Down the homestretch in the campaign for the Nov. 29 byelection in the federal riding of Vaughan, the Liberal Party trotted out father of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms Pierre Trudeau's son to attack Conservative candidate Julian Fantino.

Montreal Liberal MP Justin Trudeau released a YouTube video last Thursday expressing "shock" to learn what Mr. Fantino thinks of the Charter - a document considered holy writ by Canada's liberal-left.

Mr. Fantino, former chief of police chief in Toronto, York region and London, Ontario, and most recently commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, was quoted observing: "Who has reaped the greatest benefit from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? I would argue that, if it isn't common criminals, then it must be the Hells Angels."

However, as so often is the case in instances the left regards as politically incorrect "gotcha" moments, I suspect a substantial proportion of Canadians will at least quietly applaud Mr. Fantino's plainspokenness as common-sense observation. Hopefully the vaunted Charter is becoming less of a sacred cow.

Mr. Fantino responded to Mr. Trudeau's attack saying Friday: "After serving for over 40 years as a police officer, I don't need any lectures on law and order from a novice member of the 'hug-a-thug' Ignatieff party." Well said. Mr. Fantino took the suburban Toronto riding, heretofore a 22-year Liberal stronghold, albeit winning by a small margin.

Many Canadians, blinded by the seductive but hazily-defined notion of "rights," welcomed Pierre Trudeau's 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but in truth the Charter represented a radical handover of the reins of legal authority that should have worried every Canadian.

Prior to 1982, Canada's cultural heritage and pre-Charter legal system operated under the principle, rooted in the Magna Carta, of the supremacy of Parliament, whose decisions regarding laws and statutes that govern were accountable to citizens at each election. The Charter transferred the erstwhile authority of common law to the courts and unelected judges, unaccountable to anything but the judicial community's subjective, too-often ideological, interpretation of the law.

In a newspaper interview, former Supreme Court Justice John Sopinka, now deceased, maintained: "I think it took a little while for it to sink in that when the court is dealing with Charter cases, they're not dealing with the law as we used to deal with it. Now, when the court is asked to strike down a statute, it is often dealing with the types of decisions that were made previously by elected representatives."

As long as the traditional parliamentary and common law systems remained in place, Canadian society was afforded a degree of protection from attack from arbitrary revisionism and the ephemeral trends of political correctness, but once the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was in place, traditional foundations of Canadian society inevitably came under intensified siege.

This is increasingly manifest in court decisions pertaining to religion's place in the public square and sexual morality issues. The small "l" liberal conceit in these rulings asserts that a particular social/political agenda is somehow morally "correct," thus enjoying a natural right to predominate.

Aside from being democratically unaccountable, judicial lawmaking is notoriously fickle. For example, the drafters of the Charter explicitly and deliberately refused to include sexual orientation as a protected status in the document, and in 1995 the Supreme Court, in a decision written by Justice Gerard La Forest, ruled that "marriage is by nature heterosexual," and that traditional marriage is the fundamental building block of society because it produces and raises most children.

We now know how well those principles held up in a judicial environment dictated by the Charter.

Mr. Trudeau may be aghast at Mr. Fantino's having the audacity to publicly critique the Charter's effects, but there's a sizeable and (I think) growing constituency of Canadians who think the document has been a disaster, and would prefer to see it abolished and accountable parliamentary democracy restored in Canada.

In his book, Three Faces of the Law: A Christian Perspective former law professor Ian Hunter argued that the subversive influence of the Charter of Rights has been invoked by the courts to render Canadian law "secular, anemic, confused, and impotent," making political and social correctness the controlling factor in our courts and law schools. Let there be no mistake, Mr. Hunter warns, "at the end of this road is not tolerance, but tyranny. When we shrug off the burden of judging we shall not find utopia - a tolerant city set upon a hill. We shall find a concentration camp."

Or as Abraham Lincoln declared: "If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers."

I guess some people don't mind subjugation as much as others.