In my latest National Post column I object to the peremptory manner in which the census demands personal information on behalf of social engineers whose capacities I seriously question.

Today I got this envelope from Statistics Canada saying "2016 Census: Complete the census - it's the law." (Equally rude in French: "Recensement de 2016: Répondez au recensement - c'est la loi".) I am told the government is the servant of the people. But this peremptory tone, giving orders without even a pretence at "please," is not how a servant speaks to a master. Quite the reverse. Remember how all the right people were shocked and appalled when the Harper Tories got rid of the long form census? Without accurate data, they complained, social scientists would find it hard to engineer satisfaction of the human units to a sufficient number of decimal places. Which I always found rather an odd conception of the proper role of government and of its abilities. And look how they talk to us now that it's back.

The smart set make a lot of fuss about "evidence-based decision-making". But a decision to trust the intelligence or benevolence of government doesn't seem to me to be based on much sound evidence. Not even the personal stuff I have to provide or else, according to this envelope that just marched into my house, waved a pair of handcuffs at me and started shouting questions.

If you're looking for reasons we need to fix our Constitution, look at this story from today's National Post about a customer awarded $12,000 for "injury to his dignity, feelings, and self-respect" after a restaurant stopped accommodating his very special need for pseudo-hyper-clean surroundings. The man apparently suffers post-traumatic syndrome and OCD and can't cope with lemon in his water or cutlery placed directly on the table. And thus he has a human right to make other people do what he says even if it's not reasonable. Now I have sympathy for this person and his struggles. I don't doubt they are real. But what about the restaurant and its employees? What would happen if everybody demanded very special service including wiping the vinyl seats and always putting him in the same booth away from other patrons? How much would costs increase? And how could you seat everyone away from all other patrons without having a restaurant the size of a stadium?

Once the rule was that if you wanted special service and a restaurant was willing to provide it, as this one was for a long time, you went there. If they refused, or changed their service, you stopped going there. Just as you don't eat in a place where you don't like the food, the wait staff, the décor, the ambiance or anything else. They can't make you come in, and you can't make them let you in.

You don't always get what you want. And nor does anybody else. But nobody is able to make anyone else bend to their will regardless of consequences. All transactions must be mutually satisfying. And my right to swing my fist ends where your nose starts.

Not in the Brave New World of human rights tribunals. Instead you get to demand whatever you want of me, and I am in a very real way conscripted labour. You don't actually punch me if I don't serve the water without a straw or tell you you're too much trouble and should leave. You call the state and they send people to do it for you. First a summons, then a fine, then jail if I don't pay, and cops with weapons if I won't come quietly. Behind all this lurks the policeman's truncheon. But not the courts.

This fine came not from a judge or jury, following the due process guaranteed in Magna Carta and generally proudly upheld ever since. It came from a human rights tribunal, specifically the Ontario one. They follow very different rules, far more lenient toward the self-proclaimed aggrieved and far harsher on everybody else. And it's not a recipe for a good society.

Allegedly in this case the restaurant manager was very rude. And I like good manners. But for heaven's sake, you don't have a human right not to encounter rude people. De minimis lex non curat. And restaurants with surly staff lose customers unless the food is great and worth putting up with the abuse, or it becomes a weird kind of cult attraction. (Don't laugh; when I was in grad school there was a burger joint with an elaborate menu but only cheeseburgers actually for sale, and they ridiculed anyone who ordered anything else. It was always full. And we often asked for something else just to hear what they'd say.)

In short, we work out our own accommodations with our fellows. They can't use force or fraud and neither can we. We can negotiate but we cannot demand or compel. Or at least, we didn't use to be able to.

There were lamentable exceptions, of course. Governments drew invidious distinctions based on race or gender and punished people who did not obey such rules. But generally, people got to decide for themselves how to do things and with whom. And if you wanted the sympathy and respect of others, you had to show it for them and their difficulties too.

All that is changing now, into a society where everyone can coerce everyone else. But where does it all end? The Post story quoted a professor of hotel and restaurant management at Ottawa's Algonquin College that “Responsibility (to accommodate) will never be lessened. It will only be increased with time.”

That certainly is the way things are going now. But how do we accommodate one another once everyone has special demands, and I can't sit where I want so you can sit alone and vice versa, and the waiter is afraid of plain water, and the person at the next table but three has to bring their companion snake but someone else has a phobia about snakes? (The last is not an invented example.)

