Why the Death Penalty Decision Matters

Over at ProgBlogs, lots of good words have been written since this morning, when we all heard the announcement that Harper's Tories, for the first time in modern Canadian history, will no longer automatically attempt to secure the rights of Canadians on death row in the United States or elsewhere.

Here's why this matters:

One of the most stupefying charges that people on the right often make about modern people and the societies in which we live is that we are, allegedly, "moral relativists." That is to say, we sometimes get accused of believing that right and wrong depends on who you are and what the situation is -- that nothing can be said for certain regarding matters of ethics and morality. Furthermore, since Canada has always been a fairly progressive and forward-looking, modern country, this is also said to be true of Canada as a whole.

But that's never been true. To be Canadian has always meant to hold certain principles, and to believe that they are true -- not provisionally true, and not true just for us, but true. Among those principles, for many years now, has been that the state does not have the right or authority to execute people for crimes they have committed. The state may, by means of due process, remove a person's property or a person's freedom, but not a person's life. The latter was not bestowed by the state, by society, or by anything over which the state has authority, and therefore it cannot be taken away by the state.

That is a principle that we have long held as simply true. And it's a principle that applies to every Canadian convicted of a capital crime around the world, whether a political prisoner in a despotic nation or even a murderer in the United States. It's a universal, sharp bright line beyond which we hold that no state may step. And our governments for decades, both Liberal and Conservative, have upheld this principle as vigorously as they were able.

Now, all of a sudden, we have a Conservative government which has decided to introduce relativism into this fundamental area of rights. Now Canada's opposition to capital punishment, and its government's duty to secure the rights of its citizens around the world, is to fluctuate with the situation. It will be enforced in some cases but not others; as Stockwell Day puts it,

We will not actively pursue bringing back to Canada murderers who have been tried in a democratic country that supports the rule of law.

In other words, Canada's long-standing principle is no longer a principle. It depends on whom we're talking about, and it depends on the jurisdiction. And, by implication, if the government wants to tweak this "right" a little further when it's expedient to do so, then it can -- with no discussion, no debate, no reference to tradition, the Charter, or anything else. Now, if we need to, for example, get in some other nation's good books for strategic or economic reasons and we don't want to annoy them, well, we can show that we believe in them by letting them execute one of our people.

I said this before, and I'll say it again: The most basic function of any government is securing its citizens' rights -- all citizens however vile, and all of their rights however inconvenient. When a government abdicates that responsibility, it has no business being in power any longer. This has nothing to do with politics in any usual sense. This is not about tax policy, or about any of the other matters upon which Canadian parties have disagreed and will disagree. This is a basic principle that has been upheld by all parties and by Canada as a whole for decades. It's what government is for. This is about right and wrong, and is not relative to the situation or to expedience. This new decision introduces relativism into an area where it has no place.

That's why this matters.

Update: What James Bow said.