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Judges of the Court
Remarks of the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, P.C.
Canadian Rights and Freedoms: 20 Years Under the Charter
April 17, 2002
Coming of Age: Canadian Nationhood
and the Charter of Rights
Thank you for your warm welcome. I appreciate it.
Introduction
Twenty years are all that separate us from that cold and blustery day -- April
17, 1982 -- which marked the Patriation of our Constitution and the adoption
of the Charter of Rights.
Thinking of that day conjures up a vivid image of that drizzly scene on Parliament
Hill -- the Queen signing the rain-spotted parchment, as Pierre-Elliott Trudeau
looks on, smiling, and our present Prime Minister, then Justice Minister, stands
proudly looking on. For many of us, the image of that signing ceremony evokes
memories of the excitement that was in the air about Canada's possibilities;
of the sense that Canada had come into its own, was setting out to chart its
own course; and perhaps most of all, of a pervasive feeling of enthusiasm,
of optimism and hope for the future.
In many ways, Trudeau himself -- with his intellectual rigour and his pirouettes
-- seemed to incarnate the spirit of those times: Patriating the Constitution
and introducing the Charter reflected a willingness for Canada to break
with tradition and strike its own path -- but on the basis of a clearly-articulated,
forward-looking, and distinctly Canadian vision of what that path would look
like.
And so, here we are, twenty years after the event, looking back. Two decades
in the life of a country is not such a long time. Two decades -- twenty years
-- is still very much human time, a mere generation, a span for measuring
our own lives and the lives of those we know. While that day in April 1982
has slipped into the past, it has not yet slipped very far. Some day, we --
or others -- will be able to look back upon the Charter with the benefit
of historical distance. But that day has not yet come. The whole story of the Charter,
from its inception to this day, is contemporaneous: for many of us, it is a
story entirely encompassed within our own lifetimes.
While the Charter is no longer in its infancy, these are still early
years in its life. The Charter is still a work in progress, an unfinished
project. Perhaps, it will always be. Future generations will have a great role
to play in shaping it. To borrow Viscount Sankey's expression, the Charter is
very much a living tree. I believe it was Chou En-lai who, when asked whether
he thought the French Revolution had been a good idea, replied "It is
too soon to tell". In many ways, then, it may simply be too early to pass
judgment on the Charter.
And yet, twenty years into the Charter's life, it is possible to take
stock. There is a great deal that can be said about the Charter.
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Mark Antony famously says to his Roman
countrymen: "I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him." As I
stand before you tonight, asking you to lend me your ears, let me say: "I
come not to praise the Supreme Court's Charter jurisprudence." At
least, not in great detail. Nor do I come to bury Charter doctrines,
or defend them. Rather, as we look back together on Twenty Years Under the Charter,
I propose to consider a more basic question.
There is no doubt that the adoption of the Charter in 1982 was the
landmark event for Canadian law, at least in our lifetimes. The Charter has
shaped our legal landscape, in so many ways. The "story" of Canadian
law has been, and will for the foreseeable future continue to be, the story
of the Charter's impact on Canadian law. But the Charter's impact
does not end there. A major part of the Charter's story is its impact,
not just on Canadian law, but on Canada itself.
If there is a common theme that emerges from the media coverage on the Charter of
the last few days and from the celebration we held at noon –today it
is that the Charter has become part of Canada's identity. To quote the
theme on today's poster: La Charte: c'est à nous. La Charte:
c'est nous.
Canadian Identity and the Charter
People are aware of the Charter, people have opinions about the Charter,
in a way that would be inconceivable for almost any other legal idea or legal
text. By way of illustration: on April 6, 2002, the Globe and Mail began a
four-part series of articles on the impact of the Charter of Rights.
The following headline ran on the front page of Saturday's paper: "Most
still firmly believe in Charter, poll finds1." The
accompanying article reported that "[n]early three-quarters of Canadians
view their rights as better protected because of the Charter," according
to an Ipsos-Reid poll. Other opinion polls say essentially the same thing.
