“Rather than protecting us from government overreach, the Charter is being interpreted to justify it. After 40 years, the Charter is still one of the worst bargains in Canadian history.”
“The year 2022 is not a good one for celebrating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“We mark the 40th anniversary of that celebrated instrument this week. Over the years, it has been held up as the very jewel of the Canadian Constitution; the one great bulwark for every single citizen’s civic integrity; the very banner of Canadian democracy; the text of our liberties; a great, invulnerable wall against the encroachments of government on the day-to-day lives of Canadians.
“Canada’s ‘Magna Carta’.
“As the week began, and even a day or two before, we saw Canadian politicians, especially those high up in the ‘Liberal’ Party — which takes the deepest pride in having brought the Charter into being — celebrating its birth, flooding Twitter with hosannas for this most central of Canadian documents.
“As is only right, the son of the Prime Minister who installed the Charter offered the most extended praise:
From Justin Trudeau:
“With a few strokes of a pen 40 years ago today, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted. Built around our shared values of equality, justice, and freedom, it protects the rights and freedoms that define who we are as Canadians — and brings us closer as a country”.
“That’s very strong praise — “brings us closer as a country”. Even stronger praise — it “defines who we are as Canadians”. Those are words of near worship, and deserved, if indeed the Charter has lived up to them. If, beyond question, it has been the sleepless guardian and adamantine shield of the liberty of every Canadian.
“But has it been? Have there been any instances in, say, quite recent years, where the Charter has been absent or removed from its grand functions? Has Canada experienced some interval when all the protections so solemnly proclaimed and grandly stated in this wonderful document have been — shall we say, sidelined? And, strange as it might be to say this, but sidelined or disregarded with very little resistance, explanation or even notice?
“Well, yes, there has been such an instance, a period of two full years when a vast sweep of the most basic rights of every man, woman and child in Canada were suspended, circumscribed or withdrawn. Naturally, I’m referring to the COVID regimens. During this time, all governments — federal, provincial and municipal — and numerous institutions and companies for that matter (I’m thinking particularly of school boards) set out grand rules on how people should act, where and in what number they could meet, what they must wear, and how far apart they must stand.
“Those rules cut deeper into our everyday lives than we have ever experienced in this country. They governed the most intimate and heart-wrenching of experiences — when people could or could not visit ailing, or even dying, loved ones. The images from the early COVID days of sons and daughters standing outside the windows of nursing homes, hand-signalling to parents they were not allowed to be physically near, were both painful and present to this very moment.
“Now let us make the obvious point. A new disease, a pandemic, will reasonably justify measures for the health of all. A government that didn’t act during such a crisis would be rightfully condemned. But the suspension of so many rights, so quickly, in most cases without elaborate or even minimal debate, the shifting and reverse injunctions, the exceptions — big stores can stay open, small must close — the designation of essential and non-essential, the whole great web of limitations and restrictions — all this just happened.
“During COVID, the Charter was silent, less a shield than a thin veil, and hardly even mentioned by the various governments that so readily ignored it.
“And then, we had another experience. The bald, imperious declaration of the ‘Emergencies Act’ during the truckers’ protest. Now this was not a pandemic. It was a protest, a gathering of citizens expressing their concern over government legislation. The Act was a sledgehammer brought down from a woeful height without the slightest testing in court, and fully in opposition to the Charter’s guarantees.
“Huge fines were announced, people were charged and given no bail, the private transactions of citizens were investigated, bank accounts were entered and frozen — and these were the invasions of our rights that we know of.
“What calls were made on our famous Charter during this period? What were the noble words about the Charter then — that it “defined us as Canadians”, that it “brought us together as a country?” The truckers’ protest was the one episode, par excellence, in which the Charter, if indeed it was a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, should have been called upon. It should have warranted real debate in Parliament. But the ‘Emergencies Act’ blasted a hole in that sacred document you could drive — do I dare the metaphor, yes, I do — an 18-wheeler through.
“All in, this is not the best week, or the best year, for those who have waltzed around and through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to be Twitter-singing its praises. They would be better off trying to explain why they worship the document when it suits them, and ignore it when it doesn’t.”
