Double Aspect

I wasn’t able to post yesterday, but still want to say something good on the Charter‘s anniversary. My doubts and worries notwithstanding, I believe that the Charter has done Canada a lot of good.

With Lord Acton, I believe that “[l]iberty is not the means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” And Canada is a freer country today than it would have been had the Charter not been enacted. To be sure, there are aspects of freedom which the Charter does not protect – economic freedom in particular. But in those areas with which it is concerned, it has helped curtail the state’s imposition of its views on citizens, its arbitrariness, its bigotry.  But for the Charter, we might well still have a Lord’s Day Act; we would probably still be extraditing people to face torture or the death penalty; and we would almost surely be convicting and imprisoning people on the basis of arbitrary, brutal, or otherwise disreputable actions of the police or prosecutors.

Pace legislative optimists such as Jeremy Waldron – whom I much admire as an idealist, a scholar, and a teacher – we ought to be realistic in thinking about how best to protect our right and freedoms. In some perfect world, legislatures might do the job. In other, dystopian, worlds, judges will become agents of repression worse than any legislators. But in Canada as we have known it in the last three decades, and as it is likely to be in the decades to come, the Charter and the courts that apply it have been and remain our best hope.

But as we celebrate the Charter, we must recall Pierre Trudeau’s words at its proclamation:

No constitution, no Charter of Rights and Freedoms, no sharing of powers, can be a substitute for the willingness to share the risks and grandeur of sharing the Canadian adventure. Without that collective act of the will our constitution would be a dead letter and our country will wither away. … Let us put our faith first and foremost in the people of Canada who will breathe life  into it.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the courts that have nurtured this breath of life, though not without making serious mistakes along the way; and even more so, to the men and women who have, sometimes at considerable cost to themselves, fought for the recognition of their rights. As the profiles of some of them put together by the Globe show, they have often been perfectly ordinary people; it is a safe bet that without the Charter, none of them would have been able to contribute to the freedom of Canadians in the way they did. In this way, the Charter has lived up to Trudeau’s perhaps paradoxical billing of it as “the people’s package.”

The Charter is good, but more importantly, it is ours. Let’s make it even better.