I am delighted, as you might expect, to hear that people have embraced the Charter so
thoroughly, and have confidence that their rights are protected by it. But
the point that really stands out, I think, is that the Charter of Rights is
the kind of topic that can be the subject of an opinion poll. That means that
Canadians have acquired a certain level of knowledge of the contents of the Charter,
may have a familiarity with some of the major Charter cases and have
an understanding of the respective roles of the courts and elected officials.
The Charter really is an issue that many people have thought about,
have opinions about, and are interested in reading about. What is more, it
is a document we are proud of, that most of us like. Comme canadiens et canadiennes,
la Charte nous touche tous de très près.
Why have Canadians embraced the Charter so thoroughly and affectionately?
Why have so many asserted in the past few days that it has become part of Canada's
identity?
An easy answer might be that Canadians have been subjected to 20 years now
of debate about whether the Charter is good or bad; about whether it
has improperly thrust judges into the political arena. No doubt there has been
a lot of this sort of debate, as there should be in a mature democracy. And
no doubt it has made Canadians more aware of the Charter. But this does
not explain why Canadians have embraced the Charter as their own.
Another answer is that, like many peoples throughout the world, Canadians
have come to see themselves as "rights holders". The Charter fits
and enhances, the argument goes, a new "rights mindset". Thus Michel
Ignatieff speaks of the Charter as part of what he calls the "rights
revolution". But the "rights revolution" important as it is,
does not fully explain why the Charter has been absorbed into the national
imagination, as a defining element of who and what we are as Canadians.
To understand why the Charter has become part of the Canadian identity
in 20 short years, we must look beyond the debate it has engendered, beyond
the general appeal of the "rights revolution". We must focus more
closely on what it means to Canada, as a people.
Tonight, I would like to suggest that the reasons Canadians have adopted the Charter can
be fully understood only by recognizing three realities:
- The fact that together with the Patriation Act, the Charter reflects
Canada's national coming of age;
- The hands-on made in Canada process that led to the adoption of the Charter,
and
- The fact that the Charter expresses who we are as a people.
In the time that remains, I would like to look briefly at each of these Charter realities.
1) Patriation and the Adoption of the Charter as Canada's "Coming
of Legal Age"
The Patriation of the Constitution and the adoption of the Charter of Rights,
on April 17, 1982, symbolized Canada's Coming of Legal Age. This is true both
of our legal order, and more fundamentally, of the way Canadians perceived
their country.
Patriation marked the culmination of a long process by which our jurisprudence
became truly Canadian. The jurisprudence of Canada's first century (outside
the Civil Code of Québec2) was
dominated by Britain. Slowly, in the last half of the 19th Century, Canada's
courts started down the road toward made-in-Canada law. A vital step was the
curtailment, and ultimately the abolition, of appeals to the Judicial Committee
of the Privy Council3. But the final stride
was the Patriation of the Constitution and adoption of the Charter in
1982.
The symbolism of Patriation was felt not just by lawyers, judges and legal
scholars. When Patriation "brought Canada's Constitution home," ordinary
Canadians shared in a sense of renewed purpose for their country. The significance
of this goes far beyond technical changes to the formula for amending the Constitution.
Patriation symbolized an assertion of control over our national destiny, a
taking-in-hand of our affairs, that Canadians found deeply appealing -- what
is more important for which Canadians were ready. Politically and constitutionally,
the Patriation of our Constitution marked Canada's transition into full-fledged
adulthood, independent, in control of its destiny, and brimming with confidence
for the future.
Hand in hand with this new independence came the Charter of Rights.
In the Charter, I think Canadians saw the reflection of the kind of
society they wished to build, for themselves and for generations to come. While
Patriation symbolized the raw fact of self-determination, the Charter made
a statement about the purposes to which Canada should dedicate itself. Every
nation needs a basic statement of what it stands for. For Canada, the Charter
was that statement.
