's saving his thunder on that till he's through an election.
But I don't know.
Do you have any intel?
I don't know if you have any interaction with the party.
Who do you think might be a justice minister under Pierre Polyev or is that outside your scope of faith?
Yeah, I couldn't speculate on that.
I'm sorry.
I don't really have a scoop to give you.
And whether or not a new conservative government would be bold enough to do the kinds of things that I've been describing, I really couldn't say.
Yeah, fair enough.
And I look to Alberta.
Danielle Smith talked a lot about the Sovereignty Act, but I think she sort of stepped a little bit back from it.
I mean, she's talking about a provincial Bill of Rights.
I mean, these are good signs.
Yes.
Have you looked at her proposal on that at all?
Yeah, I've seen some versions of it.
I think it's in the right direction.
I don't think it goes to the core of the problems that we have in some respects, though.
And it maintains the control, and it's very difficult to get around, but there are ways to try anyway.
It maintains the control that the courts and the tribunals have over the meaning of the phrases that you put into the Bill of Rights.
And so I applaud the intent, and maybe it will work out very well.
I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.
But there are some real difficulties.
And in order to solve those difficulties, you really have to take the bull by the horns.
Professor, you've been very generous with your time.
I want to ask you a question because sometimes I like to think practically.
I mean, I love conversations and ideas.
But what do you do?
I mean, other than talk what can be done, what could an ordinary person do?
And what could a person in a position of power do?
You've mentioned being bold and bringing in a law that would restate the traditional notion of equality.
Is there anything an ordinary person can do to fix this?
Well, we can all participate in trying to build a environment, a political environment, in which a premier or a government that would start going down this road wouldn't get clovered by the CBC and the other media and the other non-thinking people in this country who are reactionary to believe that if you do this kind of thing, then that means you're a racist.
So building a political environment in which governments feel safe to do the kinds of things that we've been describing is, I think, the most important next thing to do.
All Hands on Deck00:00:43
And to achieve that, you got to have all hands on deck.
Yeah, and I don't think that's going to come quickly.
I think that's a 25-year project.
I agree.
Because it's taken us 25 years to get into this pickle.
Well, listen, it's great to catch up with you, and thanks for letting me read a little bit of poetry to you.
I, you know, sometimes I can find a Kipling poem that applies to almost any situation out there.
Great to see you again.
Bruce Party, professor of law at Queen's University and Executive Director of Rights Probe.
I don't need to tell you to keep fighting for freedom.
I know you do it every day.
Great to see you.
Thanks, Edgar.
You too.
All right.
Cheers.
Well, there you have it.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, goodbye.