Pierre Trudeau enacted his rationalist Constitution just as the corrosive logic of liberalism was fracturing our society. Its legacy is a post-rational, post-liberal system where the most important issues are subject to the whims of judicial power.
Throughout the pandemic, nearly all health measures polled well. It fell to judges to hold up the principle that individuals have rights, and yet they by and large gave extreme deference to government measures instead.
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.
David Frum explains why as a young man he was skeptical that Canada needed a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and, now that it has been enacted for 40 years, Frum outlines the effects the Charter has had on Canada, both the visible and the less visible.
While ideological interest groups have always sought to pursue their agendas in the courts, Canadian judges have largely resisted the lure of partisan adjudication.
The view that Charter rights are for politicians to freely side-step and leave to be adjudicated by the courts later is a misunderstanding of the intention of a constitutional framework and shouldn’t be tolerated.
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.
This episode of Frum Dialogues reflects on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as it celebrates its fortieth anniversary. Plus, why a national design competition would be a good thing for the country.
Canada’s Charter does not in fact protect property rights, making Canadians uniquely vulnerable to the dangers of digital jail as a means for social control.
It is no overstatement to say that without Trudeau, the 15th Prime Minister of Canada,1982 would not have happened.
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