equality – Double Aspect

Bonkerstown Bypass

The “math is racist” decision is overturned―on narrow grounds that give little guidance for the future

Last week, the Court of Appeal for Ontario issued its decision in Ontario Teacher Candidates’ Council v Ontario (Education), 2023 ONCA 788. The case was the appeal from the notorious “math is racist” decision of the Divisional Court, Ontario Teacher Candidates’ Council v The Queen, 2021 ONSC 7386, about which I blogged here. The Court of Appeal, contrary to the Divisional Court, holds that the math and pedagogy test (the Math Proficiency Test [MPT]) that aspiring teachers are required to take in Ontario does not discriminate against non-white candidates. But the decision’s scope is very limited. It is based on additional evidence that was not available to the Divisional Court, and while it provides useful guidance on assessing evidence in cases alleging violations of the Charter’s equality guarantee, it neither calls into question the legal framework applicable to such cases (which in fairness, is not the Court of Appeal’s role) nor points out the Divisional Court’s public law mistakes.

Justice Monahan, writing for the unanimous court, sets out the basis for the decision quite succinctly:

The Divisional Court made its findings based on the July 2021 Data, which recorded the results from the approximately 3600 candidates who had attempted the MPT by July 26, 2021. The July 2021 Data disclosed that … White candidates had passed the MPT at a materially higher rate than had racialized candidates.

The July 2021 Data before the Divisional Court provided a preliminary and incomplete basis for assessing the impact of the MPT on entry to the teaching profession. Candidates who had not passed the MPT could rewrite the test an unlimited number of times, and fewer than half of the candidates who would eventually attempt the MPT in 2021 had done so by July 26, 2021. This was an insufficient evidentiary record that failed to discharge the respondents’ onus under s. 15(1) of the Charter.

… December 2021 Data discloses that of the 8350 candidates who attempted the MPT one or more times during 2021, 95% were successful, including 93% of candidates from racialized groups. Moreover, had the MPT been available in 2022, candidates who had not succeeded in 2021 would have had the opportunity to retake the test. Thus, the ultimate disparities in relative success rates between different demographic groups might well be even smaller than the relatively modest differences observed in the December 2021 Data. [6-8]

What matters, according to Justice Monahan, is whether the white and non-white test-takers are able to enter the teaching profession at similar rates, not the outcome of any particular test attempt. There is no evidence that having to retake the test is a material disadvantage; there is no need to wait any significant amount of time before resitting; no harm ― no foul. This is sensible so far as this particular arrangement is concerned, but note how little the decision really matters for the future: in effect, the test is upheld because failure has no meaningful consequences. The test isn’t really much of a test.

Justice Monahan’s comments about statistical evidence in discrimination cases are worth noting, but they too might turn out not to be very consequential. He points out that “the number of candidates who had self-identified as members of racialized groups” in the data considered by the Divisional Court

was quite small, representing a fraction of the total number of MPT test takers in 2021. Moreover, because the absolute numbers were small, relatively small changes in the numbers would have an outsized impact on the success rate (expressed in percentage terms) for racialized candidates. [71; footnote omitted]

Justice Monahan adds that “the Divisional Court did not explain why it was appropriate to draw firm conclusions about the impact of the MPT on racialized teacher candidates in Ontario from such a small sample size”. [71] But that is not fair. The Divisional Court did address this concern. It wrote that demanding more extensive data

is akin to suggesting that more racialized candidates must attempt and fail the MPT to accumulate the data necessary to show a disproportionate impact. The fact that a greater adverse impact could be demonstrated over time does not mean that there is no adverse impact now. While evidence is necessary, it cannot be that a claimant group must wait years before it is in a position to challenge a regulation that it alleges is discriminatory. [Div. Ct., 85]

Of course, the flaw in this reasoning is that it presumes that early trends will simply continue. We know now that they did not, and this might have been anticipated in the circumstances, as the resit attempts allowed groups that were not initially as successful as others to catch up. But then again, the catching-up would presumably not have happened if there had in fact been some deep problem with the test. As I wrote in my post about the Divisional Court’s decision, “[t]here is a logic to” saying that “it cannot be that a claimant group must wait years before it is in a position to challenge a regulation that it alleges is discriminatory”, though “but “that’s because we are used to thinking of constitutional violations that are more concrete and immediate than what spreadsheets capture”.

In other words, a difficult question arises here: how does a court faced with a disparate impact discrimination claim balance the need for sufficiently robust data to support it against the concern about making people wait and suffer discrimination? It is the Court of Appeal that doesn’t explain why it disposes of this question as it does, even as it chides the Divisional Court for its alleged failure to explain itself. The explanation, I suspect, is implicit: facts are stubborn things, as John Adams long ago pointed out, and once the more complete data are admitted into evidence, it would take a peculiarly bloody-minded court to ignore them. But of course this too doesn’t give future litigants and courts a great deal of guidance.

Perhaps this is because the Court of Appeal is simply stuck with a legal framework foisted on it by the Supreme Court, and could not resolve the paradoxes that this framework throws up even if it tried. The difficulties I have just outlined are inherent in allowing statistics to ground claims of unconstitutional discrimination even if no one can offer a plausible hypothesis about how these statistics have come to be. A general invocation of “systemic racism/sexism/discrimination” isn’t an explanation of course ― it simply begs the question. Getting rid of disparate impact claims entirely would of course solve these problems. Short of that, one might at least require a claimant to explain exactly how the system works to produce this specific set of disparate outcomes. Statistical evidence would then be no more than useful supporting evidence, rather than the foundation of the claim, and its weakness would be less of a concern. In any case, these are things for the Supreme Court to think about.

What the Court of Appeal could and should have done better with is the basic question of the issue in this case and, relatedly, the standard of review and the eventual remedy. Justice Monahan describes the issue as “[d]id the Divisional Court err in finding a prima facie breach of s. 15(1) of the Charter … and [d]id the Divisional Court err in holding that any infringement of s. 15(1) caused by the MPT is not justified under s. 1 of the Charter?” [64] But this is ambiguous as to the nature or cause of the alleged “prima facie breach” or, to use more textually grounded language, limitation of the s 15(1) right. Is the claim that s 15(1) is limited and eventually breached by the specific test that was administered to would-be teachers, or to the statutory provisions authorized it?

The distinction doesn’t just matter for the sake of intellectual rigour. Under existing Supreme Court precedent, it makes a difference to the standard of review. If only the actual test that was administered is at issue, it should arguably be reviewed as a discretionary decision, and thus subject to deference under Doré v Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12, [2012] 1 SCR 395 and its progeny. If the statutory provisions themselves were being challenged, then correctness review was in order. The Court of Appeal follows the Divisional Court in applying correctness review, but doesn’t explain whether and why the provisions authorizing a test were being challenged despite the evidence dealing almost exclusively with the test that was actually administered and its outcomes. And of course, if the Court of Appeal had upheld the Divisional Court’s findings, the proper remedy would also have turned on the nature of the claim. As I wrote in my post about the Divisional Court’s decision, I don’t think there was a basis for invalidating the legislative provisions enabling the test, and yet the Divisional Court did just that. It looks like the Court of Appeal could have done the same, and we are none the wiser as to why.

The Court of Appeal’s decision is, obviously, better than the alternative. That alternative, as I wrote in my post, was “desperately sad”:

The Court notes that one problem with the relative paucity of minority teachers is that, at least in the United States, “non-Black teachers had significantly lower expectations of educational attainment for Black students than Black teachers”. [68] Yet its ruling manifests and perpetuates exactly this sort of soft bigotry of low expectations. We can’t expect, it says, “racialized” candidates to succeed on a standardized test twice vetted for sensitivity and bias. … This presumption that letting members of minority groups cut corners is the only way they can succeed is what disregards the constitutional mandate of equality ― not holding them to the same standard as everyone else.

But the survival of this particular test, for no more compelling reason than that it doesn’t ultimately prevent any significant number of people ― of whatever race ― from becoming teachers, isn’t exactly a cause for joy. The contrary outcome would have been bonkers, but the Court of Appeal doesn’t, and in fairness can’t, prevent it from occurring in a future case. It merely bypasses, for now.

The Law of Bonkerstown

Does the constitution mandate the soft bigotry of low expectations?

In a much-noticed decision, Ontario Teacher Candidates’ Council v The Queen, 2021 ONSC 7386, the Ontario Divisional Court has declared unconstitutional a standardized test would-be teachers were required to take in Ontario, as well as provisions of the Ontario College of Teachers Act and regulations made under it that required the test to be administered. The Court found that the test infringed the equality rights of “racialized” candidates under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because they (or at least some groups among them) had significantly lower pass rates than white ones. The decision is perverse in itself, as well as showing the perversity of section 15 jurisprudence.

The case can be summarised quite simply. In the face of concerns about falling student performance on mathematics tests, the Ontario legislature introduced a requirement that aspiring teachers themselves pass a standardized test. Regulations were drawn up and a test designed, drawing on a “bank of math questions used for Grade 3, 6, and 9 assessments” for its substantive part and “on Ministry policy documents for the pedagogy component”. [24] Alas, despite two reviews “for bias and sensitivity to equity issues” [25] the results of a trial run and of the first official iteration of the test showed considerable disparities between ethnic and linguistic categories of test-takers. A group of would-be teachers, supported, it is worth noting, by the teachers’ union, challenged the test on the basis that these disparities amounted to unconstitutional discrimination.

