Provinces cannot criminalize assisted death, but regardless of whether the Charter is said to require the decriminalization of assisted death, provinces are not necessarily obliged to integrate assisted death into their health-care systems.
On Christmas, Christians recall the birth of a child in present-day Israel about 2000 years ago. The child’s name was Jesus, born to a Jewish woman named Mary in a stable in the town of Bethlehem.
The greatest obstacle to appreciating the democratic value of protest in general is our own opinion on the aim or cause of specific protests. But despite the downsides, protest is certainly worth protecting on account of its service to democracy.
We should resist the temptation to think that the notwithstanding clause is itself intrinsically unjust or that every use of it is automatically unjust. Our focus should be on the substance of the law and whether it respects fundamental justice.
We find ourselves at a fork in the road. Do we update the remaining vaccine mandates to require boosters and doses of the new bivalent vaccine? Or do we recommend these steps, defer to personal decision-making, and bring an end to vaccine mandates?
Universities have, for centuries, been the principal setting for nourishing the desire for truth. Countless feats for humanity have been achieved by virtue of the university.
Legislatures are not the place to effectively censor certain viewpoints on account of their unpopularity. The costs to democratic health in barring freedom of conscience outweigh the benefits gained.
Judges are human beings with formative experiences and perspectives that predate their judicial careers. They are not robots, and that is for the better.
It’s hard to imagine that many Canadians foresaw the Charter being argued in cases about euthanasia, prohibitions on private health care and same-sex marriage—to name only a few issues.
If the framers of 1982 thought that the constitutional changes of that year would bring about constitutional tranquility, they were sorely mistaken. The past forty years have featured intense activity on the constitutional front as governments have learned how to respect the Charter.
