Never mind the Supreme Court's reasoning: it's their grammar I'm concerned about. In the course of a long, rambling judgment upholding the constitutionality of mandatory retirement policies, Mr. Justice Gerard La Forest, writing for the majority, noted that ''mandatory retirement forms part of a web of interconnected rules mutually impacting on each other.''

The use of this pretentious vogue word, outside of a dentist's office, should generally be taken as a red flag: Nothing this person says is of any value or significance whatever. Even in a Supreme Court judge, it's a yellow flag of caution: Fuzzy thinking ahead. Sure enough, in the case at hand, the court has made the right decision, but for all the wrong reasons.

The issue does not turn on whether mandatory retirement is a good idea. True, there's no law of nature that sets 65 as the age of incompetence: but 18 is just as arbitrary a benchmark. While it's easy to dismiss the usual arguments for forced retirement - that it creates employment for the young (there is no fixed number of jobs to go round) and spares the old the humiliation of performance tests (are one person's hurt feelings cause for destroying another's livelihood?) - it undeniably makes life easier for employers.

The issue, rather, is whether public or private employers are involved. In the case of private corporations, we are talking about free contracts between consenting adults. Forced retirement is here not a policy of government, but of the employer. What is commonly described as ''letting employees work'' beyond 65 really means forcing business to employ them. Abolishing mandatory retirement in this case does not extend freedom, but diminishes it.

STOP DISCRIMINATION

The principle of free contract is not absolute - most of us would have trouble with the idea of allowing discrimination in hiring against, say, black people on this basis - which is why various provinces have set up their own human rights acts to govern private arrangements. But it should be the reference point, from which any departure must be rigorously justified.

The case for banning racial discrimination is not that it will actually stop discrimination, but that it will at least require the bigots to be furtive about it. Society is thus preserved from exposure to the stench of moral decay that would surround open tolerance of the practice.

But age discrimination, despite the protests of University of Manitoba law professor Jack London, is not ''as evil as discriminating on the basis of race or sex.'' The latter involves the oppression of one distinct social group by another. But we all get old. They are us. It may still be wrong, but it is not so wrong that no good arguments could be offered to justify it.

At any rate, it is not the concern of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The charter exists, as the Supreme Court has consistently and correctly ruled, to constrain governments. Dissenters on the court tried to suggest the charter could apply to private employers indirectly, by invalidating sections of provincial human rights acts that exempted mandatory retirement. But the charter's role is to prevent the state from discriminating, not to force the state to prevent discrimination by others. It is only their own agencies' mandatory retirement rules that should run governments afoul of the charter. Whatever its simplifying merits, mandatory retirement is clearly age discrimination. There's nothing wrong or inconsistent in holding the state to a higher standard than private agents. So the only question to be decided in the cases before the Supreme Court was: Is government involved?

Whether universities, hospitals, and community colleges - the employers in question - are part of government is the sort of theological point we hire Supreme Courts to decide. As it happens, the court said universities and hospitals weren't, but colleges were. Not content to leave well enough alone, however, the court said even if they all were, the charter would not apply.

Why? Because of the charter's section 1: the infamous ''reasonable limits'' clause. This is a ''complex socio-economic problem,'' Justice La Forest fretted; mandatory retirement has ''long been with us,'' and there are all the ''ramifications'' and ''repercussions'' to think of, especially that impacting web. In other words, it would cause the government some bother.

This is the most troubling aspect of the judgment. It is just the latest example of the growing willingness of the court to defer to government in Charter cases at the least excuse. The ''reasonable limits'' clause, as many feared, is becoming the government's Santa Clause: Anything it asks for, it gets, as long as it's been good.