In a unanimous opinion by Justices Backhouse and Nishikawa, the Divisional Court agrees. Following Fraser v Canada (Attorney General), 2020 SCC 28, it explains that section 15 rights are limited whenever state action impacts a group defined by a trait it names or an analogous one more severely than a relevantly comparable group, and this disparity “has the effect of reinforcing, exacerbating or perpetuating disadvantage”. [56] Crucially, there is no need for a demonstrated causal connection between the disparity and the disadvantaged group’s characteristics, and no need for all of the disadvantaged group’s members to be similarly affected.

This test is met here by the statistical showing that some non-white groups have done noticeably worse than white test-takers ― a result that the Court ties to the fact that “[t]he education system in Ontario has historically imposed disadvantages on Black and Indigenous students” [64] and that “Black and Indigenous students tend to be over-represented in less challenging, basic and general level courses, and under-represented in advanced courses”. [65] Such students, the Court says, would do better if there were more teachers who shared their background, but there are not ― on the contrary, “[t]wenty-six percent of Ontario students are racialized. However, only thirteen percent of teachers are racialized”. [67] In addition to the statistics, the Court discusses what it describes as “qualitative evidence”, in the form of an affidavit by one candidate, of African origin, who found taking the test difficult. One reason for this was that the test “is taken on a computer”, while the candidate “ha[d] never used a computer or calculator for math and ha[d] never taken a computer-based math test” [89] ― though this candidate was actually successful on the math part of the test, and only struggled with the pedagogy one.

The Court then asks whether this limitation of equality rights is justified in a free and democratic society. It accepts the government’s submission that the test is imposed to improve student performance and is a rational way to do so. Furthermore, the issue involves balancing would-be teachers’ rights and the needs of the students, which points to “a highly deferential approach” [132] to deciding whether the test is a minimally impairing way of achieving the government’s purposes. Yet the Court still finds that the test is not justified. This is, crucially, because the government would do as well ― or, the Court strongly suggests, better ― if the test were replaced with a requirement that aspiring teachers be required to take a math course as part of their mandatory education. The Court’s key finding is that this

would be significantly less impairing of equality rights. There is a plethora of evidence in the record highlighting the disproportionate impacts of standardized testing based on race … In contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that these negative diversity impacts would exist in the context of a mandatory math course (i.e. that racialized teacher candidates might disproportionately fail these math courses), and we do not think such an inference can be made on the basis of logic or common sense. [142]

This way lies madness. The Divisional Court is, of course, bound by the Supreme Court’s test at the section 15 stage of the analysis, and for the most part it should not be faulted for the way in which it applies it. What its application of the test makes clear, though, is that this test is, to use a technical term, bonkers. It compels the conclusion that constitutional rights are limited ― or, as the Court puts it, prima facie breached ― by what could, for all we know, be statistical artefacts. (One point that arises in the Court’s discussion is whether data from one trial and one official test are sufficient to support its conclusions. There is a logic to the Court’s response that “a claimant group must wait years before it is in a position to challenge a regulation that it alleges is discriminatory”, [85] but that’s because we are used to thinking of constitutional violations that are more concrete and immediate than what spreadsheets capture.) References to historical discrimination and current statistical disparities are only for colour; they do are not meant to have any actual explanatory power. They cannot, for instance, account for the fact that, on the trial edition of the test, the disparity between candidates of “Caribbean” and “African” backgrounds was almost as great as that between “Caribbean” and “European” candidates. A potential constitutional violation is made out by a showing no one needs to and, quite possibly, can explain. This is a surrender to, indeed an embrace of, irrationality masquerading legal doctrine.

Meanwhile, the Divisional Court’s approach to section 1 is perverse in its own right, though it is also consistent with the underlying logic of the Supreme Court’s approach. The Court says that the province should rely on courses in mathematics rather than tests to ensure that teachers are competent, because there is no evidence of disparate effect of a course requirement. For one thing, note that the Court doesn’t say there is evidence of equal outcomes. It’s just that nobody seems to have studied the matter. And consider: if the course uses rigorous assessment of the same kinds of skills that the test measured, why would the outcomes be different? Alternatively, how will we know that the reason for the course requirement not yielding disparate outcomes won’t be a lack of rigorous assessment? I’ve taught enough at universities to know that this is not exactly a far-fetched hypothesis.

Here is the desperately sad thing about the Court’s reasoning. The Court notes that one problem with the relative paucity of minority teachers is that, at least in the United States, “non-Black teachers had significantly lower expectations of educational attainment for Black students than Black teachers”. [68] Yet its ruling manifests and perpetuates exactly this sort of soft bigotry of low expectations. We can’t expect, it says, “racialized” candidates to succeed on a standardized test twice vetted for sensitivity and bias. The “qualitative evidence” on which the Court relies is telling in this regard. It is, apparently, too much to ask of a teacher, or at any rate, on the Court’s logical, a “racialized” teacher, in the 21st century to be able to do a test on a computer. We shouldn’t care that a future teacher cannot answer multiple-choice questions about pedagogy, because hey, he is “uniquely qualified to broaden students’ awareness and understanding of Franco-African culture and cross-cultural world views”. [91] This presumption that letting members of minority groups cut corners is the only way they can succeed is what disregards the constitutional mandate of equality ― not holding them to the same standard as everyone else.

And yes, of course, it’s not impossible that the standard is set in an insidiously biased way. Needless to say, a standard vetted, twice, for precisely this potential problem by people genuinely concerned about this possibility is unlikely to have this problem. Still, perhaps. But then it should be possible to demonstrate that this is so. As Justices Brown and Rowe say in their dissent in Fraser, one should not assume that a statistical disparity in outcomes between groups or a correlation between disadvantage and membership in a group equals causation:

where one is dealing with complex social and economic considerations … one can readily assume that there are many factors involved, some of which will give rise to causation while others will simply be the result of coincidence (that is, caused by independent factors). [180; emphasis in the original]

Let me end this part of the past by quoting Chad Williams, writing for Fair for All:

the fundamental assumption of critical race theory is that disparities between racial groups are in themselves evidence of racism. This assumption is faulty because it fails to allow or account for the numerous reasons other than racism that racial groups might have different outcomes. At the population level, these plausible reasons include age, geography, and, of course, culture. Many analysts of group differences are trapped in the false binary that these differences must result from either racism or genetic differences. However, Thomas Sowell and others have made compelling arguments about why this simply is not true. This is not to say that past disparate treatment has had no effect on current disparate outcomes, but it certainly cannot be the only cause for these disparities. Accordingly, a policy that begins from the faulty assumption that disparities equal racism is bound to fail as a bulwark against what actual racism still exists today.

This policy is the law the Supreme Court’s created in Fraser, and the Divisional Court’s decision in Candidates’ Council illustrates the tragic consequences it is bound to have.

Before addressing the question “and now what?”, let me point out two things about this case that I do not understand. One has to do with what exactly the Court is deciding. Beyond explaining that a recent amendment to the College of Teachers Act required the test to be set up and regulations under the Act gave effect to the requirement, the Court’s reasons focus entirely on the test. The evidence, such as it was, had to do with the results of different groups of candidates on the particular test they were administered, and the experience of some individual candidates. Yet the court not only invalidates the test, but also the statutory provision and the regulation pursuant to which it was created. It doesn’t at all explain why. Under the heading “What Is the Appropriate Remedy?” it simply states that “[a] declaration” to this effect “will issue”. [161] The province can’t create a new test even if thinks that it might come up with one that will not produce the disparities this one did. That doesn’t seem right to me, and the absence of any explanation does not speak well of the Court’s commitment to transparency and to judicial craft.

Relatedly, I do not understand the Court’s approach to the standard of review. The Court deals with it briskly, citing Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, for the proposition that “constitutional questions are reviewed on a standard of correctness” [50]. But that seems too quick. Vavilov makes a

distinction between cases in which it is alleged that the effect of the administrative decision being reviewed is to unjustifiably limit [Charter] rights … and those in which the issue on review is whether a provision of the decision maker’s enabling statute violates the Charter. [57]

The former type of cases is not, ostensibly, decided on the correctness standard at all, but following the framework set out in Doré v Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12, [2012] 1 SCR 395 and refined in a number of subsequent cases. Only the latter attract the correctness standard. Co-blogger Mark Mancini has argued that this is incompatible with Vavilov‘s overall thrust, and so have I, but that’s how it is until the Supreme Court says otherwise. Now, as I’ve alluded to just above, Candidates’ Council seems to involve both types of issues. The design of the test is a discretionary administrative decision. It’s not prescribed by statute or regulation: regulation 3 of the Proficiency in Mathematics Regulations, made under the College of Teachers Act, simply provides that “[T]he Education Quality and Accountability Office shall develop English and French versions of a mathematics test”. The test, then, should in principle be assessed under the Doré framework, on a reasonableness standard. Meanwhile, the Regulations and the enabling section of the Act are obviously the kind of provision whose constitutionality falls to be addressed on the correctness standard under Vavilov.