2) A Process Made-in-Canada by Canadians
The process by which Canadians went about drafting their own unique statement
of values helped confirm its significance to our identity. The Charter was
not produced by a few trained draftsmen, nor yet by a select conference of
statesmen, but quite literally by the men and women of Canada. To be sure,
statesmen and draftsmen served well. But what I find remarkable about the genesis
of the Charter is the degree to which individuals and groups of ordinary
Canadians contributed to its content.
The idea of constitutional change in general and a Charter of Rights and
Freedoms in particular, may have begun with Prime Minister Trudeau's desire
to anchor Canadian unity in equality and individual rights. It may have been
driven forward by the vision of his first ministers and provincial counterparts.
But well before the process was completed, Canadians had laid claim to the
process, insisting that they should have a say in the new document's content.
Early drafts of the Charter focused mainly on individual rights drafted
in conventional constitutional language. By the time individuals, advocacy
groups and First Nations had done their work, many of individual rights guarantees
had been reworked and the Charter included guarantees for collective
language rights, women's equality, multicultural heritage and aboriginal rights.
The main concern of citizens and their representative groups was to expand
the guarantees of the Charter. They mounted a campaign in the parliamentary
committee hearings in the winter of 1980-1 designed to improve what some described
as a "seriously flawed4" document.
This grass-roots campaign proved to be remarkably effective, and led to a variety
of amendments, particularly to section 1 (the relationship between individual
rights and collective state interest) and section 15 (equality), as well as
the addition of new provisions aimed at protecting the interests of particular
groups. The result was a document that mirrored the distinctive Canadian values
of respectful tolerance, pluralism, and the interlocking rights and responsibilities
of the individual and the state.
3) The Charter as Expression of Who We Are
This brings me to the third reason why Canadians have adopted the Charter as
part of their identity – it reflects who we are as a people.
The Charter, while it borrows from venerable international traditions,
is a uniquely Canadian amalgam. It is the product of our distinctive history.
When the Charter came into force in April, 1982, much was said and written
about its sources. Some saw it as a clone of the United States Bill of Rights,
elevating the ethic of individualism to constitutional status. Others argued
that it was more European than American in flavour, with its insistence on
balancing individual rights against public interests. Few noticed how well
attuned the Charter was to Canadian values and sensibilities.
In my view, the uniquely Canadian character of the Charter is reflected
in its emphasis on three kinds of rights: individual rights, tied to
a conception of tolerance and respect; collective interests, bound up with
an appreciation of the relationship of support and obligation between individual
and community; and group rights, tied to a recognition that of pluralism is
one of Canada's animating values. The Charter reconciles these three
types of rights, not as contending forces balanced precariously against each
other in basic opposition, but as complementary rights, drawing strength
and support from each other. This, I think, is the Charter's defining
characteristic. And, to the extent this is so, it resonates with Canadians'
conception of themselves.
Individual Rights
The protection of individual rights is basic to the Charter. In this,
the Charter belongs to that global family of constitutional documents
which enshrined basic rights throughout the latter half of the 20th century,
in order to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of the Third Reich and the
Second World War. The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
adopted in 1948 and ratified by most nations of the world. In the decades that
followed, country after country adopted domestic bills of rights, guaranteeing
fundamental freedoms to all persons. Canada moved to adopt human rights statutes
at the provincial and federal level5, followed
by the Diefenbaker Bill of Rights and finally, in 1982, the Charter
of Rights and Freedoms. Many other countries were doing the same thing.
One of the last holdouts, Britain, adopted a quasi-constitutional bill of rights
in 2000.
The individual rights guaranteed by the Charter are inspired by our
respectful tolerance of the basic entitlements of every person. This is a leitmotif
running through the 1982 Constitution Act -- and the provisions guaranteeing
individual rights are no exception. It is the implicit condition of the exercise
of all rights and freedoms, from the right of all to vote, through the right
of dissident speech, to the liberty rights. It finds explicit expression in
the equality guarantee of s. 15 of the Charter, which proclaims that "[e]very
individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal
protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular,
without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion,
sex, age or mental or physical disability".