–‘You could drive an 18-wheeler through our Charter of Rights and Freedoms’,
Rex Murphy, National Post, Apr.19, 2022
“In my opinion, when the story of Canada’s 1982 ‘Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ is told by future historians, it will go something like this:
“Prior to the founding of Canada under the ‘British North America Act of 1867’, all those in the British colonies of the New World lived under English parliamentary law, and their court proceedings were judged according to common-law precedent. Law made by parliamentarians was the highest law of the land but even before deciding on new statutes, English parliamentarians would usually make passionate appeals to common law because in the pubic mind, such precedents were considered a precious historical inheritance from what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead” — which is to say, a priceless gift of moral and legislative wisdom from our ancestors, near and far.
“In the rising democratic spirit of the times, however, these Canadians-to-be once or twice revolted against British rule to achieve what they called “responsible government“. By this revolutionary slogan, they meant that they wanted those who made their laws to answer to them, the people. They were finished with colonial governors bossing them around…
“But it was only with the ‘BNA Act of 1867’ that Canada finally got fully-responsible government. The new Canadians would now grow their own British-style parliamentary tradition and common-law inheritance…and would at last have political masters responsible to them alone. They would finally be able to hire and fire their own lawmakers.
“This hopeful regime lasted a mere 115 years — until 1982 — when Prime Minister Trudeau got the Charter he wanted. Now, among the things that Trudeau had always mocked and despised were English concepts of governance, such as common law. He was also very much unsettled by the idea of ten provincial legislatures all making their own sovereign laws, sometimes in conflict with each other.
“Of course, that right of sovereign lawmaking by local citizens was a mark of the glory and freedom of the English system. But to a Francophone intellectual, the very idea of a nation without a unitary Napoleonic-style code hovering over it…was abhorrent.
“In short, Trudeau despised any system under which “the people” in Parliament (and in each provincial legislature) had the unfettered right to create statutes that were by definition “the highest law of the land“.
“This complaint is typical of anyone raised in the Cartesian intellectual tradition, in which rational conclusions are supposed to flow from fixed axioms, and laws must follow clear and distinct principles, rather than emerge from potentially-conflicting precedents. That means that laws must be shaped by a rationalized higher code, and to hell with the common-law insights of ancestors. What did they know about modern socialist theory, anyway? Nothing, of course – so, forget them, was the feeling.
“What Trudeau wanted, and got, was a new, abstractly worded code-law, to be imposed on the freedom of legislators in Canada’s Parliament, all provincial legislatures, and courts.
“The meaning of all the articles of his Charter, if challenged, would then be decided by unelected judges, who were ‘above’ the political fray and — here’s the rub — WHO WOULD NEVER BE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE TO THE PEOPLE.
“This meant that from henceforth, the Canadian people were once again to have the spirit of their most important laws and moral traditions decided by people whom they did not place in power, and whom they never would be able to remove.
“In one stroke, Canadians were returned to the political condition that they had suffered prior to 1867. Morally and legally speaking, Canadians have become colonized again and this time, not by a foreign power, but by their own hand.
“This was a radical and deeply-wrenching reorientation of Canada’s entire judicial and political tradition, muscled into position by one man who was drawing from a tradition inimical to the English way of life. He was not citing ‘Magna Carta’, or Locke, or Blackstone, or Burke as his intellectual teachers.
“No. He repudiated the glories of the English tradition and embraced, instead, the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the teacher of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton — radical intellectuals, socialists and murderers, all — hinting blithely as he did of Rousseau’s concept of “the General Will“, or in French, “la volonté générale“.
“In one of Trudeau’s last publications…he urges Canada
“to create a national will… ‘une volonté générale‘, as Rousseau had called it“.
“He did not seem to realize that a national will is something subtly different from Rousseau’s idea of a ‘General Will’. The former may be properly thrashed out in the heat of a debate and passed by a majority, with disagreements tolerated. But the latter is a totalizing concept declared by edict of the supreme ruler (and Rousseau advocated the death penalty for all who opposed it, once it was decided).
“…I do not hesitate to say that Rousseau’s whole notion of the General Will was, and remains, a Franco-European conception of unitary national governance that is alien to the British way of life and to our entire inherited political history, if not — as many would argue — a precursor to much more sinister conceptions of governance, such as ones that nearly ended European civilization in the 20th century.
“In this way, Canada has been changed, uprooted, altered beyond recognition from its noble historical roots.
“That is the real significance of the Charter.”
–‘The Charter At Twenty-Five’, William D. Gairdner
from “Oh, Oh, Canada!”, BPS Books (Toronto, 2008)
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22531013953
“Canada’s closest constitutional relatives – the U.K., New Zealand and Australia – deny their judges the power to invalidate legislation.”