Does that make sense? No, not really. I would even say, none at all. But that’s what Vavilov pretty clearly seems to require. It is puzzling that the Court does not even attempt to engage with its demands. This isn’t even a matter of fudging the law to get to a desired outcome ― as we have seen, the Court makes a show of being deferential while ostensibly applying the correctness standard, and strikes down the test anyway. It could easily have reached the same result under Doré. I suppose the absurdity of the Vavilov/Doré cohabitation was simply too much to deal with.

So what to do about this terrible decision? Unsurprisingly given both the Zeitgeist and the egregious nature of this decision, the n-word ― “notwithstanding” ― has been thrown around since the decision came out. More than on other occasions, I understand the impulse. But, as before, I remain of the view that it must be resisted. While using the “notwithstanding clause” to undo this particular decision may be a short-term fix, it is not a genuine solution to the underlying problem. The invocation of s 33 of the Charter will have to be renewed every five years. A legislature that takes a different view of either the substantive issues or indeed the propriety of using the notwithstanding clause itself need not do so. More importantly, using the notwithstanding clause to resurrect this particular policy does nothing to prevent other judgments, striking down other policies, from applying the same misbegotten principles as the Divisional Court applied here. Are the supporters of the notwithstanding clause saying that it should be used, René Lévesque-style, to insulate all law from judicial review? They’ve always been angry at me for suggesting that that that’s where their positions naturally led.

The immediate solution, of course, is for the province to appeal. One should hope that the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court if need be, will restore sanity, if only on the section 1 issue, on which Fraser does not control. Otherwise, the appropriate solution ― and it is probably well worth pursuing regardless of the outcome of the appeal ― is an amendment to section 15 of the Charter. At a minimum, it should endorse the dissenting position in Fraser, requiring a showing of causation for statistical disparities to be regarded as limiting equality rights. More radically, the amendment could excluding disparate impact discrimination from section 15’s scope. My tentative opinion is that this is the better, cleaner option ― but I am open to persuasion. Either way, an amendment is both a more permanent ― not to mention transparent and honest ― way of avoiding similar disasters in the future than using the notwithstanding clause to revive this particular policy, and a more modest one than a blanket invocation of the notwithstanding clause to prevent section 15 challenges at all would be.

Day Two: Kerri A. Froc

The Power of Saying No

University of New Brunswick

The ability to reject traditional reasoning, to say “no”, is a central part of feminist critique and practice. Student groups introduced the “no means no” campaign into popular consciousness over two decades ago to emphasize the importance of sexual consent. While it lost purchase because of its seeming implicit burden imposed on women to communicate non-consent, the original idea behind it was to shift cultural values. Women’s “no” could no longer be devalued as meaningless, or a challenge to be overcome, worse yet, as a disingenuous way of saying “yes”.

Feminists often have to say “no” a lot, in terms of positively asserting that they reject inequitable, conventional understandings and refuse to go along. In a patriarchal culture, that becomes read as “sex negative”, as overly sensitive, or as biased (as the Chief Justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal recently discovered). While saying “no” is often powerful and sometimes a moral imperative, it wears on you. As Ahmed says:

[A] no can still be dismissed as impertinent in the sense of rudely bold or boldly rude and can be judged as an act of political vandalism. So many refusals are dismissed in these terms; you might be free to say no but your no is heard as destructive; hearings have consequences (becoming a killjoy is a consequence)… For feminism: no is political labour.

So, in the dissents I want to talk about, I celebrate the refusal to “go along” in favour of what might be professionally risky for the judge or simply a great deal of effort wasted or ignored. They represent ways of thinking that deserve another look.

Justice Frank Iacobucci in Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v Canada (Commissioner of Customs and Revenue), [2000] 2 SCR 1120

In Little Sisters, federal customs officials, under the auspices of holding back material they deemed “obscene” under the Customs Act, targeted a lesbian bookstore for discriminatory treatment. While the majority found that there was discrimination in application, this could not be attributed to the Act itself, as “Parliament is entitled to proceed on the basis that its enactments ‘will be applied constitutionally’ by the public service.” This was notwithstanding that customs officers were ill-trained to identify obscene material, and that the process for challenging improper decision-making was lengthy and cumbersome. The multipart, legalistic Butler regime to determine obscenity was deemed sufficient to guide officers – the problem was not that the Act but the individuals applying its rules.

By contrast, Iaccobucci refused this characterization – he saw the problems as systemic and “baked into” the regime established by the Act, leading to lack of training, turnover of officers, lack of procedural fairness for importers, as well as “superficial and context-insensitive” review of materials. He found accordingly that the Act “practically invites” violations of s.2(b) freedom of expression. The framework needed to be completely rethought from the perspective of expressive rights.

His seems to be an eminently appropriate approach where a regime is so flawed that it can be reasonably anticipated that its operation will very likely result in rights violations. In the same way, manufacturers cannot avoid tort liability completely where they make products with built-in design flaws, notwithstanding that harm could be avoided if those using them did so perfectly (rather than like typical human beings). Surely, fundamental constitutional rights demand at least as much protection (especially as those affected cannot avoid the state’s “product”). History proved Iacobucci J. right – Little Sisters continued to be targeted notwithstanding government promises in the Supreme Court appeal that it had improved the administration of the Act. Nevertheless, I have tried in vain to find any court decisions where his dissent on this point has been taken up and applied.

Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé in Thibaudeau v Canada, [1995] 2 SCR 627

To borrow a phrase, Thibaudeau is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad equality decision, and the split amongst the judges is telling: the two female judges on the Court wrote separate dissents, with the male majority rejecting the section 15 claim. At issue was the treatment of child support under the Income Tax Act: it was taxable in the hands of custodial parents (98% of which were women) and a tax deduction for payors. Both justices analyzed the income tax regime through a gender lens, one that accounted for the realities of women raising children alone. The male judges relied on abstractions and legal fictions.

The majority and concurring decisions found that there was no negative distinction, because in most cases there was a net tax benefit to the “family unit” (which no longer existed). They thereby deemed egalitarian distribution of benefits to exist in families (even defunct ones!). This would notionally occur in separated families through “gross-ups” of child support to take into account tax consequences. If this version of “trickle down economics” did not occur and women had less money for their children, this inequality was “peculiar to specific cases” – the fault of individual judges or fathers not passing along tax benefits – and not the Income Tax Act. The justices refused to consider the unequal impact on custodial parents in their own right.

In Thibaudeau, L’Heureux-Dubé J. gestures to the doctrine of coverture in underscoring how using the couple as the unit of analysis for adverse effects of the taxation rules obscures inequality. She recognized the Act as the source of detrimental treatment because its “default” is that the benefit accrues completely to the non-custodial spouse and the detriment to the custodial spouse. The onus is on the custodial spouse to “wage an unremitting and costly battle, both emotionally and in the family law system,” if the family law system was to remedy the inequality completely through the gross-up mechanism. Not only did this require judges to perform repeated calculations perfectly, it also did not consider the practical realities of separated family life with custodial parents – women – having less money for legal fees and needing to avoid antagonizing non-custodial spouses. Despite her reasons not carrying the day in court, Parliament was persuaded: child support became non-deductible, non-taxable in 1997.

This case is emblematic of the justice’s emphatic “no” to an analysis of a woman’s Charter case that is degendered and abstracted to the point of absurdity. Constance Backhouse in her oeuvre, Claire L’Heureux-Dubé: A Life, documents the cost L’Heureux-Dubé J. pays for her rejections, including a fractious relationship with Justice (later Chief Justice) Antonio Lamer and a public, gendered attack by an appellate court judge following a sexual assault appeal popularly referred to as the “no means no” case, R v Ewanchuk, [1999] 1 SCR 330.

Her call to recognize the detrimental impact of default regimes that confer benefits to the more advantaged spouse would take nearly 20 years to be finally be recognized, in Quebec v A, 2013 SCC 5, [2013] 1 SCR 61. Even then, the majority voted to justify provincial family law legislation excluding common law spouses under section 1 because it prioritized autonomy and “choice” of couples. An approach that fully attends to conditions of subordination in which such “default” legislation operates has therefore yet to be fully embraced.

Justice Bertha Wilson in R v Morgentaler, [1988] 1 SCR 30

I wrestled with selecting the last “dissent”: do I adhere to the letter of these blog posts (dissents = a decision that is directly contrary to the majority on outcome) or the spirit (dissents = minority opinions that should have carried the day but didn’t)? There are several other decisions in which I agree with the dissenters on outcome, but their reasons are not completely compelling. In the end, I decided to keep with the spirit and discuss an opinion that technically is a concurrence.

At the time of Morgentaler (1988), Madam Justice Wilson was the only woman in a court that was not hospitable to women members, which makes her opinion even more remarkable for her refusal to “go along.” Relatively well known by now is that Justice Wilson departed from the majority by ruling that not only did the Criminal Code therapeutic abortion committee regime violate women’s security of the person due to its imposition of psychological trauma and unnecessary physical risk, any restrictions on abortion violated women’s right to liberty. She redefined liberty to include the right to make fundamental decision over one’s own life free from state interference, which included the decision as to whether to carry a pregnancy to term. In doing so, she created a more inclusive and objective conception of liberty over that gendered male. She remarked that the history of human rights had been “the history of men struggling to assert their dignity and common humanity against an overbearing state apparatus”, to the exclusion of “women’s needs and aspirations are only now being translated into protected rights”. Her conception of liberty came to inform majority decisions of the Court in cases like Blencoe v British Columbia (Human Rights Commission), [2000] 2 SCR 307.

