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Playing with Irwin Toy
Here’s something that might be obvious to people with good memories, or those immersed into the Supreme Court’s freedom of expression jurisprudence, but which, I confess, surprised me when I recently re-read two of the foundational cases of that jurisprudence, Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Quebec (Attorney General), [1989] 1 S.C.R. 927, and R. v. Keegstra, [1990]…
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The Two Halves of the Glass
Much has already been written about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, which holds that, at least in some circumstances, the state cannot prohibit a person from seeking assistance in order to end his or her life. At the CBA National Magazine’s blog, Yves Faguy has up a roundup of some of…
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Error-Correction
I have a new post at the CBA National Magazine’s blog, which follows up on my posts (here and here) arguing that the Suprme Court’s recent decisions constitutionalizing a right to collective bargaining and a right to strike were bad mistakes. In National Magazine post, I review the various ways in which these mistakes might be…
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Check Their Privilege
In my post criticizing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 1 and Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, 2015 SCC 4, which constitutionalized rights to collective bargaining and to strike, I suggested, without elaborating, that they are inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in that they constitutionalize organized labour’s economic rights…
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Laboured Thoughts
Over the last few weeks, the Supreme Court re-wrote yet another part of the Constitution ― this time, the Charter’s freedom of association provision. Section 2(d) now means that labour unions have a constitutional right to participate in a “meaningful process of collective bargaining,” created in Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC…
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Un imam turbulent
La ministre de l’Immigration et de la pensée unique Diversité, Kathleen Weil, se sentait un peu comme Henri II ces derniers jours. « N’y aura-t-il personne », se demandait-elle, « pour me débarrasser de cet imam turbulent? » L’imam, Hamza Chaoui, est turbulent, il est vrai. La démocratie, l’égalité, et la liberté religieuse ― bref,…
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What Does This Mean?
Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will recall that I take a lot of interest in oaths; especially, but not exclusively, citizenship oaths. A paper of mine arguing that the Canadian citizenship oath is unconstitutional as an unjustified infringement of the freedom of conscience came out in the last…
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“For The Security of the Country”
Apologies for my long silence. I know I have ground to make up, what with the Supreme Court’s last Friday’s decisions. But let me start with something entirely different: a passage in Justice Taschereau’s dissent from the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Switzman v. Elbling, [1957] S.C.R. 285, which struck down Québec’s infamous “Padlock Law,” formally An…
