Re: ‘Secret’ sessions should be an election issue, (editorial comment, August 19):

This was a terrific, timely editorial.

Fear is the great disabler in this. We have lost our common moral ground in Canada, our unified sense of purpose, our sense of obligation to something — perhaps, a community, a church, or a country — greater than ourselves, as well as our ability to trust in our long-standing institutions.

Now, it seems, it is everyone for himself or herself, and everyone is particularly (over-) quick on the draw with their legal firepower, real, imagined, threatened, or alleged. Canadians used to talk to each other, and hold constructive civil discourse. Times have changed.

We are living in ultra-litigious times, as this fine editorial suggests. Everybody (and his wife!!), it seems, is a lawyer now. My wife works for the Ministry of Education in Toronto, and is charged with responding to serial complaints from aggrieved, acrimonious, angry parents — and/or their lawyers — who are losing their neighbourhood schools in “greying” communities like Oakville. Whether these individuals are more concerned for their children’s education or, rather, for their personal residential property’s potentially declining market value is highly debatable, however.

Either way, the Ministry is being regularly threatened with litigation and is, as a result, hard-pressed to make decisive, final, binding, public decisions in overt support of local school boards’ school closure decisions. As Canadians, lamentably, we have gotten far away from being able to either make difficult decisions or to discuss them fairly, publicly. Such is the fear of being sued or “lawyered” that stalks us.

In Orangeville’s case, the current mayor, Rob Adams — who is a good man, a fine son of Orangeville, and a man of action who saved the railway connection and — as a consequence — hundreds of railwaydependent jobs in town, but who is not a lawyer, unlike several other quite prominent family members — at a Council meeting, when being preyed upon by Council members and staff who were more openly fearful of prospective litigation or potential lawsuits against the Town than he, commented tartly that “if you ask four or five lawyers you’d likely get four or five different opinions on a given matter.”

My own solicitor, Mr. R. G. Church, Q.C., of the RCAF (ret’d.) and of Orangeville, is of the old school, and has never been short of excellent counsel and has been impeccable in the legal services he has provided me at country-style prices through his fine office. He is an exemplar of what a lawyer should be.

And, Judge Adams, the Mayor’s father, was always courteous to a fault, and even amusing, when speaking with me. But a more modern generation of lawyers, who may or may not lease their Germanengineered ‘rolling-stock’, have exponentially multiplied in Canada since the dawning of The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) — the magnum opus of that “Tahitian Treat” of a Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau — which legal document never seemed bother to get around to mentioning any of the older, quieter, less self-centred values like honour, duty, service, obligation, or civic responsibility.

Rather, the Charter has served as an impressive genie’s bottle, which those — like the egregious Rahim Jaffer — who appear slick, connected, wellrepresented, and rich in either influence or purse, can rub upon frantically when truly “up against it” in life or legal affairs. Someone wrote from Simcoe County to the letters page at National Post last year that, since the Charter, ‘we no longer have a justice system but a legal system.’

And so the fear of litigation stalks us in our businesses, our daily lives, and in our Town Council. Litigation lurks in the shadows, the bushes, and the dark recesses of our unrealized fears. Orangeville’s councillors, as pleasant human beings, are not immune from these fears or anxieties, and the Town’s very comfortable and tidily remunerated “staff” does little to dispel these with hard doses of realism or gritty, avuncular counsel.

We, as Canadians, have — in the main — turned our backs on the traditional teachings and wisdom of the Gospels. Had we not, Luke 11 is instructive about the more modern, post-Charter incarnation of lawyers or being afraid of them and their ‘worst’. In 1933, President F.D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in much worse times than these, but he had the Christian core or “Centre” (Yeats) with which to provide himself and his nation a sure, unchanging anchor.

President Roosevelt, in his great inaugural address, which is largely remembered because it shows up in To Kill A Mockingbird and is most famous for its tag-line “that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, said then:

“We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.”

Broadly-speaking, as with “old lamps for new!”, we have made a poor bargain in trading in our common “moral values”, our shared ground, for the socalled protections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ‘protections’ that really can only be legally bought by well-off individuals or umbrageous groups at extortionate prices and, often times, to the national detriment.

And the real, silent victim of the piece is public, shared, civic life in Canada, a once peaceable life where — in towns like Orangeville, anyway — doors did not have to be locked and when, once, storefront windows might be left unshattered, and where our dutiful Town representatives were not compelled, continually, by fear of litigation, to discuss matters touching upon our good government, ad infinitum, in camera.

Rob. Bredin,

Orangeville