Less cited, however, is how she found that the regime violated the principles of fundamental justice. She noted that Justice Lamer referred to other rights in sections 8-14 in interpreting fundamental justice in BC Motor Vehicles, thus leading her to surmise that the concept means not only procedural fairness but also consistency with other Charter rights and freedoms. Accordingly, “a deprivation of the s. 7 right which has the effect of infringing a right guaranteed elsewhere in the Charter cannot be in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” The abortion regime also infringed women’s freedom of conscience given that the state sought to override women’s own moral decision-making. Consideration of other rights violations as a breach of fundamental justice is profound – it recognizes that the Charter as a whole is an embodiment of what is just. In an article called “Constitutional Coalescence”, I argued this does not necessarily mean that one does, e.g. a mini-s.2(a) or s.15 analysis within section 7, but that an interpreter views the former rights through a different (potentially wider) lens, one that goes beyond a hyper-individualized and procedurally-based notion of justice to one that considers systemic structures of subordination. This is in stark contrast to other cases in which the Court has been at pains to keep rights conceptually separate and has declined to consider all rights in multiple rights claims. This led to what I refer to in my earlier work as a “watertight compartments” approach to the Charter leading to complete rejection of claims involving multiple rights. Despite its potential enrichment to our understanding of Charter rights, Wilson J’s innovation has not explicitly been taken up by other judges.

As Carissima Mathen has written in relation to equality, a divided decision “that is the result of failure to reach agreement on ‘deep’ issues is preferable to one that, as the price of unanimity, remains ‘shallow.’” The dissents that I have highlighted reflect the potential depth of dissenting decisions, and into which I hope future justices will mine for their wealth.

Shouting into the Constitutional Void

Section 28 of the Canadian Charter and Québec’s Bill 21

By Kerri A. Froc*

“And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Aphorism 146)

For several years now, I have been arguing that section 28 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is more than a symbolic flourish, more than just emphasis for section 15’s sex equality guarantee, and more than an interpretive provision. In fact, it has its own independent work to do. This includes blocking attempts by government to use section 33 to preserve gender inequality.

I did not make up this interpretation of section 28. Rather, it is part of section 28’s text and history and is uncontroversial amongst those who have studied the matter. That is why I am not only perplexed, but annoyed, at section 28 seemingly being ignored in the debate over the constitutionality of Bill 21’s requirement that certain government employees (including school teachers, police, Crown prosecutors and judges) do not wear religious symbols at work (section 6). It is in fact reminiscent of the way that women’s rights were ignored in 1981 constitutional negotiations, which galvanized women to insist upon section 28 in the first place. Below, I discuss section 28’s interpretation vis a vis section 33, and then how it would be pled in a constitutional challenge to Bill 21.

Section 28 beginning phrase reads: “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter.” This meant its guarantee of equal rights is not to be derogated by other provisions of the Charter. Provincial and federal bureaucrats attempted after the November 1981 “Kitchen Accord” to subject section 28 to section 33. They drafted amendments to section 28 and section 33, notionally to “implement” the terms of the Accord (though first ministers never discussed section 28). The opening words of Section 28 would have been revised to read, “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter except section 33,” and section 33 would have been amended to end with, “or section 28 of this Charter in its application to discrimination based on sex referred to in section 15.” These proposed additions were scrubbed from the Charter’s final text through the hard work of feminist advocates, women MPs from all parties, and, to put it bluntly, a groundswell of pissed off women from across the country. This history, however, merely confirms that “notwithstanding anything” means what it plainly says.

In their 1984 book, Canada Notwithstanding, Roy Romanow, John Whyte and Howard Leeson (all members of the November 1981 Saskatchewan constitutional delegation) confirmed that the removal of the application of section 33 from section 28 “in effect…meant that sexual equality in section 15 could not be overridden.” Justice Carole Julien, in a 2004 Charter case involving pay equity, Syndicat de la fonction publique c. Procureur général du Québec,had occasion to discuss the legal effect of section 28. She noted that the predominant scholarly opinion was that the override did not apply to section 28 “due to the historical context of its adoption and its objectives” (my translation). It is unfortunate that this judgment was merely a passing footnote in the recent Supreme Court decision, Centrale des syndicats du Québec v. Quebec (Attorney General).

How would it potentially play out if litigants argued section 28 in relation to the Bill 21 constitutional challenge? There are potentially two Charter claims that could be advanced by women who are adversely affected by section 6. The first is that it discriminates against them on the basis of sex, contrary to section 15(1). The second is that section 6 violates their freedom of religion disproportionately, so that women are unable to exercise this freedom on an equal basis with men. Sex discrimination is contrary to Charter section 15(1) and 28; a gender-disproportionate violation of religious freedom would be contrary to sections 2(a) and 28. Section 28 is involved in both claims as section 6 results in unequal rights afforded to men and women. A section 28 violation cannot be preserved using section 33.

One could also use an alternative legal argument in relation to section 15. Quebec could argue that a general sex equality violation, in and of itself, does not implicate section 28 (saying that section 28 does not really “add” anything to the section 15 determination). However, if additional state action is taken to attempt to preserve a section 15 sex equality violation by invoking section 33, section 28 operates to block the effect of that invocation. Taking action to preserve women’s section 15 rights violation results in unequal rights contrary to section 28. This is quite applicable to Bill 21, in that section 30 contains a pre-emptive declaration that the Act operates notwithstanding sections 2 and 7-15 of the Charter.

Regardless of which argument(s) you accept, the validity of section 6 cannot be maintained by the section 33 override because doing would mean section 28 is made subject to the legal effect of section 33.

A question I am sometimes asked is: where is the gender inequality in Bill 21? Many media sources have indicates that the group most affected are Muslim women wearing the head scarf (hijab), but do not indicate the sources they rely upon for that fact. I’ve done some of my own data crunching to provide initial support for that point.

Of the groups mentioned, Muslims are in vastly greater numbers in Québec than both Jews and Sikhs (men from these two other groups have been mentioned as being the others affected by the law). For the last year in which we have data (2011), there were nearly two and a half times as many Muslims in Quebec as Jews and Sikhs together. Approximately 53%, of Muslim women in Canada wear the hijab. Quebec’s public service is still massively dominated by white francophones; however, nearly half of its workers are female (amongst school teachers, one of the largest groups affected by Bill 21, that percentage is much higher). It stands to reason given these statistics that most of those affected are Muslim women. While some judges may not consider these statistics more than a “web of instinct”, this data could be supplemented by access to information requests and litigation disclosure to obtain numbers of affected employees. Further, one could argue that the state demanding women remove clothing has a more threatening import and communicates a sex-specific devaluation, given the way women’ attire has been regulated and judged by law throughout history. Thus one could argue that the qualitative impact constitutes a sex-based distinction in itself.

Even apart from disparate impact, if the purpose of a law is discriminatory or is to privilege certain religious beliefs, then that would be a violation of section 15(1) and section 2(a) respectively. A good case could be made that Bill 21 targets Muslim women based, for instance, on the Quebec Minister for the Status of Women’s comments. Concerning the privileging of religious beliefs, it is worth noting that symbols of Quebec’s “religious cultural heritage” (read: Christianity/Catholicism) are specifically exempted from all of Bill 21’s provisions by section 16.

Of course, there are potentially other elements in relation to a Charter analysis that would have to be successfully argued, such as showing “disadvantage” for section 15(1) and more than atrivial infringement of religious freedom, for section 2(a). However, I do not regard those as posing much of an impediment.

Why should we care if civil liberties associations, lawyers, and courts ignore section 28 in the upcoming constitutional battle over Bill 21? To paraphrase Nietzsche, if we gaze into the Constitution and see only an abyss when it comes to section 28, we should not be surprised if the abyss gazes back in the form of more constitutional provisions courts feel secure in being able to ignore into desuetude. Simply put, entrenched constitutional text should and does count more than implied bills of rights, unwritten principles, constitutional architecture and the like. If not section 28 in this case, then when?

* Kerri A. Froc is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick. Follow her on Twitter!

It’s Happening Here Too

Canadians need to heed David Bernstein’s warning about administrative decision-makers’ disregard of constitutional rights

A very interesting article by David E. Bernstein, “Anti-Discrimination Laws and the Administrative State: A Skeptic’s Look at Administrative Constitutionalism” has recently been published in the Notre Dame Law Review. Professor Bernstein cautions against allowing administrative decision-makers to pursue egalitarian goals unchecked by judicial supervision, because this pursuit often tramples over constitutional guarantees, especially freedom of speech. It is a compelling warning, and deserves the interest of Canadian readers, because the problems Professor Bernstein identifies afflict Canadian law. Indeed, much of his argument applies to the administrative enforcement of other statutes, not only anti-discrimination ones.