“The truth is that judges have no greater insights than the people when it comes to debating the important moral and social issues of the day. The basic tools of legal reasoning are not well suited to the resolution of complex moral and social issues.”
“Canada was a free and democratic country prior to the ‘Charter of Rights and Freedoms’, committed to things such as freedom of expression, equality and the principles of fundamental justice. What changed with passage of the Charter was that rights and freedoms were given constitutional status, and judges were given the power to strike down laws that infringed on them.
“In 1982, there was little reason to think this change would be momentous. The judiciary was considered a relatively-conservative institution, cautious and incremental in its approach to the law.
“But in fact, much has changed in the first 30 years of the Charter. Numerous laws have been struck down and many others altered substantially, often by novel statutory interpretation and ‘remedial techniques’ the courts have developed.
“Consider just a few of the recent Charter decisions made by Canadian courts. Same-sex marriage has been established, along with abortion on demand; marijuana has been legalized for medical use (along with a requirement that the government grow and provide it) and prohibitions on private health care have been struck down, along with laws banning tobacco advertising. Laws governing parental discipline of children and prohibiting the possession of child pornography have been rewritten by the court in the course of their constitutionality being upheld.
{ALL of this is in the purview of our elected representatives and NOT our unaccountable judges.
Strike legislation down? Yes.
Create or rewrite legislation? Judges should keep to their own lane…}
“Alexis de Tocqueville once said that most political questions in the United States eventually end up as judicial questions. The same is now true of Canada.
{The main result of the Constitutional changes was to enhance the political and earning power of the legal profession. The Charter is a proverbial legal goldmine…}
“Our courts are currently involved in Charter litigation on everything from assisted suicide to prostitution and polygamy.
{And let us not forget the Supreme Court’s creation, through its rulings, of the billion-dollar Aboriginal Industry.}
“The problem in all of this is that the Charter is anything but self-executing. It is full of vaguely-worded rights and the social science evidence that courts have at their disposal in adjudicating Charter claims is anything but determinative. As a result, judicial decisions interpreting and applying the Charter are bound to be controversial. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the interpretation and application of Charter rights. So do reasonable judges, as evidenced by the number of closely-divided decisions in the Supreme Court.
“That is why not everyone concerned about rights thinks that it is a good idea to give judges the power to strike down democratically-enacted legislation. Canadians are proud to note the influence of the Charter internationally, but Canada’s closest constitutional relatives – the U.K., New Zealand and Australia – deny their judges the power to invalidate legislation.
“Many play down judicial power under the Charter, rationalizing it in terms of “dialogue” between the legislature and the judiciary… Former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour made the familiar dialogue claim, asserting that critics of judicial activism and the legalization of politics are simply wrong.
“Charter litigation has provided a high-quality intellectual forum {Lol…} in which to debate issues that are not best left to majority diktat“,
she wrote.
{And yet, the Supreme Court, by voting, also uses ‘majority diktat’. Somehow it’s different when judges do it…}
“The truth is that judges have no greater insights than the people when it comes to debating the important moral and social issues of the day. The basic tools of legal reasoning are not well suited to the resolution of complex moral and social issues.
“Nevertheless, it is clear that Canadians have faith in judges and little respect for their politicians. Ms. Arbour wrote that Canada’s political parties “have been impoverished by the rise of judicial prominence“ and I agree. But this is a bad thing, and it cannot continue. Ms. Arbour’s boast that the substance of the court’s calendar “compares very favourably with the platform of the political parties” is nothing to be proud of {!}.
“The solutions to our economic and social problems, our health-care and education concerns and so much more must come from our elected representatives.
“The courts’ role in protecting Charter rights is profoundly important, but it is incumbent on the courts to act modestly in performing this role, promoting democratic resolution of our problems rather than imposing constitutional solutions. Thirty years into the Charter, the relationship between the legislature and the courts remains the most pressing problem in Charter litigation.”
–‘Yes. The Charter of Rights has given judges too much power’,
Grant Huscroft, Toronto Globe and Mail, April 19, 2012 — Updated July 31, 2017
(Grant Huscroft is professor of constitutional law at Western University.)
“The 40th anniversary of the Charter of Rights is an appropriate time to assess how it has changed the way Canada is governed. Have there been winners and losers? And if so, why?
“The biggest losers have been provincial governments, and those of us (both in Quebec and in the West) who would prefer to be governed by legislators who live in our neighbourhoods, share our concerns, and are elected and accountable to us, rather than by distant, unaccountable judges in Ottawa.
