Trudeau: a James II or a William III?

Vincent J. Curtis

22 Dec 2019

The new Minister of Public Safety, Bill Blair, thinks he can get Toronto’s criminal gunmen to give up their firearms through an Order in Council.  Blair will announce soon an OIC that purports to ban guns.  A colour of law will be thrown over this Ministerial action by combining it with a “buy-back” program.  Depriving law-abiding gun owners across Canada of their lawful property Blair thinks will cause criminal gunmen in Toronto to give up their unlawful guns. 

A decadent judiciary might let this violation of rights pass without murmur.

Another occasion when an OIC purported to ban privately owned arms was during the reign of King James II of England.  James’s reign was short, lasting only from 1685 to 1688.  James was a Catholic and a Stuart.  England was protestant and had beheaded James’s father, Charles I, for political conduct characteristic of the Stuarts.

James sought to impose what was known as “popery” upon England, and the resistance to his measures caused James to deprive his protestant subjects of the right to keep and bear arms.  Ultimately, James fled England, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought William and Mary to the throne.  William signed into law the Bill of Rights of 1689, which named and banned the worst excesses of James’s rule.  Vindicating and asserting ancient rights and liberties, the Bill included “that the subjects which are Protestant may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”

The curious phrasing of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (The Right of the People...shall not be infringed) led Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to research the origin of the Amendment. This research was published as the majority opinion in the Heller case of 2010.  Scalia concluded that the right to keep and bear arms pre-existed the Constitution, and was found already in Common Law in America, inherited from England as a result of the Bill of Rights of 1689.

Canada, like the United States, is an inheritor of English Common Law, and, absent contrary scholarship, that right to keep and bear arms according to law also exists in Canada.  Scalia argued that the ‘according to law’ provision meant that the right is subject to regulation, but neither law nor regulation can be used to extinguish that right.

King William III signed the Bill of Rights without reluctance.  He required no loyalty tests of the nobility of England.  He was not afraid of an armed citizenry because he had no thought to misrule his kingdom.

He also understood that the common law right to self-defence was meaningless if a person were denied the means of self-defence.

The issues of right raised by gun-control were resolved in common law over three hundred and forty years ago.  So long ago, in fact, that it required the scholarship of the renowned Justice Scalia to rediscover them.  How Canada’s judiciary reacts when these facts are placed before it after the OIC is challenged in court will be an interesting test of its intellectual decadence.

Blair’s predecessor as Minister of Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, was defeated in the last election after serving twenty-six years.  He too threatened a gun confiscation, and paid the price for it.  Apparently, Goodale’s political corpse taught Trudeau nothing.

The Firearms Act of 1995 was passed in response to the murders at École Polytechnique.  The law created a new regime of prohibiting, restricting, licensing, and registering that did nothing except expose the ignorance of guns of the law-makers.  The Act was supposed to be the last word on gun control, and therefore registration of firearms by private citizens would never be used for a general confiscation.  That would be a betrayal of the trust required to begin the registry.

We’ll soon see how trustworthy the Trudeau Liberals are.  Is the Trudeau government fearful of an armed citizenry?  Does it keep old promises?  Does Trudeau believe in a real right of self-defence against criminals and tyranny?  Is Trudeau a James II or a William III?
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Vincent J. Curtis is a retired research scientist and an occasional free-lance writer.