Many years ago, as a new law student, I had a moment of disbelief. “Surely it doesn’t really work this way,” I thought to myself as I sat in an early class. The law, I discovered, is not a set of immutable rules, predictable and secure. Instead, it is rife with ambiguity, riddled with uncertainty, and subject to the whims, temperaments and follies of human beings who make and apply it. And yet, as I also came to realize, it has often worked well. The Western legal tradition, upon which the Canadian system is based, has protected individual autonomy better than any other legal system in history. The problem is that for decades that tradition, and the culture from whence it came, have slowly been eroding. And now, during COVID, when the law has let us down, there is a tide in the affairs of Canadians.
