When Law Becomes Plunder: Canada Is Living Bastiat’s Warning

The law was meant to protect rights, not redistribute them. Canada’s courts have forgotten this.

There was a time when justice meant something simple: impartiality, fairness, and the equal application of law. But in Canada today, that notion is collapsing in real time. A nonviolent protester like Tamara Lich can face seven years in prison for mischief—while men convicted of raping minors, shooting at police, or killing entire families in drunk driving incidents receive shorter, often shockingly lenient sentences.

Frédéric Bastiat saw this coming nearly two centuries ago. In his 1850 treatise The Law, Bastiat warned that when the state begins to use law not to protect life, liberty, and property—but to redistribute, punish, and engineer society—then law itself becomes criminal. "When plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law," he wrote, "all plundered classes try somehow to enter… into the making of laws." Canada is now firmly within this phase. What we call law is often nothing more than legally sanctioned theft, favouritism, and political persecution.

Bastiat’s central thesis is disarmingly simple: law is the collective use of force to prevent injustice. It is not the creation of morality, wealth, virtue, or equality. It is a negative force—a shield against coercion, not a tool to impose dreams.

But what happens when that force is no longer used to defend, but to redistribute? What happens when the law no longer protects property, but becomes the method for violating it? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” And he warned that when this happens, society becomes divided into two classes: those who live off of others, and those who are lived off of.

Nowhere is this legal plunder more visible than in Canada’s tax and transfer regime. According to the federal government’s own 2025 Report on Federal Tax Expenditures, recent immigrants receive 205% more in child benefits than native-born Canadians. Transgender and non-binary recipients receive 1,343% more than men. Women receive 3,157% more. These aren’t distributions based on need—they are formulas based on identity.

The law now functions as a tool of engineered outcomes—not justice. Bastiat described this as socialism masquerading as virtue.

"As the result of its systems and of its efforts," he wrote, "it would seem that socialism can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association.”

Bastiat see’s through the language games clearly: “It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility."

Take the case of the Quebec court that reduced a drug trafficker’s sentence on the basis of his race. The judge cited systemic oppression and cultural context as mitigating factors. This is the death of equal justice under law. If one man's punishment is reduced because of his identity, then another’s may be increased for the same reason. And suddenly, we have two sets of laws for two sets of people—a moral order shattered by ideology.

Bastiat warned, "When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." Today, Canadians are forced to choose between trusting a system that rewards criminals and punishes dissenters, or rejecting the system altogether. Neither leads to peace.

The law has become a weapon. And when one resists, they are told they’re against solidarity, against progress, against decency. In truth, they oppose not the concept of charity—but coercion. Not free giving, but forced extraction. Bastiat called this "false philanthropy." A legislator may sincerely believe he is building a better world. But the result is still theft when he uses law to take from one and give to another.

This reveals the fatal flaw in modern Canadian governance: the arrogance of central planners. Bureaucrats believe they can engineer fairness, equity, and moral uplift from above. They do not view citizens as agents of their own lives, but as material to be molded. Bastiat ridiculed this mindset: "The socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind, as between the gardener and his trees."

In Canada, this is the ethos that drives sentencing disparities, identity preferences in tax credits, and ideological enforcement in institutions. It is not enough that people are equal before the law; the law must now ensure equal outcomes. But in pursuing that goal, it destroys actual justice. Bastiat warned that positive law—law that tries to do good rather than prevent evil—leads to conflict without end. "Depart from justice," he wrote, "and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty... The law becomes the battlefield for everybody’s dreams and everybody’s covetousness."

In such a battlefield, law is no longer a neutral ground. It is a prize to be won. And every group—racial, sexual, political—fights to seize it for their benefit. This is why Freedom Convoy organizers face stiffer sentences than violent criminals. They are not being punished for mischief. They are being punished for challenging the system. For revealing its corruption. For daring to dissent.

Meanwhile, organized crime flourishes. Political elites share addresses with drug traffickers. Justin Trudeau reportedly took a private meeting with Paul King Jin—a suspected kingpin of transnational Chinese organized crime. Conveniently, prosecutions collapse. RCMP financial crime units are disbanded. Nothing is done.

Why? Because in a regime of legal plunder, law enforcement isn’t about justice. It’s about optics, power, and protection. The people who should be investigated host boxing events with politicians. The people who should be jailed are waved through airports flagged by border security. Meanwhile, citizens who protest this regime risk frozen bank accounts, surveillance, and prison.

This is not just an erosion of law. It is its inversion. When the law no longer punishes crime but rewards it—and punishes the innocent for exposing it—we are not living in a state of justice. We are living in a criminal empire where law has become crime.

Bastiat saw the endpoint clearly: once plunder becomes legal, every group organizes to participate in it. The law becomes the tool of every ambition, every envy, every ideology. And eventually, it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Canada is now a nation where legal plunder is not only policy—it is principle. It is the foundation upon which politics is built. That is why every crisis becomes a pretext for more redistribution. Why peaceful protestors are “far-right extremists,” and every bureaucrat a saviour. Why facts no longer matter and why silence is now safer than speech.

But silence will not save us. The only antidote to plunder is justice. Not performative justice. Not politicized justice. Actual justice: the equal and impartial application of law to every citizen, regardless of class, race, sex, or political view.

Frédéric Bastiat was not just a critic of socialism. He was a prophet of tyranny. And his message is clear: If we want to be free, we must return to the law as it was meant to be—a shield for all, not a sword for the few.