The Hollow Promise of Justice: Canada’s Betrayal of the Individual

Part Two of "We don't have a justice system, we have a legal system."

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In Canada, where the Charter is recited with the reverence of a Psalm and maple leaves are stitched into the national self-image like halos into saints’ portraits, there lies a quiet, cowardly betrayal: the rule of law without the rule of appeal. We are governed not by justice but by the pretence of it—a theatre of fairness where the outcome is already predetermined, the actors are all on salary, and dissenters are ushered out through trapdoors labelled "mental health" or "safety concern."

This isn’t conjecture. It’s not a metaphor. It’s modern Canada. And if one cannot meaningfully appeal a decision—if there is no reachable forum that can reverse a wrong—then we do not have law.

We have a ritual.

The machinery is elegant in its futility. An institution, such as a university, wrongs one, but when one appeals to a union, the union often shrugs its shoulders. Should one attempt to hold that union accountable, one finds that the Ontario Labour Relations Board rejects over 99% of Duty of Fair Representation claims. One cannot appeal the OLRB either, at least not without entering the fiscal slaughterhouse of judicial review, where $70,000 buys you nothing but the right to be told the procedure looked fair—even if the substance was a whitewash.

These boards and commissions, once conceived as safeguards for workers and individuals, now function as cloaked doormen for the very institutions they’re meant to restrain. The architecture is Kafkaesque, with just enough transparency to give hope, and just enough bureaucracy to crush it.

Then there are the “self-regulating” bodies, those glowing gems of Canadian hypocrisy. The Law Society of Ontario, for instance, is to professional discipline what a bucket of water is to a wildfire: performative, impotent, and late.

File a complaint against a lawyer who’s authored a defamatory report for a university—sans evidence, sans fairness—and watch the file get dismissed not by a tribunal, not even by a lawyer, but by an intake clerk, no legal reasoning required—justice by clerical fiat.

Across the Commonwealth, the pattern repeats: UK medical boards, US diocesan abuse tribunals, and our Canadian bureaucracies offer the same pious performance. You’ll be heard, they insist. But only so they can record the sound of your drowning.

Ah, but the courts! Surely the courts? Alas, litigation in this country is often reserved for the rich and vengeful, or for institutions with unlimited public funding and moral cowardice masquerading as a legal strategy.

If one dares to sue—for defamation, say, for being falsely called a Nazi, a racist, a paedophile—the price is not merely financial, it is existential. This is my story. But I have enough to eat and live, and I will survive.

The process costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you lose, or even win insufficiently, the costs will consume your retirement and leave your character on the scrap heap anyway.