This article originally appeared in Without Diminishment.
By Shawn Whatley, March 26, 2026
We must not miss the revolutionary nature of the Supreme Court’s hearings on Quebec’s Bill 21. The hearings touch far more than whether Quebec has the constitutional right to use the notwithstanding clause, or whether its use should be limited.
The Supreme Court of Canada hearings on Bill 21 are about who defines Canada and who gets to change it. Does the Supreme Court have the power to bypass the Constitution’s amending formula? Can the Supreme Court overturn Section 33 of the Charter? Furthermore, does Quebec have the right to pass legislation like Bill 21, which essentially legislates against multiculturalism?
The Mark Carney Liberals are one of 51 interveners in the Supreme Court of Canada hearings on Bill 21. Carney wants the Supreme Court to alter the Constitution by judicial fiat, bypassing the amending formula. He opposes Quebec for ruling against multiculturalism and will find any way he can to oppose it.
Revolution has been thrust upon us.
The Charter would have never come into existence without Section 33. The notwithstanding clause was literally the only reason provinces agreed to the Charter in the first place.
And now the Supreme Court has not only assumed it has the legitimacy to hear such a case, but also that it has the power to rule on it, potentially changing the Constitution itself.
Those who love peace and order sometimes have to take up intellectual arms, at great personal cost. They must storm the castle. Rotten ideas promoted by ignorant or unsavoury people can turn any institution into its opposite.
Historian Robert Conquest described a law of politics: “Any institution not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”
Institutions end up adrift and in crisis, not because we cannot see it happening, but because most of us avoid the cost of winning them back. Institutional rescue always disrupts the dysfunctional status quo, which risks injury for the rescuers.
The mandate to rescue, at its core, is simply the revolutionary imperative by another name. Some are born revolutionaries, some become revolutionary, and others have revolution thrust upon them.
In January, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks at Davos captured global headlines. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
Carney put words to feelings. The world is different. It does not just contain new and different things, it has a new operating system.
The scope and speed of change have created a crisis in political thought — a period of upheaval. Legacy political ideologies lack the intellectual heft required to address current issues. For example, what can liberalism offer in response to two years of Intifada protests? Calling for the ‘rule of law’ only denounces illegal protests. What can liberalism say about legal, public celebrations of civilian massacre?
The traditional right fares no better.
Reaganism and neoconservatism, which embodied the right-wing consensus between 1980 and 2015, no longer offer the resources needed for our crisis. Given the return of nationalism and the end of Pax Americana, tax cutters and war hawks sound hollow. No doubt, we can still study those ideas, but their salience has waned.
Many younger people have barely heard of Reagan and couldn’t care less about neoconservatism. “The old order is not coming back.”
Fighting is ego-dystonic for most people. Even in professional hockey, only a few players truly love to punch.
Fixing an organisational crisis requires heroism and valour. It requires a willingness to do what we must do, but cannot avoid.
We fight to rescue institutions we care about.
No matter how you spin it, attempts to rescue an institution in crisis will appear revolutionary. People who benefit from the status quo will call them coups or hostile takeovers. Administrators will be sacked, policies will be changed, and governance will be restructured.
Only by examining the nature and outcome of the revolution will we be able to tell whether it is glorious or a reign of terror.
Glorious revolutions seek change that removes rot and replaces it with known, healthy habits and renewed culture. Reigns of terror demolish everything they cannot understand and replace it with innovative geometric rigidity.
Progressive intentions justify the cause regardless of outcome. Conservative intentions are proven by outcomes. The promise of outcomes must temper enthusiasm before we see results. Rescue as revolution must be labelled as the old maps once were: Hic sunt dracones, here be dragons.
The Revolutionary Imperative
It’s a twist of fate that Carney said, “The old order is gone.” With respect to the Supreme Court of Canada hearings on Bill 21, the Carney Liberals are leading the revolution.
Canadians on the non-Left must respond. We cannot take a conservative, cautious stance. We have been thrust into a revolution and must respond with the urgency the situation requires.
Liberal democracies are ailing and in need of rescue. Fortunately, help is near, only forgotten. Scruton said, “Conservatism is a work of rescue.” We just need to rediscover it. Rescue will require sacrifice, and it will feel like revolution.
Will we embrace the revolutionary imperative?
Shawn Whatley is a past president of Civitas Canada and of the Ontario Medical Association. He is a Senior Fellow for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and author of When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing. Listen to his podcast on Substack, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
