When the charter was summoned into being as part of the 1982 Constitution Act, it was destined to spend the next couple of decades being given the continual stinkeye by conservative Canadians, or just the many who fear and loathe the Liberal party. A bill of justiciable rights was bound to make criminal justice more inefficient, more expensive, and more sluggish. Some evildoers of the most vomitous kind were bound to elude justice because of abstract due-process technicalities.
Some conservative critics expressed fears that the charter would obscure or overwrite the memory of our older legacy of civil liberties, and this, too, has arguably happened. The charter is sometimes treated implicitly as the fountainhead of all individual rights in Canada: the foregoing 800 years of legal evolution are a blur. Up until the moment the Queen’s fancy fountain pen touched the Constitution Act, we were little better than slaves awaiting emancipation.
The charter was certainly a leap away from the Westminster model of government and toward the American one, and many observers see us wandering slowly down the road toward American-style politicization of the judiciary. Other critics of various political stripe were concerned that a legal apparatus incorporating reciprocal duties was being replaced by a cold grocery list of simple restrictions on the state.
Apologies for the long quote, but I think that paragraph might accidentally be the most glorious defence the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has yet received. The professor was not wrong: the Charter, by design, does embody the classical spirit of “negative liberty,” and has probably had some neoliberalizing or libertarianizing effect on our politics.
Conservatives in the broadest sense had these reasons to be suspicious of the charter, these and many more. Yet, over time, the charter has become the idol of the populist right in Canada, and COVID has proven it. You can tell from the complaints that the truck-driving and anti-vaccine crowd have been
Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)
Fun read!
You mean co-opted. People waving the charter around right circles will read the charter about as thoroughly they do the Bible.
colbycosh Colby Cosh it’s great you can tarnish the efforts of the truckers who went to Ottawa when in fact there has been no greater representation for average Canadians in our lifetime. To be expected from one whose profession has been bought and paid for by Govt
Except they haven’t read it, and are counting on none of their followers reading it either, so they can make up any sh*t that they want about it.
acoyne If morons dont get the charter why should the intelligent have to hold their hands
acoyne The problem is they don't understand it and misquote it regularly. They also think it has a 2nd amendment.
colbycosh Regrettably, this imperfect doc is all that a portion of Canadians have left to use to defend themselves from experimental medical interventions & segregation. Reducing it to left vs right issue may seem easy & convenient now but is a dangerous precedent. The wheel can turn.
acoyne What the hell is our populist Right? Is voter popularity not the base of democracy?
acoyne Yes acclaimed by the Right who understand little or nothing of its content or application!
acoyne Andrew - Question: If you're checking Twitter a hundred times a day, what are you avoiding doing?
And people wonder why there is division amongst the populous. Just read this crap of an article. Seems like it was written by a grade 6 pupil with no sense of the world, let along their own backyard.
Ten years ago, the Liberals cried that PM Harper didn’t hold a celebration of the Charter’s 30th anniversary, opting for War of 1812 bi-centenary observations instead. 40th birthday? A dud by design.
As demonstrated over the last two years, the Charter isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.
The only part of it being upheld is the 'not withstanding' part at the beginning.
Except they conveniently ignore a few pieces of it.
Embraced with limited depth of comprehension & a simplified understanding of its purpose & application. Don’t think this means what you think it means.
We don't have a Constitution at all This 'government' has NO credibility okboomer?
Only when it suits them though
Accepted or not. The charter needs to be repealed. The division we see in our society can be partly ascribed to its ideological bias and liberal judge interpretations of it. It is not a good structural document. It may eventually result in a dissolved Canada
If only they’d read it
RightsOfCanada were you aware of this?
Does populism always refer to the Right?
True that the populists have embraced the Charter, but the courts have not, the Liberals continue to ignore it.
People are encouraged to forget that Canada was always a country of the rugged individual, who had to get along on his/her own because there was little government. From that came our culture of free individualism. Government gradually encroached on that with socialism.
These deluded fools have bought Pierre Trudeau's lie that it's a 'people's Charter'. It's actually a judges' Charter, an elitist document used by a liberal activist judiciary to subvert democracy. They should read Morton & Knopff's 'The Charter Revolution & the Court Party'.
More recently 'populism' is a reflection of people who see government encroaching on their right to make personal decisions. To that end the government employs their favorite 'societal burden' argument so championed by the courts, or promoting exaggerated fears.
The 'populism' that the lib-left has chosen to attack of late merely reflects what is 'popular' with the people. In effect, populism is democracy. The English Bill of Rights was populist. So was Magna Carta. To rail against it is to rail against democracy.
When they find it convenient they do.
Boy, talk about a warped point of view. Not a lot of legal or philosophical brains there. The balance between individual, collective and government rights has NOT been maintained by the charter. Ask Brian Peckford. He was there when they wrote it.
It’s a shame they can’t read it as others do
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