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Late in 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered two of its most consequential Charter decisions on freedom of expression in recent years: City of Toronto v. Ontario and Ward v. Quebec.
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Since 1982, the Supreme Court has been instrumental in...
- Part 2 of 5
Apr 29, 2021 · After more than 25 years of Canadian governments pursuing a hands-off approach to the online world, the government of Justin Trudeau is now pushing Bill C-10, a law that would see...
Freedom of expression in Canada is protected as a "fundamental freedom" by section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; however, in practice the Charter permits the government to enforce "reasonable" limits censoring speech.
- Limiting Police Powers
- Women's Reproductive Rights
- Recognition of The LGBT Community
- Linguistic Rights For Francophones Outside Quebec
- Strengthened Aboriginal Rights
- Judicial Activism
One of the more significant changes over the past 30 years has been court-enforced legal safeguards and accountability for policing, Des Rosiers observes. There were a number of charter cases that codified these changes, including the Oakes case in 1986 in which the Supreme Court overturned a law that had required the accused to disprove a presumpt...
The key decision in this instance was the 1988 Morgentaler case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Criminal Code sections on abortion were unconstitutional. By the time of that ruling there was only one woman on the Supreme Court — Bertha Wilson, the first woman to be appointed. Siding with the majority, "she anchors her decision in what pr...
Through a series of decisions the courts have recognized rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Canadians, despite the fact that sexual orientation is not specifically mentioned in the charter itself. In the 1998 Vriend decision, the court read sexual orientation into Alberta's human rights legislation, confirming earlier decisions prohib...
Through a series of provincial and Supreme Court decisions, the charter gave francophones outside Quebec access to French schools, school boards and even hospitals. Canada now has a generation called "section 23 kids" who were educated in these schools, where numbers warranted. Des Rosiers considers those decisions to have been among the most impor...
The charter's recognition of Aboriginal Peoples "sent a very important message," Renée Dupuis, the former chief commissioner of the Indian Specific Claims Commission, told CBC News last year. The other amendment to the Charter, to section 25, was on aboriginal land claims. The charter has imposed on governments a duty to consult aboriginal peoples ...
For Rainer Knopff, the biggest change, institutionally, is that the charter "amounts to a significant transfer of policy making to the courts," especially in an area that could be described as "morality issues." "The charter has meant that the courts have a major influence on those things in a way they wouldn't have previously," he says. McPhedran ...
Feb 26, 2018 · The principal rights and freedoms covered by the Charter include: freedom of expression; the right to a democratic government; the right to live and seek work anywhere in Canada; the legal rights of people accused of crimes; the rights of Indigenous peoples; the right to equality including gender equality; the right to use Canada’s official ...
Nov 11, 2023 · Supporting expressive freedom should not imply support for – or criticism of – the underlying cause or opinion being expressed. The Supreme Court of Canada has stated: “the very lifeblood of democracy is the free exchange of ideas and opinions.”
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Since 1982, the Supreme Court has been instrumental in determining when freedom of expression is protected under s.2 (b) of the Charter, and when infringements are permitted under s.1’s reasonable limits clause. In this way, the s.2 (b) jurisprudence forms the bedrock of what expressive freedom means to Canadians today.
