I am just back from a five-day flying visit to Canada. I was speaking at a conference on federalism and judicial activism in interior British Columbia in the city of Kelowna. A fair few readers won’t realise that we are all living through what is probably the common law world’s most intensive period of judicial activism ever. And by ‘judicial activism’ I mean the willingness of unelected judges to usurp the last-word social policy decisions from those who were given the legitimate authority to make our laws, namely the elected legislatures and the drafters and ratifiers of our constitutions. And the judges are doing this based on implausible, unconstrained interpretive approaches that disconnect meaning – or rather what these judicial elites claim the document means – from any actual intentions that the legitimate lawmakers ever held. You get this with all claims about ‘living constitutions’. You get it with talk of the ‘unwritten constitution’ and guff about ‘implied meanings’ in the invisible architecture of the constitution. You get it when judges indulge in proportionality-type analyses – who in their right minds care in the slightest what a half-dozen top judges think about the suitability or reasonableness or proportionality of some law? Seriously. You can’t imagine a more insulated, genuflected-to group of people on the planet. Remember, the vast preponderance of the lawyerly and judicial caste thought Australia’s Voice proposal was just fine and dandy and supported it. And anyway, no one in Australia ever gave the judges this power to sit in judgement on the rest of us on whether some law is or is not in keeping with what they – the judges – happen to believe is justifiable and proportional. Our top judges literally gave this job to themselves, also using wholly implausible interpretive techniques. They said it was an implication of the constitution, which is risible. But it also means no voter can do anything about this power grab.

Still, as bad as it is here in Australia, this move to juristocracy or kritarchy (pick whether you prefer the Latin or Greek) is far worse in other common law countries, especially those with bills of rights. The judges in India and Israel have made themselves Philosopher Kings. Canada’s and Britain’s judges are nearly as bad and still beyond the democratic pale. The US, which has hundreds of years of experience with uber-powerful judges, has at least learnt to treat the judges for what they are making themselves – namely political actors. The US finally has a Right-of-centre political party that takes very seriously whom to pick for its top judges and whether the candidate subscribes, publicly and reliably, to interpretively conservative approaches to finding meaning. (By contrast, our Libs here in Australia must all be asleep in Cabinet when judicial nominations come up on the agenda. That, or they are incredibly stupid. Hard to know and you could be forgiven for leaning towards the latter.)

Anyway, there I was on a flying five-day trip to this stimulating conference in my native Canada and on the first night, chatting with these Canadians, it hit me that our (supposedly Right-of-centre) Liberal Party under Sussan Ley is now so broken and rudderless that it is to the political Left of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Yes, the Davos Man banker who replaced Justin Trudeau and leads a Left-wing government in Left-wing Canada now has publicly stated views to the Right of Ley and the Libs in this country. Did you know that a little over a week ago Canadian PM Carney announced that his Government was going to have to look at its commitment to Net Zero? Even Carney, a fully paid-up climate change catastrophist, can see we are living in a world where the biggest carbon dioxide emitters are heading full speed ahead on ‘burn baby burn’. Two new coal-fired plants a week in China. Mr Trump is all-in on fossil fuels and the cheapest possible electricity. Ditto India. Canada is an irrelevancy on an irrelevancy in terms of the world’s temperature. So impoverishing yourself for nothing – since no one treats Canada or Australia as moral beacons to mimic and emulate – is stupidity on steroids. That’s Canada. But in Australia the supposedly Right-of-centre party is the one that pushes us into Net Zero. It’s the party that first signed us up to the whole renewables folly. And it’s the party that today, under numerologist Sussan, can’t make the obvious call of committing to tear up the whole Net Zero pledge and insanity. The Liberal party is broken.

Oh, and Mr Carney seems to have more of a commitment to free speech than the Libs here in Australia. Sure, he doesn’t have all that much. And what Carney has may be tactical and pragmatically driven (due in part to the fact that three-quarters of Canada’s exports go to the US and President Trump mercifully has a proven track record supporting free speech and Mr Carney fears higher tariffs). But whatever the causes, it was plain to me during my five days in Canada that one of the most Left-wing Prime Ministers in Canada’s history takes public positions more sympathetic to free speech than our Liberal party here in Australia. What has happened to the party of Robert Menzies?

It gets worse when you consider that Canada’s Opposition party, the Right-of-centre Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, is far better again on those two issues than Mr Carney. And on tackling culture war issues. And on cutting back big time on mass immigration (where, again, even Lefty Canadian PM Carney has made modest cuts to immigration and is better than Ley). Remember, although Poilievre lost the Canadian election in April of this year he took the Conservative vote to a 40-year high of over 41%. (Compare that to Dutton’s and Ley’s first-preference scores.) And Poilievre is going harder on these positions, in the newest opinion polls he’s back ahead of Prime Minister Carney – which, in part, is why the Canadian PM has moved Right.

In Canada, though, the party leaders are chosen by the party members. Mr Poilievre is well-liked by the party based and his job was and is secure, the wets be damned! Here, the Liberal partyroom is riven down the middle. The ‘new Labour’ or wet or ‘moderate’ wing that put Ley in place and that defenestrated Tony Abbott and that turned Peter Dutton into a bowl of gutless jelly is too strong for the party to be conservative on anything. Heck, this is a party that can’t even see the bleeding obvious. That Sussan Ley needs to go and needs to go now, along with Alex Hawke and a bunch of other barely disguised progressives. This week’s Newspoll has the Liberal Party at its lowest first-preference total in history. It’s broken. Far too many of its MPs are not fit for purpose. The wrong people are choosing the party leader.

And that means this country has no real opposition to discipline the instinctive hard-Left proclivities of Prime Minister Albanese. Who would ever have guessed that the party of Justin Trudeau would look more conservatively palatable than Robert Menzies’ party? Yes, it’s that bad readers.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.