FORD OPENS GATES OF CONSTITUTIONAL HELL

   Rex Murphy, NP: It’s good to see that here in the centre of our Confederation, the issue of our time is supplying the country with such explosive debate. The question of how many people should sit on Toronto’s city council has long lain dormant, even unacknowledged, as a — or even the — pivot of Canada’s constitutional health. But in the past week or so, Premier Doug Ford’s idea, so to speak, of trimming the number of simians approaching the typewriter has engaged more press attention than the NAFTA talks and Trans Mountain combined. Who knew that cutting the number of councillors that get to decide which downtown Toronto street next gets a bike path and a licence to open a hen farm could so threaten the Confederation?  Now to the troublous awakening of the notwithstanding clause (NWC). To his opponents, invoking the NWC is the most parlous moment in our history since the Plains of Abraham. By this enormity Ford has opened the gates of constitutional hell, splintered the rule of law, opened the floodgates to dread populism and dictatorship, and — blasphemy itself — shattered the veritable Mosaic tablets of Canadian citizenship (brought down in the ancient days of 1982), the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.