“This risk was evident at the outset. The architect of the Charter, Pierre Trudeau’s highest priority was to blunt the Party Quebecois French-only education and language laws, which were creating an exodus of Anglophone voters (and ‘Liberal’ Party supporters) out of Quebec. The more Anglos that left, the stronger the separatists became. Trudeau understood this. So did PQ Premier René Lévesque, which is why Quebec refused to sign the ‘Constitution Act’ in 1982. And still refuses to this day.
“Western Premiers had similar fears of a strongly-centralist bias in Charter interpretation. For a decade,, they had watched Trudeau’s hand-picked Chief Justice, Bora Laskin, strike down provincial laws for reasons of federalism. They justifiably feared a similar bias in Charter interpretation. They would never have agreed to the Charter without the now-infamous Section 33 ‘Notwithstanding Clause’. The Notwithstanding Clause allows a province to insulate a law from judicial veto if it deems the judges have made an incorrect interpretation of the Charter and/or are mandating an unacceptable policy.
{Or, as in the case of Quebec, they simply have no respect for human rights…}
“Why the “infamous” Section 33? The same groups that have benefited from the court’s Charter activism and their allies in the universities and national media have worked tirelessly and successfully to stigmatize the use of the Notwithstanding Clause. Other than Quebec, provincial governments have been reluctant to use the notwithstanding power for fear of media attacks and political backlash. The net result is that there are now broad areas of provincial jurisdiction where public policy is essentially set by the Supreme Court and its interest group supporters — a coalition that I have dubbed the “Court Party”. Like its 18th century predecessor, today’s Court Party prefers and benefits from a political system in which certain key decisions are made by government officials unaccountable to the rest of us who have to live with consequences of those decisions.
“From a provincial point of view, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was one of the worst bargains ever struck in the history of Canadian federalism. In practice, it is little more than the old, discredited ‘power of disallowance’ in disguise: a federal veto over provincial policy exercised by the Supreme Court rather than by the Cabinet {See below}. Pierre Trudeau must be smiling from his grave.
“Federalism is itself a form of protecting minority rights. Each province is a minority — Quebec first and foremost, because of its unique linguistic and ethnic heritage, but the other provinces as well. But this version of Canadian federalism is being sacrificed on the altar of a new version of minority rights.
“Which takes us to the winners’ circle. Any policy touching on bilingual education, Aboriginal issues, abortion, LGBT or feminist issues, or prisoner voting rights — if a provincial government does not accede to the interest group’s demands, that government can expect to be hauled into court, and usually lose.
“This is all quite predictable. The Federal cabinet chooses who sits on the Supreme Court, and the Charter doesn’t speak for itself. At the end of the day, the Charter means what the judges say it means. What about the costs of going to court? No need to worry if you’re on the right … er, Left … side. The ‘Court Challenges Program’ funds the litigation costs of interest groups that the ‘Liberals’ support, and who in turn support the ‘Liberals’. (The Harper government terminated this program, but it was quickly resurrected by Justin Trudeau’s government.) It’s a tidy and efficient little circle.
“But why has Canada gone so far, so fast, down this rabbit hole of jurocracy? What happened to “responsible government”, parliamentary supremacy and federalism — all traditions that still defined and shaped Canadian politics as recently as the 1970s?
“The Charter revolution has been energized by deeper, socio-economic changes that have transformed the politics not just of Canada, but the other English-speaking democracies as well. For several decades, the middle class has been shrinking. It is dividing between a white collar, upper middle-class and a blue collar, lower middle class. The former are more educated, more affluent, more urban, more public sector and more ‘progressive’ {Leftist} in their values. The latter typically do not have university degrees, are less affluent, work in the private sector, more rural/small town and have more traditional moral and political values. But demographically, they are still a majority.
“These growing socio-economic differences are redefining the Left-Right cleavages in our politics. For those who now call themselves ‘progressives’, the principal political goal is no longer about economic redistribution from the few to the many, but rather protecting the few from the many. Rather than the people’s party, today’s ‘progressives’ now see ‘the people’ as the problem.
“This movement is what we now know as “identity politics” and its crusade for “social justice”. In the new ‘progressive’ lexicon, ‘equity’ has replaced ‘equality’. Equality was about equal opportunity, equal starting lines. Equity is about equal results. If minorities — women, ‘LGBT’ people, ‘Black’ people, ‘people of colour’, ‘Indigenous’ — are not proportionally represented in classrooms, board rooms, committees, etc., the explanation is racism, sexism and all the other new forms of bigotry attributed to those of us who disagree with them.
