COLUMN: Think Again – Premier Kinew is playing games with the Charter

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Premier Wab Kinew over the last couple of years, it’s that he cares more about optics than substance.

When the NDP took power two years ago, Kinew boldly promised that his government would fix healthcare. However, by all objective measures (e.g. surgical wait times, doctor shortages, etc.), things are worse now than they were back then. Kinew made plenty of grandiose promises, but the follow-through hasn’t been there.

Similarly, Kinew often says that the economic horse pulls the social cart. While this is a true statement, we’ve seen little indication that this NDP government understands the private sector. Manitoba businesses are still mired in excessive regulations, job-killing taxes, and bureaucratic delays. Kinew says that he wants to make Manitoba a “have” province, but his track record shows that he has no realistic plan to get us there.

As for education, the biggest change brought in by the Kinew government was to drastically lower the standards for teacher education. No longer will future math teachers have to take any university math courses or history teachers any history courses. As far as this government is concerned, teachers don’t need to know anything about the subjects they teach. It’s a decidedly poor way to address the teacher shortage, but it’s the kind of subpar initiative we’ve come to expect from the Manitoba NDP.

In keeping with Kinew’s focus on optics rather than performance, the government recently introduced Bill 50, The Constitutional Questions Amendment Act. Essentially, Bill 50 states that any future government that plans to invoke Section 33 (also known as the notwithstanding clause) in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms must first refer the proposed legislation to an appeal court judge who would then comment as to whether the law would take away any rights.

This judge wouldn’t be able to stop the proposed law, but he or she would be asked to provide comment. Kinew claims that this adds an extra safeguard so that future governments don’t trample on the rights of Manitobans.

However, Bill 50 is exactly the type of meaningless legislation that we’ve come to expect from Kinew. Since Section 33 gives governments the ability to temporarily override certain sections of the Charter, it stands to reason that a government would only invoke this clause in the first place if it felt that the courts would likely strike a proposed law down.

For example, Saskatchewan recently invoked Section 33 to preserve its legislation that requires schools to notify parents before using the preferred names and pronouns of students. Since a judge had already granted an injunction delaying implementation of this law on the grounds that it might violate Charter rights, the Saskatchewan government invoked Section 33 to keep the law in place.

Now, what would have happened if Saskatchewan had its own version of Bill 50? Not much.

The law would have been referred to a judge who would then have issued an opinion that the legislation might violate Charter rights. The government would then have invoked Section 33 to protect the law. If this looks like the current situation in Saskatchewan, you see just how little impact Bill 50 would have.

Simply put, Bill 50 is both meaningless and redundant. Whatever one thinks about Section 33 and the issues surrounding it, Bill 50 does nothing other than add a bureaucratic step to what is already a complicated legislative process.

True to form, Bill 50 is yet another example of useless legislation introduced by Premier Wab Kinew’s government. It won’t do anything practical, but it does give the premier another opportunity to virtue signal.

Manitobans deserve better.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.