Professor Bernstein takes aim at the view, which he attributes to a significant number of American scholars, that administrative decision-makers both do and ought to play a very significant role in defining the scope and content of constitutional protections for certain fundamental rights. This view, “administrative constitutionalism”, rests on a number of arguments. Its supporters think that administrative decision-making “is more transparent than” the judicial sort, that administrators “are more accountable to public opinion than are courts”, and that they bring their expertise to bear on the application of constitutional standards to particular regulatory schemes. (1384) Professor Bernstein provides a number of examples of administrative decision-makers “aggressively enforcing antidiscrimination laws at the expense of constitutional protections for freedom of expression and guarantees of due process of law”, (1386) sometimes in defiance of relevant Supreme Court precedent and political direction. These will be of considerable interest to readers who follow American legal and political developments.

But what is more interesting from a parochial Canadian perspective is Professor Bernstein’s analysis of the situation ― his explanation for why administrative decision-makers tend to apply the law in a way furthers their statutory mission at the expense of the constitutional rights of those subject to their decisions. The explanation is partly institutional, and partly ideological.

The first institutional fact that contributes to administrative disregard of constitutional rights, according to Professor Bernstein, is that administrative decision-makers “maximize their power and budget”, and secure “political support, by expanding the scope of the laws they enforce”. (1401) Constitutional limits to this expansion are brushed aside. Second, a purposivist approach to statutory interpretation “practically invites agencies to find and even create ambiguities so that they can interpret statutes broadly”. (1402) In doing so, administrative decision-makers see themselves as accomplishing legislative goals, and ignore the compromises that may have been involved in the enactment of their enabling legislation. Third, administrative “agencies tend to attract employees who are committed to the agency’s regulatory mission” (1403) and want to expand their own power to, as they see it, do good. While some instances of regulatory overreach invite pushback from those subject to the regulation, this is generally not the case when it comes to “antidiscrimination regulation”, in part because “many businesses hesitate to publicly oppose” this regulation “because of the negative public relations implications”. (1403) Fourth and last, administrative decision-makers “do not see enforcing constitutional constraints on their authority as their job”. (1404) The courts themselves are partly to blame for this, because they often discourage the bureaucrats from looking to the constitution. But, for their part, supporters of “administrative constitutionalism” positively encourage administrative decision-makers to treat constitutional constraints as no more than a factor, among others, to take into account or to reject.

As for ideological concerns, they have to do with the fact that “conflicts between freedom of expression on the one hand, and restrictions on discrimination by private actors on the other, are conflicts between a
constitutional right and a statutory privilege”. (1406) As a matter of orthodox law the former ought to prevail, but for those “who believe that protecting vulnerable groups from discrimination should be at the heart of our legal and political system”, (1406) such an outcome would be wrong. They are accordingly inclined to discount constitutional concerns, or to seek to re-balance them by appealing to “the notion that the ‘constitutional value’ of antidiscrimination should trump First Amendment limitations on government regulation”. (1407) These views are prevalent not only in the legal academy, but also among activists ― and their ideological allies among the administrative decision-makers in charge of enforcing anti-discrimination laws. The fact that “[a]t the state and local level” these decision-makers are often

known as ‘human rights commissions’ … suggest[s] that the right to be free from private discrimination is at least as valuable as other rights, including constitutional rights. Indeed, the phrase ‘human rights’ suggests a superiority over mere textually supported constitutional rights. (1408)

So why, Professor Bernstein asks, don’t the courts do something about administrative decision-makers run amok? After all, the courts ― at least “generalist courts” ― “do not share mission-driven agencies’ tunnel vision, i.e., the latter’s devotion to its statutory mission at the expense of
other considerations”. (1410) But the administrative state is often able to escape scrutiny by using settlements or ostensibly “soft” forms of regulation that are not subject to judicial review. Professor Bernstein argues that courts should engage in review of administrative action more often, and that they ought to be less deferential when they do so. He also suggests possible institutional reforms, notably “to establish constitutional watchdog offices devoted to protecting constitutional rights from
[administrative] overreach”, (1413) whether within individual administrative entities or for the government as a whole.

Canadian readers probably do not need me to tell them that the issues Professor Bernstein describes arise with at least as much, and probably more, urgency in Canada. After all, although it rests on foundations that are partly different from those of its American counterpart, and goes by a different name, administrative constitutionalism is the law of the land in Canada, whenever a court is minded to follow the precedent set in Doré v Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12, [2012] 1 SCR 395. In Doré, the Supreme Court held that, given their alleged expertise in applying constitutional “values” in the context of specific statutory schemes, administrative decision-makers are entitled to judicial deference, even in cases where the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is implicated. Whether an administrative decision gives effect to constitutional “values” ― not even rights ― as fully as possible in light of the statutory objectives is to be assessed on a standard of reasonableness. The Supreme Court also confirmed that reasonableness is the presumptive standard of review applicable to the decisions of anti-discrimination tribunals, in Canada (Canadian Human Rights Commission) v. Canada (Attorney General), 2018 SCC 31, [2018] 2 SCR 230 (although this was not a Charter case).

Admittedly, the Supreme Court hasn’t always been inclined to do so, occasionally simply ignoring Doré. But its latest engagement with administrative interference with constitutional rights, in Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 SCR 293, reiterated the applicability of the Doré framework, although it is worth pointing out that the Court’s majority insisted that this wasn’t supposed to be “a weak or watered-down version of proportionality”. [80] Still, the majority wrote that

Doré’s approach recognizes that an administrative decision-maker, exercising a discretionary power under his or her home statute, typically brings expertise to the balancing of a Charter protection with the statutory objectives at stake … Consequently, the decision-maker is generally in the best position to weigh the Charter protections with his or her statutory mandate in light of the specific facts of the case … It follows that deference is warranted when a reviewing court is determining whether the decision reflects a proportionate balance. [79; references omitted]

Professor Bernstein’s article helps us identify the folly of this approach. Despite the claims to the contrary of Justice Abella (the author of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Doré and the most strident defender of “administrative constitutionalism”, most recently in Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness) v Chhina, 2019 SCC 29) and her colleagues, administrative decision-makers are unlikely to take the constitution, or even constitutional “values”, seriously at all. Granted, unlike their American counterparts, Canadian courts do not discourage bureaucrats from taking the Charter into account. Justice Abella, in particular, exhorts them to do so. But such exhortation is unlikely to mean much, compared with the much more concrete incentives Professor Bernstein identifies.

Canadian bureaucrats, no less than their American colleagues, want to expand their power and to advance their and their allies’ ideological goals. The seemingly expanding efforts of human rights bureaucracies or other administrative decision-makers (such as the former benchers of the former Law Society of Upper Canada) to police speech in the name of equality are an illustration of these twin tendencies. And while there has been pushback against the Law Society’s demand that lawyers “promote equality, diversity, and inclusion”, culminating in the election of a plurality of benchers opposed to this imposition, the incentives, both in the private sector and, still more in, say, public educational institutions are very much on the side of tacit or even vocal endorsement of the one-way ratchet of obstensibly pro-equality agenda.

The Supreme Court’s rulings on statutory interpretation exacerbate this problem. In West Fraser Mills Ltd v British Columbia (Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22, [2018] 1 SCR 635, the majority insisted that the statute at issue featured a “broad and unrestricted delegation[s] of power” [11] so that an administrative decision-maker could pursue its purposes; in TWU, the majority also spoke of a statutory objective “stated in the broadest possible terms”. [33] (West Fraser, to be sure, was not a case implicating constitutional rights. TWU was such a case, however, and their logic is much the same.) In both cases, as I explained respectively here and here, the majority gave no effect to statutory language suggesting that the administrative decision-makers’ powers were not, in fact, unlimited, to which dissents sought to draw its attention. In West Fraser, the majority opinion disparaged attention to such details as “formalistic”. [18] As Professor Bernstein points out, when empowered to pursue expansively defined statutory missions, administrative decision-makers will be unlikely to pay much heed to constitutional concerns. Indeed, TWU offers a perfect illustration of this, since the Supreme Court ended up having to make up the reasons that supposedly justified the administrative decisions at issue.

What Professor Bernstein terms “ideological” factors operate in Canada too. Here too, the value of non-discrimination in the private sphere, branded as a “human right” by federal and provincial legislation alike is held to prevail over such constitutional concerns as freedom of expression and freedom of conscience. The TWU majority spoke of “shared values”, notably non-discrimination, as a valid reason for limiting constitutional rights, despite the fact that the Charter explicitly provides that it does not expand the law-making powers of legislatures or their creatures in the administrative state.

Like Professor Bernstein, I will conclude with an appeal for greater judicial scrutiny of administrative decisions that implicate constitutional rights. Judges ought to realize that administrative decision-makers have no particular incentive to be mindful of the constitution, and real incentives to disregard it. Even when they act in good faith, bureaucrats suffer from a single-minded, excessive focus on their statutory missions, real or assumed, that is bound to divert their attention from constitutional rules that ought to be paramount for all those who exercise public power, but in reality matter primarily to the courts ― if they matter to anyone.

