Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew clearly overstepped when he called for criminals convicted of child pornography offences  to be “buried under the prison” after fellow inmates dealt with them.

After all,  neither the British North America Act nor its successor, the Constitution Act 1982, places vengeance, vigilantism, or for that matter digging shallow graves, under  provincial jurisdiction.

While rule-of-law guardians can rightly object to the specific words the Manitoba NDP leader used, though, it’s a safe bet the vast majority of Canadian align with the anti-child porn sentiment he meant to express. 

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Alberta’s Danielle Smith, Ontario’s Doug Ford, and federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre voiced that anger – without going verbally overboard – by demanding the Carney government use the constitution’s notwithstanding clause to negate a “disgusting” and “outrageous” recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling on child pornography.

 The Prime Minister’s plate, alas, has been otherwise full currying Canada’s favour among Asian strongmen, and delivering an “investment” budget to leave Canadians ever deeper in debt. He has yet to respond to the demands for invoking the Section 33 override.

Let us hope and pray that Mark Carney, a devout Catholic, doesn’t believe delay will defuse the impetus to cancel last week’s catastrophic high court error. It ruled, by a narrow 5-4 count, that Parliament violated the Charter of Rights when it mandated a one-year minimum sentence for creating or possessing child pornography.

Immediate beneficiaries were two convicted felons. One was caught possessing more than 300 child porn images showing, among other debauched infamies, children between the ages of three and six being sodomized by adults. The second pleaded guilty to owning more than 500 images and 274 videos of children aged five to 10 being sexually abused.

The SCOC found, however, that their rights were violated because the mandatory minimum sentencing provision is written too vaguely. The minimum could foreseeably apply, the majority ruled, to a hypothetical 18-year-old who is sexted an image of a 17-year-old girl and, while knowing it constitutes child porn, neglects to delete it from his phone.

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Yes. They did. Actually rule that way. 

Globe and Mail columnist Robyn Urback, never a charter member of the Hang ’Em High and Often fraternity, pinpointed the hallucinatory quality of the decision. She called it a “fantasy…unrealistic, outlandish,” utterly detached from the ground on which our legal system stands and, indeed, from the real world.

“It is nutty, frankly, that the majority on the Supreme Court would use this scenario as the test of the constitutionality of the mandatory minimum sentence, when the actual cases before it were of men who possessed hundreds of images of small children being sexually violated in the most horrific ways,” Urback wrote.

Horrific as the particulars are, the potential for longer term damage of Canada’s highest court appearing in such a Nuts ’R Us light is in some ways worse. Already, there are serious people seriously concerned about provincial governments’ increasing deployment of the override clause to violate genuine Charter rights. 

Quebec’s flagrant abuse of Sec 33 clearly violates the intentions of those who crafted it into the 1982 Constitution. At the same time, what recourse do provinces have in their areas of jurisdiction when the country is transformed from a place of mere judicial overreach to a political-legal fantasyland?

Such a transformation will take us beyond questions of the rule of law to authentic fear about our collective ability to recognize reality. It will force facing up to who and what we truly are as a country. The questions engage action, yes, but also spirit.

As Catholics, we should be on the cusp of, though not yet filled with, fear and trembling for what that means. Our faith, in its foundation, is inherently incarnate. For us, the active and the spiritual are a seamless garment of grace and nature, a harmonious union of distinct dimensions of an integral reality.

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The secular-legalistic shredding of that garment predates the current Supreme Court imbroglio by decades. It gained its most venal form a decade ago when the 2015 Carter decision on euthanasia stripped away the principle of sanctity of life from Canadian jurisprudence. So, the new high court ruling that the Charter protects child pornographers over and above the sacredness of childhood is only a horrifically logical progression of that legal violation.

None of which is to say that we are doomed and fit for burial in the prison yard. But we must act, now, in the peaceful spirit of Christ’s promised victory.