“And what about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, parents’ rights, due process of law and property rights? When these impede the new ‘equity’/‘social justice’ agenda, they can and are being violated. Rather than protecting us from government overreach, the Charter is being interpreted to justify it. These are all now just “reasonable limits”. Just ask those arrested and prosecuted during the truckers’ freedom convoy. Like federalism, traditional fundamental rights and freedoms are being sacrificed to the new ‘social justice’ agenda.
“This explains ‘progressives’ attraction to the Charter and the courts. If the source of these inequities is the unreconstructed majority, ‘progressives’ can no longer rely on general elections, or their old populist favourites — referendums and recall elections. Instead, they must turn to institutions that are not accountable to Canadian voters, such as courts, human rights bureaucracies, and now even the United Nations. Since these judges and bureaucrats are more educated, more affluent, more urban — they too tend to be more ‘progressive’. A perfect match.
“The Charter — a parchment document — has not caused the Charter revolution. Nor have nine judges sitting in a marble temple on the South bank of the Ottawa River — at least not by themselves.
“Changes of this magnitude required powerful support from influential people and groups — well educated, affluent, connected elites — to design, encourage and then support the transformation of Canadian politics that has taken place since 1982.
“Is it a done deal? Is there any coming back to a more accountable, less jurocratic more federal form of democratic government in Canada? I don’t know. But there seems to be the beginnings of a counter-movement. Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson described the surprise election victory of Doug Ford’s ‘Conservatives’ in the 2018 Ontario election as a “populist … reaction — or a revolt — against ‘identity politics’. for whom the elites’ messages of ‘inclusiveness’ seems to include everybody but them”. Ford’s supporters were less educated, more rural and small town, more blue collar, more likely to work in the private sector and more likely to describe themselves as “poor”.
“Was the 2018 Ford election a one-off event, not to be repeated? What about the ground-swell of support for the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy this past February? The issues were different but the kinds of people who came out to support the truckers were the same. And what about the recent resurrection of the “infamous” notwithstanding power? It has recently been used not just by the Ford government in Ontario but also by Premier Moe in Saskatchewan.
“Is the counter-revolution beginning?”
–‘After 40 years, the charter is still one of the worst bargains in Canadian history’,
Ted Morton, National Post, Apr.14, 2022
(F.L. (Ted) Morton is an Executive Fellow at the School of Public Policy and professor emeritus at the University of Calgary. His book, “The Charter Revolution and the Court Party”, won a Donner Foundation book prize in 2002.)
“In Canadian constitutional law, the powers of reservation and disallowance of both federal and provincial legislation still formally remain in place and are described in Sections 55 and 56 of the “Constitution Act, 1867”, which until 1982 was known as the “British North America Act”.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disallowance_and_reservation
^^^^^^^^^^^
“Reservation’ and ‘Disallowance’ are often confused, since both derive from the practices of the British colonial empire, but they are actually distinct terms. Historically, ‘reservation’ was the practice whereby a colonial governor, rather than giving or refusing assent to a Bill, could refer it to the imperial government for the final decision. ‘Disallowance’, on the other hand, was the practice whereby a colonial Bill could still be declared null and void by the imperial government, even though the colonial governor had given royal assent.
“Sections 55, 56 and 57 of the ‘Constitution Act, 1867’ provided that acts of the Parliament of Canada were subject to these instruments of imperial control. A few such acts were reserved or disallowed in the first few decades after Confederation, but the powers passed into disuse as Canada evolved towards independence, even though they were never formally eliminated.
“Section 90 of the ‘Constitution Act, 1867’, which adapted the same practices to the purpose of maintaining federal control over the provinces, proved to be of much greater significance. Early Lieutenant-Governors frequently reserved bills for a final decision by the federal government. Although the practice was controversial, and soon became unnecessary as communications improved between Ottawa and the provincial capitals, a Saskatchewan Bill was unexpectedly reserved as late as 1961.
“Disallowance, from the federal viewpoint, was a much more reliable instrument of control over the provinces. It was used extensively by the Macdonald, Mackenzie and Laurier governments, particularly against Manitoba and British Columbia, and thus became a source of western discontent with the federal system. After 1911 its use was rare, but the election of the Social Credit government in Alberta in 1935 led to a brief revival. The last Act ever disallowed was a 1943 Alberta statute which prohibited the sale of land to “enemy aliens” or Hutterites.