Collective Interests
But the Charter did not stop at international rights. True to Canada's
values, it also respected our collective interests. Canada's history demonstrates
a commitment to a positive partnership between the state and the individual,
between the private interest and the public good. Canadians do not typically
see the state as the adversary of the individual. By contrast, the United States
was born of a Revolutionary war, and emerged as a nation that saw individual
rights and liberties as a bulwark against the overweening power of the state.
On a scale of values, the individual ranks first, the community somewhat lower.
Canada, however, was born not of revolution but of evolution. We have traditionally
seen the state not as the enemy, but often as the protector of our rights and
liberties. Historically, we have tended to view rights, not as threatened by,
but as existing in harmony with collective rights.
Canada's approach to those cases when individual rights squarely conflict
with broader collective interests further distinguishes us from the United
States. The United States constitution casts rights in absolute terms, making
no mention of the need to balance them against the collective interest. Individual
rights are portrayed as simply trumping collective interests. The interests
of the community must yield in the face of a basic individual right. Does that
mean that collective interests never prevail in the United States? Of course
not. Rather, the community's interests are accommodated by broadening or narrowing
the scope of the individual rights themselves.
In Canada, when individual rights squarely conflict with broader collective
interests, s. 1 of the Charter requires balancing the competing interests,
candidly and above-board. As Mr. Edward Greenspan put it – not uncritically – in
a speech he gave in Washington in 1995:
Our First Amendment -- we call it Section 1, our first words that set the
tone for all Canadians to rejoice in our essential freedoms, the words we
first read coming out of the starting gate are like a warning on a pack of
cigarettes -- Beware! These nice looking sticks kill! It says "People
of Canada! Don't get overly excited at what you are about to read. We know
this is our Charter of Rights. Soon you will inhale a pack of rights
that include freedom of expression, freedom of press, right to a jury trial,
the right to fundamental justice (we couldn't even bring ourselves to call
it due process). But before you get too excited, we want you to know that
all of the so-called guaranteed rights you are about to read are subject
to reasonable limits that may be imposed by the government upon you in a
free and democratic society. [Edward Greenspan, "Ifs, Buts, and Whereases":
Paper Presented at Ambassador's Lecture Series Presentation at the Canadian
Embassy, Washington, D.C. on September 26, 1995] (1995) 29 Gazette 212]
Whether one agrees with Mr. Greenspan or not, he makes an important point.
The Canadian way, as reflected in the Charter, recognizes that individual
rights may conflict with larger societal goals and collective interests.
It goes on to provide a way to resolve that conflict, thorough a candid process
of justification and demonstration. Through this process of acknowledgment
and justification judges can give effect to Ronald Dworkin's exhortation
to "get real and come clean: about the values and societal interests
that are the true basis for limiting an individual's rights.
Pluralism and Group Rights
A third and final Canadian characteristic recognized by the Charter and
the 1982 Constitution Act is our commitment to pluralism and the protection
of group rights like freedom of association, language rights, aboriginal rights.
The Charter and the Act's related provisions protect individual
rights, to be sure. But they go further, recognizing that there are some activities,
essential to human flourishing, that can only be protected or nurtured by protecting
the group setting in which they take place. Language provides an excellent
example: a language can only be spoken with others, by definition. Language
rights, in order to be effective, must therefore operate at the level of the
group. The only way to protect an individual's language right is to protect
the setting in which the language is spoken. This is what is meant by "group
rights": rights that can only be exercised through a group.
The Quebec Act of 1791 was the first of many enactments seeking to
protect the language and culture of a particular group. The British North
America Act of 1867, carried forward special rights to protect the French
minority outside Quebec and the English minority within Quebec. To this the
1982 constitutional amendments added recognition of multiculturalism and gender
equality, as well as a formal guarantee of Aboriginal rights under s. 35 of
the Constitution Act.
Our long tradition of giving special guarantees to certain groups is neither
American nor European. Some Americans, those who embrace the ideal of the melting
pot, look on our Canadian tradition of special accommodation with a mixture
of puzzlement and concern. Thus the distinguished American historian, Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., quotes our former Prime Minister, William Lyon McKenzie King,
to the effect that Canada has too much geography and too little history, and
goes on to argue that Canada's policy of bilingualism has been a mistake destined
to weaken the country – a mistake which he goes on to argue that the
United States should not make in dealing with its Hispanic minority6.
