The following is an excerpt from the author’s chapter in Constitutional Democracy Under Stress – A Time For Heroic Citizenship, Peter L. Biro (ed.), forthcoming from Mosaic Press, Oakville, Canada The Rule of Law entails the existence of a legal framework, binding at all times on the government and also on individuals in at least some of their interactions with ...
Read More »Tag Archives: section 1
Easing the Stress on Constitutional Democracy
On October 6, 2019, I had the pleasure of speaking at a conference entitled “Constitutional Democracy Under Stress.” The conference was hosted by Section 1 and its founder, Peter Biro, who incidentally was one of my early mentors when I was a summer student. Mr. Biro, whose article for ARL on the Section 1 project can be read here, gathered ...
Read More »A Constitutional Pregnancy: A New Approach to Section 1 Following BC FIPA?
Can you get a little bit pregnant? Of course not. But recently, in BC FIPA, the Supreme Court of Canada held that it matters whether the government infringes constitutional rights by a little or a lot. The difference will determine the strength of evidence the government will need to adduce to justify a rights infringement under section 1 of the ...
Read More »The Decisions to Reject Trinity Western were not “Prescribed by Law”
This article appears in the current (Fall 2016) edition of the Christian Legal Journal, a publication of Christian Legal Fellowship, an intervener in Trinity Western University’s litigation in all three provinces. Any state-imposed limit on a constitutional right or freedom must be “prescribed by law”, according to section 1 of the Charter. This requirement stems from the principle of ...
Read More »A Questionable Ruling on Aboriginal Rights
As has been widely reported, an Ontario court has ruled that native parents have a right to deny their children life-saving medical treatment. The case of Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation v. D.H. concerned an 11-year-old child, J.J., who was diagnosed with leukemia in August 2014. Her treatment team determined that she had a 90%-95% chance of being cured with chemotherapy, ...
Read More »