“The ‘Victoria Charter’ of 1971 would have eliminated ‘reservation and disallowance’ from Canada’s Constitution, but the extensive changes made to the Constitution in 1982 left both powers intact. Either might still be used to prevent the illegal or unilateral secession of a province, but otherwise their future use is extremely unlikely.”
Sources:
–G.V. La Forest, “Disallowance and Reservation of Provincial Legislation” (Ottawa: Department of Justice, 1955).
–J.R. Mallory, “Social Credit and Federal Power in Canada” (Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 1954; reprinted 1976).
–J.T. Saywell, “The Office of Lieutenant-Governor” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1957).
–G. Stevenson, “Ex Uno Plures: Federal-Provincial Relations in Canada, 1867-1896” (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).
–‘Reservation and Disallowance’,
Centre for Constitutional Studies
http://ualawccsprod.srv.ualberta.ca/ccs/index.php/pr/539-reservation-and-disallowance
‘Limitations to the Charter’ (Slide Show)
https://slideplayer.com/slide/6240252/
See also:
‘The Charter Is A Trojan Horse’:
“The Charter is a Trojan Horse. What else would you expect from Pierre Trudeau?
First off, there is the “reasonable limits” clause in the very first section. Then, we have the ludicrous “Notwithstanding Clause” that allows any provincial government to override citizens’ so-called ‘rights’. And finally, we have the deceitful ‘Section 15’, where individual legal rights are ‘guaranteed’ in 15(1), but then immediately superceded by the ‘group rights’ delineated in 15(2)…”
https://constitutioncdn.wordpress.com/2021/01/05/the-charter-is-a-trojan-horse/
‘When Will We Ever Be Equal?’:
“Quebec considers itself a Nation within Canada, just as the Aboriginals do. We are not all equal in this country. When will we ever be equal?”
“This was our response…”
https://canadiansforlegalequality.wordpress.com/2020/11/20/when-will-we-ever-be-equal/
‘Notwithstanding Our Rights’ (Quebec Secularism Law) {Jan.20, 2020}:
The ‘Notwithstanding Clause’ of the 1982 Constitution guarantees an unequal application of our so-called ‘Rights’…
“The Quebec Court of Appeal has rejected a challenge from Canadian civil rights groups to suspend parts of the province’s secularism law, known as ‘Bill 21’. While the three judges acknowledge the law is causing harm that may be irreparable…the majority agreed the province’s use of the {infamous} ‘Notwithstanding Clause’ means it should not be suspended.”
https://canadiansforlegalequalityblog.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/notwithstanding-our-rights/
‘Supreme Court Screws Up Again’ (Interprovincial Trade) {April 21, 2018}:
Another court decision that damages Canada and is caused by flawed and illogical Constitutional ‘interpretations’ from our politicized and unaccountable Supreme Court of Canada:
“Enter the Supreme Court of Canada with a decision that eviscerates any real hope that Canada will ever have what real nations such as Australia and the United States enjoy — legal protection of internal free trade…”
https://wordpress.com/post/constitutioncdn.wordpress.com/supreme-court-screws-up-again
‘Training Legal Warriors To Undermine Canada’ {April 13, 2018}:
“Courts and academics are transforming the Charter of Rights and Freedoms from a roster of fundamental liberties, into a ‘social-justice’ {‘communist’} charter that justifies curbing individual freedoms instead of protecting them… Individual liberties are no longer fundamental. Everyone is not subject to the same rules. The legal ground is shifting.”
https://canadiansforlegalequality.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/training-legal-warriors-to-undermine-canada/
‘The Strange Case of Canadian ‘Legal Equality’ (Charter Section 15) {March 8, 2016}:
“The political — and therefore, ‘flexible’ — tool that is subsection (2) means that the Constitutional Principle of Section 15(1) cannot really exist as a ‘Principle’, and merely serves as an inspirational introduction to the court-driven social engineering enabled by subsection (2).
“As a result, legal equality of individual Canadian citizens has become a thing of the past…”
https://canadiansforlegalequality.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/the-strange-case-of-canadian-legal-equality/
Constitution Canadian 
“This great lawmaking power — which most Canadians think is the sole prerogative of our elected Parliament — flows directly from the Court’s post-Charter position as sole arbiter of the constitution…”
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