Collin May, writing for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Inside Policy, has a name for what a lot of Canadians have been watching without a label. He calls it prosecutorial democracy: the habit of using courts, regulators, commissions and professional bodies to discipline people who argue with the official story, all while insisting the crackdown is how you save democracy. The twist is old and ugly. Liberal democracy was supposed to protect speech so citizens could fight about power. This version treats the speech as the danger and the institution as the victim.
His recent example is small enough to miss and large enough to explain the rest. National Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak wrote about an Ontario judge’s record on race-based sentencing. The president of the Canadian Bar Association put out a statement warning the media about “delegitimizing judges” and called the column a crude attack on public confidence in the courts. Judicial independence is a real principle. Using it to scold a newspaper for describing a judge’s work is something else. May’s question is the right one. Who elected the bar association to lecture the press?
He thinks the old cancel-culture script is giving way to something more formal. Social-media mobs still exist, but the serious work now happens in administrative files. Jordan Peterson and the Ontario psychology college. Amy Hamm and the B.C. nursing regulator. Barry Neufeld and a $750,000 human-rights order in British Columbia. In the United Kingdom, people have already gone to jail over online posts. Ottawa’s newer hate-speech machinery points in the same direction. Once the process is a professional complaint or a tribunal, you do not need a trending hashtag. You need a licence, a job, or the money to hire a lawyer for a year.
May’s account of how we got here will sound familiar to anyone who has watched appointments since 2016. Diversity screens on judicial and Senate selections reward the same outlook the institutions then enforce. A government that weakens the notwithstanding clause and treats opposition as a staffing problem is not expanding citizen power. It is concentrating it in people who already share a theory of whose speech counts as harm. Identity narratives of oppression become the operating system. Disagreement gets filed as a phobia. The people who run the associations congratulate themselves for protecting equality while they narrow the range of what a journalist, a nurse or a school trustee is allowed to say.
You can reject parts of May’s diagnosis and still see the pattern. A healthy democracy answers a column with another column. A prosecutorial one answers it with a press release about the rule of law, a college investigation, or a bill that turns “downplaying” into a police matter. The second approach does not make the courts more independent or the public more trusting. It teaches everyone watching that the safest opinion is the one already approved by the people who issue the licences.
