Trudeau government illegal use of the Dispensing Power

Vincent J. Curtis

1 June 22

RE: Drug laws to be eased next year.  News item Canadian Press.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 1 June 22.

Senator Eugene Forsey, a noted expert on the constitution of Canada, must be rolling in his grave.  The Federal government is going to invoke the dispensing power or the suspending power to ease Canada’s drug laws in a section of the country.

The dispensing power and the suspending power were both made illegal in the Bill of Rights of 1689.

The dispensing power was the “prerogative or discretion claimed by the monarch of exempting from the operation of statutes in particular cases. It was exercised by medieval and Tudor monarchs but became a bone of contention in the 17th cent. The Long Parliament, in its Nineteen Propositions, accused Charles I of making excessive use of it.”

The Bill of Rights of 1689 declares specifically:

(1)  That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of the laws by regal authority without the consent of parliament is illegal;

(2)   That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority as hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal.

The proposed action of the Trudeau government is a use of these pretended regal authorities, and is plainly illegal.  And Act of Parliament is necessary to make it legal.

I mentioned Forsey because his autobiography mentions a mandarin invoking the dispensing power to justify something “administratively convenient,” and Forsey embarrassed him with the 1689 Bill.  Bureaucratic slovenliness isn’t new.

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