To be clear, the issue is not only with the Doré framework ― though this is the most obvious way in which excessive and unwarranted deference is given to administrative decision-makers when they decide Charter questions. The Doré framework must go, the sooner the better, but this is not enough. The idea that “values” are an adequate substitute for law, whether as a source of constitutional guarantees or of administrative powers, must go along with the Doré framework, to which it is closely linked. And the Supreme Court’s approach to statutory interpretation, and in particular its willingness to countenance supposedly “unrestricted delegations” of power to administrative decision-makers, even if this requires disregarding more circumscribed statutory language, must go too. This, in turn, may require an end of the Court’s fascination with administrative expertise and its pro-regulatory bias.

This is, admittedly, a very ambitious programme. But, as Professor Bernstein shows, it is on that must be attempted if constitutional constraints are to be meaningful in the administrative state. “Administrative constitutionalism” is no substitute for the real thing. This is precisely why its supporters, who are not willing to accept constraints on what they believe is the bureaucracy’s power to do good, advocate for it. This is why we must reject it.

On the Origin of Rights

Are religious justifications for rights and equality inadmissible in Canadian politics?

Why have we got the fundamental rights we think we have? This is a somewhat embarrassing question for secular liberals, such as yours truly. We don’t have a very satisfactory answer to it. Our religious fellow-citizens, by contrast, have one, which is that rights come from God, in whose image (at least the Judeo-Christian tradition) human beings have been created. As it turns out, however, not everyone is okay with this answer being publicly aired, at least by a politician. This is puzzling to me, and worth a response.

The minor Twitter dustup of the week so far was triggered by the Conservative Party’s leader, Andrew Scheer, who wanted us all to know that he “believe[s] that we are all children of God and there is equal and infinite value in all of us”, from which it follows that no one is superior or inferior to anyone else on the basis of “race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation”. Pretty anodyne stuff, I should have thought. But not according to, well, a number of people ― one can never tell how many with these Twitter dustups. Emmett Macfarlane demanded that Mr. Scheer “[k]eep his imaginary shit out of [his] public policy”, eventually adding that”[i]t’s actually highly disagreeable to imply … that the equality of people is rooted in our status as ‘children of God'”. And I’ve seen other comments along these lines too. Perhaps, as Jonathan Kay suggested, “Canada has run out of real things to fight about”. But I take it that to Professor Macfarlane, and to others who think like him, this is a serious thing.

So here are some hopefully serious thoughts on this, from the perspective of one who does not share Mr. Scheer’s belief that human beings are children of God. To begin with, it’s necessary to recall that something like Mr. Scheer’s view was, historically, the foundation of the argument for the normative equality of human beings and the existence of fundamental rights inviolable by a political community. It was John Locke’s argument and Thomas Jefferson’s, for instance. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, as “self-evident” “truths”, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Lord Acton would later wrote that “the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in the fulfillment of duty to God … is the secret essence of the Rights of Man”.

A Twitter interlocutor told me that this was of no import in Canada. Stuff and nonsense. Canada is very much an heir to the liberal tradition of which both Locke and Jefferson were among the founders, and Acton one of the great exponents. (The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in particular, embodies this tradition ― and, in permitting individual rights to be set up as limits on public power, does so in a manner that is more Jeffersonian than the defenders of Canadian exceptionalism care to acknowledge.) Others have pointed out that Locke’s egalitarianism did not extend to the Aboriginal peoples of the New World. They might have added that Jefferson was, notoriously, a slave-owner who fathered children with an enslaved woman. Acton, almost as notoriously, supported the slave-owners in the American Civil War in a shockingly misguided and embarrassing defence of federalism. But I don’t think this matters here. Locke, Jefferson, and Acton fell short of their principles ― as human beings often do ― and this is to their individual discredit, but not to that of the principles which, had they followed these principles fully, would have prevented them from discrediting themselves.

More modern, secular statements about the origin of rights, meanwhile, are full of elisions and circumlocution. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” This is, up to a point, an echo of Jefferson’s words, but notice what’s missing here: any indication of why human beings are born free and equal, or how we know this, or who endowed them with reason and conscience. Section 1 of the Canadian Bill of Rights “recognized and declared that in Canada there have existed and shall continue to exist … [certain] human rights and fundamental freedoms”. This (like similar, if more laconic, language in section 2 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990) is a recognition of the pre-political nature of rights, which are not created by whatever positive law implements them. But again, it is not clear how these pre-political rights came into being. The preamble to the Canadian Bill of Rights declares that “the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions”. The preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also refers to “principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”. But the connection between these principles and the rights these instruments protect is left studiously undefined.

I am not saying that this is a bad thing. It’s probably more important to agree on our having rights than on the causes of our having rights. I share A.V. Dicey’s belief that it is more important to provide legal remedies for the violations of rights than to declare grand principles of rights-protection. Jefferson could consider the divine origin of rights self-evident, but in contemporary society neither his view nor any alternative can make such claims, and it is fortunate that we have gotten on with the practical business of providing legal remedies against the breaches of at least some important rights instead of debating the precise metaphysical reasons why we should do so.

It would be a long debate. We secularists cannot claim to know, collectively, where rights or equality come from. To be sure, some of us, individually, have hypotheses. There is Kant’s work on human dignity of course (arguably as mysterious as many a religious dogma). Jeremy Waldron (no secularist, actually, as will soon be apparent), sets out a multifaceted justification for equality in his book One Another’s Equals. Another line of thought that I personally find appealing is based (non-religious) natural law, developed along the lines Randy Barnett sketches out. In a nutshell, this argument holds that, given certain facts about human nature ― perhaps especially our general tendency, all too well attested by history, to disregard the interests of those whom we do not consider to be (at least) our equals ― if we want to live peacefully and prosperously with one another, we really ought to consider each other as equals and as holders of certain rights. Intriguingly, the preamble of the Universal Declaration actually makes an argument of more or less this sort: “[w]hereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”. In other words, if we don’t commit to ideas like equality and some other fundamental rights, we can be pretty sure that things will turn out badly.

But none of that is, to use Jefferson’s words, self-evident. One can plausibly be a Kantian, a secular Waldronian, a latter-day natural lawyer, but one cannot plausibly insist that these explanations, let alone any one of them, are the only admissible ones. Nor can one specifically exclude religious explanations for equality or fundamental rights from the realm of admissibility. (That’s not to say one has to find them persuasive.) Professor Waldron himself writes that it “seem[s] obvious to [him]” that

an adequate conception of human dignity and of the equality that is predicated on that dignity is rooted in an understanding of the relation of the human person to God or in aspects of human nature that matter to God or matter for our relation to God[;] that human worth and human dignity are going to have to be rooted in something like a theological anthropology, a religiously loaded account of human nature. (177)

Professor Waldron acknowledges that these things are not obvious ― to put it mildly ― to many others; that “[m]any philosophers” ― or political scientists, like Professor Macfarlane, or others ― “are inclined to dismiss religious accounts of human equality as superstitious nonsense”. (178) He specifically addresses the concerns of those who would rather that religious arguments on such issues not be offered to the public. As read him, Professor Waldron speaks mostly to the position of the philosopher (not necessarily a professional one, but perhaps simply a philosophically-minded citizen), not that of the aspiring office-holder. But I think that his conclusion that “everybody calling it as they see it and giving the fullest and most honest account they can is superior to … embarrassed self-censorship about a matter this important” (213) is applicable to people in Mr. Scheer’s position, as well as in Professor Waldron’s. This is partly a matter of honesty both personal and intellectual, and partly also a consequence of the fact that, as noted above, for politics and law, our agreement on the existence of rights and the value of equality matters rather more than the reasons we might have for subscribing to this agreement. If some people want to sign on for religious reasons, we should welcome them and be glad of their company even if we do not find their reasons convincing.

So, despite not being religious, I would not purge the religious accounts of equality and fundamental rights from the realm of intellectually respectable ideas, and still less from the public square. Indeed, I will end on a on wistful and worried note. Professor Waldron suggests that “perhaps some of the foundations” of our morality “have [a] nonnegotiable character;” (188) they must be obeyed and are not subject to revision in light of our other commitments. These foundations “may include the basic equality of all human beings, and I wonder whether a religious grounding might not be a good way of characterizing this particularly strenuous form of objective resilience”. (188) Perhaps the same might be said about liberty, or its more specific instantiations, such as the freedom of conscience and the freedom of speech.

And so, like Professor Waldron, I wonder whether a world, call it Jefferson’s world if you like, in which there was certainty about the origin of rights ― and about their divine origin, and hence transcendant importance, too ― was not one in which rights could be more secure than in our world of pluralist doubt. Against that, we must count the reality of, on the whole, much greater respect for rights today than in Jefferson’s own time and in his own life. Still, it is difficult not to worry that our lack of confidence about the origin of rights leaves them vulnerable to the rhetoric of those who see rights (and other legal and constitutional limitations) as dispensable luxuries or outright obstacles in their pursuit of plans for remodelling human beings, society, and the world in the name of this or that ideal.