You can't. You literally can't build a society with stable rules, mutual respect, and restaurants that can actually operate if people don't have to respect other people's autonomy. Instead you get a free-for-all of uncivil demands and hurt feelings and everyone has a right to everything but there is nothing.

If that sounds bad to you, please back our "True, North and Free" project to fix Canada's constitution so that it really respects individual rights, including the right to run a restaurant where customers can't march in, redesign the place and call a cop if you object.

In my latest National Post column, I argue that the left has won smashing victories lately… but with more smashing than victory about them.

A curious story in today's National Post says PEI's Liberal administration will start providing abortions because it doesn't believe it can defeat a court challenge claiming abortion is secretly a Charter right. Frankly it sounds like one more case of politicians using judges as a handy excuse to do something they want to do anyway without the hassle of defending it to voters. Time was ministries felt an obligation to defend existing law in court unless they were willing to stand up in the legislature and urge that it be changed or repealed, which arguably contributed to accountability in government. I'm not sure what was wrong with that system. But there's a deeper question here.

Specifically, how can the Charter mandate abortion so clearly that governments fold like cheap lawn furniture before an activists' challenge when (a) it doesn't mention it (b) many of those who wrote the Charter opposed abortion and would be both astounded and horrified to be told that without realizing they'd secretly written it in?

Alternatively, if it's that obvious, why didn't the brave politicians notice and act on it before the challenge was filed?

This sort of disingenuous legislative-judicial two-step is no way to settle important and contentious questions. Instead, it's one more reason we need a real Constitution, based on popular consent, with a real Charter of Rights that guarantees real rights in plain language even citizens can read and understand, with no invisible ink.

The United States Supreme Court just made a singularly sensible ruling that stun guns are weapons. Duh, what else would they be? Perhaps. But here's the thing. As UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh explains (and by the way I heartily recommend his multi-author blog for the Washington Post, "The Volokh Conspiracy"), what was at issue was a bizarre ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution only protects weapons in wide use in 1789.

Now as Stephen P. Halbrook pointed out more than three decades ago in That Every Man Be Armed, people would be outraged if an American court tried to impose this sort of narrow construction on any other key right. Imagine the outcry, including from Canadians, if an American judge suggested that free speech was limited to the government, as some have claimed the right to arms is limited to state militias, or restricted its application to 18th-century-style hand-cranked printing presses.

By the same token, there's no justification for taking such a view with respect to modern firearms or to "stun guns", often casually referred to by the name of one particular brand, the Taser, which incidentally is an acronym from "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" from the 10th instalment in the once very popular children's adventure series whose excessive fondness for adverbs accompanying speech acts gave us the "Tom Swifty", of the form "'I'm thirsty,' he said dryly."

There's another point to consider, and one that speaks directly to Canada's incredibly tight restrictions on weapons. The Massachusetts decision in question, COMMONWEALTH v. JAIME CAETANO, involved a woman who was found, in the course of an investigation into shoplifting, to be carrying a stun gun for protection against a violent ex-boyfriend.

Is that so wrong? There is no suggestion that the weapon was used, displayed or mentioned in the alleged shoplifting incident, and if it had been, there are criminal sanctions against armed robbery that would apply. But she did say she'd had to display it to scare off her ex-boyfriend at least once, which sure sounds to me like a socially desirable outcome as well as an action clearly protected by the American Second Amendment.

Now consider that in Canada such devices are prohibited. You just can't have one. Not in your car, not in your purse, not in your house. Only the government can have them.

Why? Does anyone fear a mass tasering leaving dozens dead? Even if you grant the legitimacy of restrictions on certain types of firearms, which I don't, what possible justification exists for forbidding a woman to carry a stun gun for protection against a stalker? To have one in case she is swarmed by hostile men in a public place? Or at least to have one beside her bed in case she wakes up to find an intruder looming over her?

If you can't answer those questions either, stay tuned for our documentary A Right to Arms, where we argue that Canadians' unquestioned historic right to self-defence was sound on utilitarian grounds as well as those of natural law, and should be restored.

Meanwhile, good for the U.S. Supreme Court. They've given the Massachusetts court orders to try again, but with a pretty clear warning that it better come back with a more sensible ruling.

In my latest National Post column I admit that Trump’s triumph seems to indicate an America in decay … possibly due to the disintegrating family.

In my latest National Post column I explain that China's reversal on the one-child policy is a stunning intellectual event of the first importance.