The Honourable Peter D. Lauwers is a Justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. This speech was delivered to the Runnymede Society in Toronto on January 12, 2018. It develops further some thoughts on Charter values in my article, “Liberalism and the Challenge of Religious Diversity, (2017), 79 S.C.L.R. (2d) 29. The footnotes have not been edited or completed. ...

Is it “antithetical” to the “Charter value” of “inclusivity” to allow a child to be excused from a public school classroom while sexual orientation or gender is being discussed? In this article I review a case that raises this very question. Many lawyers today are concerned that “Charter values” are being used as a sword for state-enforced moral conformity, when ...

All readers of ARL are warmly invited to attend the 2018 Law and Freedom conference, presented by the Runnymede Society. Join the Runnymede Society for some lively debate and discussion about the most important issues in Canadian constitutional law today — and how they impact freedom, policy, and society. Until December 1st, 2017, the code EARLYBIRD will entitle you to ...

Ontario Court of Appeal Justices Miller and Lauwers recently critiqued the nebulous concept of “Charter values” in a written judgement and urged judges to avoid invoking Charter values as much as possible. The case, in Gehl v Canada (AG), 2017 ONCA 319, is worth reading, but I’ll summarize it for you here. The issue in Gehl was whether the appellant, ...

In a recent decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, R. v. Jacques, Justice Lauwers correctly applied the law despite his understandable reservations about the outcome. Mr. Jacques had been convicted before the Provincial Offences Court on two counts of driving without automobile insurance and one count of driving with a suspended license. His convictions were upheld on appeal before the Ontario ...