It's Thursday, February 17, 2022.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Much of the world appears to be looking at Canada, at least in part as something of a spectacle

with the trucker protests, but the unfolding story there turns out to be of tremendous importance and not just for Canadians.

We are looking at a challenge to constitutional order.

We are looking at a government that is now overreaching in its declaration of the

Emergencies Act and even though it says it is not suspending basic

constitutional freedoms almost by any honest evaluation that's exactly what it is doing and that requires a

closer look but before we look at what's going on in Canada let's just

remind ourselves of what's at stake and this will be fun and instructive as we think back through

how we got to a constitutional order, what makes that different. If you go back

before a constitutional order, you're going to have to go back before the 13th century.

Well you say that's a long time ago well it is but in the year 1215 a momentous

event happened in the year 12, rebellious barons in England forced the king, the now

infamous King John, to sign an agreement that limited the monarch's power, limited the power of the king of England.

Now he did so by force, but that's actually part of the story.

The fact is that even by force, ultimately by force, he did so. And in that act in what became known as the Magna Carta Liberatum,

he signed the Great Charter of Liberties, which wasn't a modern constitutional document with modern

ideas of constitutional rights, but it was the great turning point.

Constitutionally, everything is basically dated before 1215 or after 1215.

And clearly we're living in that constitutional age and thankfully so, the age after the year

1215. The time after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta.

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