What Really Matters

Whether Québec’s anti-religious bill is racist or Islamophobic is beside the point. What matters is its illiberalism

In the debate about Bill 21, Québec’s proposed legislation to make “laicity”, whatever exactly that is, the province’s official religious doctrine, and to impose a correspondingly faith-based dress code on its teachers, lawyers, and police officers, much attention is being devoted to the question of whether the endeavour reflects racism, Islamophobia, or other forms of discrimination. The proposal’s critics often say that it does. Its defenders, and indeed some critics, profess offence at the suggestion, and insist that the aggressive form of secularism the Québec seeks to enforce is a principled political vision. It seems to me that this all quite beside the point. Whether or not Bill 21 is the product of discrimination or of high principle does not matter. It is equally despicable either way.

Now, I should say that I personally have little doubt that xenophobia makes a more-than-de–minimis contribution to such political support as there is for Bill 21. Without an irrational fear of “invaders”, of foreigners (actual or presumed) who “impose their customs” on the established populations (which outnumber them by 30- or 50- if not 100-to-1), the ambitions of dogmatic secularists to impose their creed on Québec would in all likelihood have remained perfectly theoretical. This is, after all, what they had been for decades, before this fear started being inflated in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Multani v Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, 2006 SCC 6, [2006] 1 SCR 256, a.k.a. the kirpan case. For all that we are asked to remember Québec’s uniquely fraught relationship with (Catholic) religion, there was nothing like the current degree of support for virulent secularism at a time when the memories of this relationship were fresher than they are now. Still, whatever may be the case in general, we should probably be reluctant to make accusations of xenophobia against individuals ― unless, of course, we have specific reasons to do so in their particular case.

Let us focus, then, on the supposed principled justifications for Bill 21. Let us presume, for the sake of argument, that its supporters really believe that, as Christian Rioux put it in Le Devoir, “the diversity of modern societies makes state secularism an increasingly unavoidable requirement. The pluralist societies are, more citizens demand that the state’s religious neutrality be beyond reproach” (translation mine here and below). Let us ignore the delightful irony of a man named Christian preaching secularism. Let us even avert our eyes from the sleight-of-hand involved in the equation of “state neutrality”, which as the Supreme Court explained in Mouvement laïque québécois v Saguenay (City), 2015 SCC 16, [2015] 2 SCR 3, “is required of institutions and the state, not individuals”, [74] with the “neutrality” of men and women who work for the state. Let us concede, or imagine, that the supporters of Bill 21 believe in good faith that their vision of secularism is morally justified.

Why are they wrong? Simply because this form of secularism involves gross violations of individual liberty. It means that the state gets to tell people how, or how not, to practise their faith ― whether they will be allowed to pursue their fundamental commitments. Mr. Rioux denies that Bill 21 does any such thing, since it only affects “the right to publicize [one’s religion] during working hours” ― as if one could have a part-time faith. This is laughable. If Mr. Rioux were asked to wear a kippah, but only during working hours, would that be all right by him? (This is why the frequent attempts to analogize the policy of Bill 21 to bans on political self-identification do not work: political commitments are indeed part-time things, even for hardened partisans, and can be set aside and then resumed, in a way that religious commitments cannot.)

Needless to say, the state may limit or even take away a person’s liberty to avoid it being used to interfere the life, liberty, or property of others; and, perhaps, to avoid it being used to deny others’ equal membership in the community. But public officials or employees who refuse to convert to part-time religion or to commit apostasy do no such thing. They do not take anyone’s property; they do not deprive anyone of their ability to do anything; they do not impose their beliefs on anyone. Sure, they are visibly, manifestly, identifiable as having a religious affiliations; but most of us are visibly, manifestly identifiable as members of particular genders and racial groups, not to mention as being of a certain age. A Muslim teacher wearing a hijab no more makes her students Muslim than a white male teacher makes his students white men. (Of course it is possible that a religious teacher or public servant will engage in proselytism, or unduly favour co-religionists. These things should be punished, just as propaganda or favouritism based on other commitments or aspects of one’s identity should be punished.)

The secularist obsessives supporting Bill 21, however, have a much more expansive view of the reasons for which the state can deny people’s liberty. Mr. Rioux writes that, “faced with a multiculturalism that seeks to impose its single-minded thinking everywhere, the premier [of Québec] was right to assert … that ‘this is how we live here'”, because “Quebeckers have much more than a language in common”. Never mind, again, the irony of denouncing single-minded thinking while insisting that a state may deprive citizens of liberty in the name of “how we live here” and of what they purportedly “have in common”. Were Mr. Rioux not a hypocrite, the idea that state-sanctioned ways of doing things ― said to be widely or even universally shared despite, and indeed precisely because of, glaring evidence of the fact that they are not ― can be imposed by force on those who do not share them would be no less wrong-headed, and no less pernicious. This idea purports to authorize those in power to dictate their beliefs and their ways of living to everyone, for no other reason than that they are in power. It is incompatible with any liberty that deserves the name.

Of course this illiberal view is widely held. It is not confined to any particular racial or religious group, or any nationality. Mr. Rioux appeals, against the charge of Islamophobia, to the fact that a large majority of French Muslims apparently support restrictions similar to those that would be imposed by Bill 21. They can’t be Islamophobes, can they? This sounds like a good argument, so far as it goes, except that it doesn’t go anywhere that matters. A French Muslim can be as illiberal as a French Canadian lapsed Catholic. For that matter, the judicial darlings of Canada’s bien-pensant multiculturalist intelligentsia have proven themselves quite capable of this sort of illiberalism when then invoked mythical “shared values” to authorize an arm of the state to deny an accreditation to a religious dissenting institution, in Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32.

It might be odd to say so now, but the debate around Bill 21 shows as well as any other that equality, and its attendant -phobias and -isms, occupy too large a space is our thought and discourse. This is not to say that these things do not matter. But not everything that is wrong in our politics is wrong because it contravenes the value of equality. Nor is anything that does not contravene this value therefore permitted, or anything that supports this value therefore required. It is time we remembered that liberty is no less important ― or, better yet, that we realized that liberty is more important, but I am not asking for everything at once. It is time we remembered that living individuals, not intellectual dreamt-up abstractions or imagined communities, are what really matters. It is time we stopped fearing the way in which others might use their liberty if we do not preemptively coerce them. It is time we were free.

No Money for You

Can Saskatchewan fund non-Catholic students in Catholic schools? Raising government ire, a court says no.

A couple of weeks ago, in Good Spirit School Division No. 204 v Christ the Teacher Roman Catholic Separate School Division No. 212, 2017 SKQB 109, Saskatchewan’s Court of Queen’s Bench held that provincial funding for non-Catholic students of Catholic “separate” schools in the province was unconstitutional. Saskatchewan’s government is upset, and has proclaimed its intention to invoke the “notwithstanding clause” of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to nullify the effects of this decision. In this post, I will summarize the decision and briefly explain why I think it is correct. I will comment on the use of the Charter‘s override provision separately.

The constitution requires Saskatchewan to allow the formation of, and to provide equal funding for “separate” schools for Catholics and Protestants, whenever one of these two groups happens to be a minority in a given school district and if parents belonging to the minority group request it. The mechanics of this requirement are somewhat complex: section 17 of the Saskatchewan Act, 1905, which created the province from the North-West Territories, makes applicable to it a somewhat modified version of section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which guarantee “right[s] or privilege[s] with respect to separate schools which any class of persons ha[d in 1905]” under the then-existing territorial law. Laws enacted in furtherance of this guarantee are constitutional and not subject to scrutiny under the Charter, because its enactment did not abrogate the guarantee. Any other provincial laws relative to education, including the “separate” schools, are subject to Charter scrutiny like all other legislation in Canada.

The case was a challenge by a public school board to the funding received by a Catholic one for non-Catholic students attending one of its schools. If this funding were not available, the students would have attended a school operated by the plaintiff, and the funding would have followed them there. The case raised two main questions. Is the funding of non-Catholic students attending Catholic “separate” schools part of the guaranteed rights or privileges? If not, is it contrary to the Charter? There were a couple of preliminary issues too: whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue, and whether the school at the centre of the proceedings, St Theodore, was a legitimate “separate” school despite the fact that most of its students were not Catholic. Justice Layh answered both of these questions in the affirmative, and I will say no more of them. The decision is 230 pages long, not too much of it superfluous. I will only focus on the key points here.

Justice Layh found that there was no constitutionally guaranteed right for a “separate” Catholic school board to receive public funding for educating non-Catholic students. Only “denominational aspects” of the “separate” schools were constitutionally protected from legislative interference. The aim of the guarantee was to preserve minority religious communities by allowing them to withdraw their children from the majority’s schools and so to avoid assimilation. Moreover, at the time of the guarantee’s entrenchment, Catholics viewed education jointly with non-Catholics with great suspicions, and while constitutional interpretation had to account for new social realities ― notably the fact that Catholics and protestants were no longer the only religious groups of any significance in Canada, making special protections for them anomalies ― it could not import theological developments, such as Catholicism’s greater openness to other religions ― that occurred since the Saskatchewan Act came into force.

As a result, the ability to educate non-Catholics could not be viewed as a “denominational aspect” of the functioning of Catholic schools; it was not essential to their functioning as Catholic institutions. Therefore it was not constitutionally protected. Nor did the requirement of non-discriminatory funding for “separate” schools extend to funding students from outside the religious community for which they were set up. The funding requirement served to protect the distinctive religious character of the schools, not the ability of outsiders to attend them. In short, the provision of funding of which the plaintiffs complained was not a constitutional requirement, but a legislative choice of the province.

