EDITORIAL: Equality Before the Law Is Not Optional
We have allowed illiberal thinking to become pervasive in Canada. It did not arrive all at once, and it did not announce itself honestly. It crept in under the language of compassion and reform, wearing the borrowed clothing of liberalism while hollowing liberal principles out from the inside.
At the centre of this rot is a simple idea that should be uncontroversial in a free society: equality before the law. There cannot be different rules for different people. The moment the justice system abandons that premise, it ceases to be a justice system at all and becomes an exercise in managed favouritism, rationalized injustice, and moral cowardice.
This does not require historical amnesia. The criminal justice system has, undeniably, been harder on minorities in the past. That reality animated legitimate, liberal arguments for reform: that the law should be applied fairly, that bias should be rooted out, that punishment should fit the crime rather than the identity of the accused.
Those arguments were about universalism—about bringing everyone under the same standard, not fragmenting society into competing categories with different expectations. What we are witnessing now is something entirely different.
Under the banner of “context” and “systemic factors,” judges are increasingly empowered—and in some cases encouraged—to impose weaker sentences for serious crimes, to release repeat violent offenders on bail, and to explain away conduct that should be clearly and unequivocally condemned.
