We should want no part of it. South of the border the courts are the main event, a slow-motion war for nine chairs where every loss waits on the next appointment. A court asked to settle every contested question becomes a standing committee of last resort, and its citizens become litigants. We are starting to treat this as a virtue. When the Supreme Court spent four days this spring on the challenge to Quebec’s Bill 21, it heard a record 51 interveners, six attorneys general among them, each given minutes on the notwithstanding clause. But if that is how we now settle such questions, by gathering and weighing submissions from across society, then we already have an institution built for the job. It has elected members, it sits a few hundred metres up the street, and we call it Parliament. The case for restraint was never simply that judges reach bad answers. It is that working a hard question out by persuading the people next door is the substance of democratic life, and in a diverse society the only way to reach settlements most can live with.