In fact, I would argue that Canada has rather a lot of history, and that accommodation
of minority interests are a central part of that history. Recognition of special
group interests is bred in our soul. It is the stuff that founded us and the
means by which we have managed to stay together. It is not American, to be
sure. It is Canadian, and for Canada it has thus far worked.
Nor are group rights part of the European constitutional tradition. European
constitutions tend to assume a single ethnic group or volk, defined
by shared language and culture. The reality in many European countries belies
this assumption and, in some cases, constitutional accommodation has been made – for
example, recognition of both Flemish and French groups in Belgium and acceptance
of Catalan as an official language in the Spanish province of Catalonia. But
generally, recognition of group rights is not as broad in Europe as in Canada.
For this reason, one finds interest in the Canadian constitutional model in
areas of Europe where cultural strife has become the norm, such as the countries
of the former Yugoslavia.
Conclusion
Let me conclude.
In the past two decades, the Charter has been absorbed into the national
imagination, as a defining element of who and what we are as Canadians. Indeed,
in the past twenty years, the Charter of Rights has become so tightly
woven into the fabric of the Canadian identity that, across the country and
in every region, it is scarcely possible to form and idea of Canada – of
what Canada is, what Canadians aspire to, what values Canadian
hold dear – without discovering the Charter of Rights as a constituent
element of that idea.
There are only a few things that are so deeply ingrained in the fabric of
our national consciousness: hockey, medicare, and the Charter of Rights.
The Charter is not merely part of our constitution; elle est entrée
dans nos coeurs.
Why has this happened?
I have suggested three answers. First: because the Charter represents
our national coming of age, and that, to Canadians, even twenty years later,
hold enormous significance. Second: because the Charter represents our
own statement of values, made in Canada, by Canadians, to fit Canadians' sense
of themselves; and third: because the Charter, not by magic nor by accident
but through the nation — affirming process that brought it into being
and nurtured it over the past two decades, captures the essence of what we
hold dear as a people:
- respect for individual rights;
- respect for the collective interest and harmony between individual freedorm
and the greater good of all;
- respect for pluralism and a commitment to the fundamental equality of each
and every one of us, religion, gender or ability.
It is too soon to say how this or that Charter decision, this or that Charter doctrine,
will stand the test of history. What I do assert tonight is a more modes – yet
significant – proposition: we have made a good beginning.
We have a Charter that reflect our most fundamental values, that tells
us who and what we are as a people.
We have a Charter that the world admires.
Most important of all, we have a Charter that Canadians in the last
two decades have come to embrace as their own. La Charte: c'est à nous.
La Charte: c'est nous.
Thank you.
_____________________
Notes
1- K. Makin, "Most still firmly believe in Charter,
poll finds" The Globe and Mail (April 6, 2002) at A1.
2- S.Q. 1991, c. 64.
3- An Act to Amend the Supreme Court Act, S.C.
1949 (2nd sess.), c. 37. Since then, English citations, once dominant in Supreme
Court jurisprudence, have dwindled. References to the Judicial Committee all
but vanished and seldom occurred outside the context of an appeal dealing directly
with the federal-provincial of powers - important when it comes up, but infrequent.
4- R. Sheppard and M. Valpy, The National Deal: The
Fight for a Canadian Constitution (Toronto: Fleet Books, 1982) at 135.
5- Saskatchewan's legislation was the first, in 1947.
The Canadian Human Rights Act was enacted in 1978. For further details,
see W.S. Tarnopolsky, Discrimination and the Law, 2nd ed., Revised by
W.F. Pentney (Don Mills: De Boo, 1985), chapters 1 and 2.
6-A.M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America:
Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Revised and Enlarged Edition) (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998).
Remarks of the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, P.C.
Ottawa, Ontario
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
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