This area of the law is quite complicated, and I cannot claim particular expertise on it. To me, however, Justice Layh’s reasons are largely persuasive. It will not come as a surprise to regular readers that I am very skeptical about his take on the role of social change in constitutional interpretation, as I might further explain in a future post, if time permits. But I do not think that this is material here. Justice Layh makes a compelling case about the originalist raison d’être of the constitutional protections for “separate” schools being to allow minority communities to stand on their own, and about there being no legal right to funding for non-Catholic students in 1905. A purely originalist analysis would not, I think, yield conclusions different from his.

Having concluded that the funding of non-Catholic students was not exempt from Charter scrutiny, Justice Layh turned to the plaintiff’s claims that it infringed the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and equality. Part of the respondents’ case on this point was that the plaintiff, not being a natural person, was not entitled to make such claims, since only individuals could hold religious beliefs or claim equality rights under section 15 of the Charter. Justice Layh dismissed this argument. In his view, although only an individual could claim that a generally neutral law had a disproportionate or discriminatory effect on him or her, anyone could argue that a legislative measure was unconstitutional on its face, as the plaintiff here was doing. I find this distinction dubious; once the plaintiff is granted standing to sue in the public interest, shouldn’t it be able to advance constitutional claims on behalf of others? Isn’t that the point of public interest standing? But nothing turns on this here.

Justice Layh found that funding non-Catholic students in Catholic schools ― and, importantly, not funding, say, non-Muslim students in Muslim schools or non-Jewish students in Jewish schools ― amounted a breach of the state’s duty of religious neutrality and to discrimination on the basis of religion. Neutrality means treating all religious groups equally, as well as not favouring religion over non-religion or vice versa. Providing money to Catholic schools so that they can educate non-Catholics, instructing them in Catholicism and thus “evangelizing” them, as well as creating goodwill in the community, without providing equivalent opportunities to other religious groups is not acting impartially, and is thus a breach of the Charter‘s religious freedom guarantee as explained, notably in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), 2015 SCC 16, [2015] 2 S.C.R. 3 (which I explained and discussed here). It is also, ipso facto, discriminatory. I think this is correct, and quite obviously so. There is no meaningful account of religious neutrality on which singling out one group for a favourable treatment denied others is permissible.

There remained the question of a possible justification of these infringements of Charter rights under section 1, as limitations “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. Justice Layh found that no such demonstration had been carried out. Indeed, the provincial government had not even really attempted one. The defendant school division, for its part, argued that funding Catholic schools for students outside of their faith served to provide educational opportunities to all students, and choice to the parents. Justice Layh rejected these objectives, on the basis that they had nothing to do with the limitation of funding of non-denominational students (if I can be forgive this use of the term) to Catholic schools. Public schools could provide educational opportunities, while the objective of enhancing choice could not be advanced by an inherently discriminatory policy. While these objections seem to me to go to the “rational connection” stage of the section 1 test rather than to invalidate the objectives themselves, nothing turns on this. The objections themselves are well taken, and Justice Layh’s conclusion, correct.

In the result, Justice Layh declares that Saskatchewan’s legislative and regulatory provisions allowing funding of non-Catholic students in Catholic “separate” schools is unconstitutional. He adds that “[a]ppreciating that the implementation of this declaration will cause significant repercussions in the province, this declaration is stayed until June 30, 2018.” [476] The stay, I think, is self-evidently appropriate here, and this case should be kept in mind in any future discussions of suspended declarations of unconstitutionality.

As it works its way up the judicial hierarchy, Good Spirit School Division could also produce important rulings on the constitutional issues it addresses ― and I hope that appellate courts will pay attention to Justice Layh’s reasons, which strike me ― despite some reservations ― as generally very careful, well-argued, and perhaps above all lucid. But all of that is likely to be overshadowed by debates about the Saskatchewan government’s invocation of the “notwithstanding clause” to annul Justice Layh’s decision. I hope to say more on that in short order.

“Intolerant and Illiberal”

The BC Court of Appeal is right to insist on tolerance for an intolerant institution

In a decision issued yesterday, Trinity Western University v. The Law Society of British Columbia, 2016 BCCA 423, the British Columbia Court of Appeal held that the Law Society acted unreasonably when its benchers, following its members, voted “not to approve” the University’s proposed law school, preventing its graduates from practicing in the province and causing it to lose the government’s permission to grant recognized degrees. The unanimous decision “by the court” is not always straightforward to follow in its administrative law analysis, which is surely at least in part the consequence of the convoluted approach that the Supreme Court has taken to analyzing Charter issues when they arise in administrative decision-making. But on the constitutional issue of balancing the allegedly competing considerations of religious liberty and equality rights, the Court gets it quite right when it concludes that “[t]his case demonstrates that a well-intentioned majority acting in the name of tolerance and liberalism, can, if unchecked, impose its views on the minority in a manner that is in itself intolerant and illiberal.” [193] Let me explain.

Trinity Western requires its student to sign a “Covenant” which, among other things, seeks to prevent them from having sex outside marriage, and defines marriage as strictly heterosexual. Whether or not this is intended to discriminate against LGBTQ students, it obviously does discriminate. Although there apparently are some such students at Trinity Western, the Covenant is obviously a greater burden on most of them (except those who do not view celibacy as a burden) than on most heterosexual students (though it’s worth noting that the Covenant does restrict the liberty of such students too, and in a way that would surely be unconstitutional if this restriction were imposed by the state). A great many people, within and outside the legal profession, and within and outside the LGBTQ community, are offended by the Covenant’s existence, and have campaigned for Trinity Western’s proposed law school not to be recognized, preventing its graduates from entering the profession. For some, this seems to be a means of putting pressure on Trinity Western to repent its discriminatory sins. But Trinity Western has made it quite clear that, as befits religious fanatics, they will do no such thing. There will be a Trinity Western Law School with the Covenant, or there will not be one at all. There is no tertium quid.

Trinity Western argues that denial of accreditation to its law school by the BC Law Society infringes its religious liberty. The Law Society claims that it has balanced religious liberty and the equality rights of the LGBTQ people, which are infringed both by being put to the choice of either refraining from going to Trinity Western or going there and living in the closet for the duration of their studies. Moreover, the Law Society says that it should not put itself in the position of effectively endorsing the Covenant by accrediting the law school despite the Covenant’s existence. As the Court’s judgment shows, the Law Society did no such thing. Although its benchers were aware of these various concerns, they punted on the decision whether to accredit Trinity Western or not, and let the Society’s members effectively make that decision through a referendum, authorizing it through a resolution that made no mention of the religious liberty side of the ledger.

How should these concerns be balanced, then? More to the point, are these concerns even real? Trinity Western’s clearly are. Its ability to exist as a religious institution is denied when the government (or its delegate the Law Society) denies it an accreditation, that would otherwise be available to it, on the basis of its religious beliefs. Sure, Trinity Western doesn’t have to have a law school. But if the only reason the state will not let it have one is its religious belief, then the state is in default of its duty of religious neutrality, which applies as much to prevent the state from singling out a set of beliefs for a particular burden as to prevent it singling out a set of beliefs for special support (the proposition upheld by the Supreme Court in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), 2015 SCC 16, [2015] 2 SCR 3).

The Law Society’s constitutional concerns, by contrast, are simply made up. The moral concerns are real enough ― Trinity Western’s Covenant is profoundly illiberal (though nobody seems actually concerned about that) and homophobic in effect if not in intent. But that is not enough. As the committee of the Federation of Law Societies that considered Trinity Western’s proposed law school pointed out,

approval of the [Trinity Western] law school would not result in any fewer choices for LGBT students than they have currently. Indeed, an overall increase in law school places in Canada seems certain to expand the choices for all students. [Quoted at 174]

The Court stated that “[t]hese findings are entitled to deference”, which may or may not be right. But quite apart from any deference, this statement is self-evidently correct. Even assuming (plausibly even if not entirely accurately) that no LGBTQ student would want to attend Trinity Western, the number of law schools open to such students does not change whether or not Trinity Western’s is allowed to operate. And the idea that Trinity Western might be “persuaded” to drop its homophobia is, as already noted, patently wrong. As the Court concludes, “it is incontrovertible that refusing to recognize [Trinity Western] will not enhance accessibility” [175] of legal education for LGBTQ people.

The Court is also right to reject “the submission that the approval of [Trinity Western’s] law school would amount to endorsing discrimination against LGBTQ individuals”. [183] As it observes, all manner of people and organizations seek and obtain regulatory approval for all sorts of projects and undertakings. It cannot be the case that such approvals are always synonymous with endorsement of these people’s and organizations’ beliefs. If it were otherwise, and the state had to refrain from communicating such endorsements, “no religious faculty of any kind could be approved”. [184] Arguably, no political activity should be either, since the state ought (morally and arguably constitutionally) be politically as well as religiously neutral.

Ultimately, as the Court rightly notes, the issue here is hurt feelings ― people’s outrage at the idea of a homophobic institution being allowed to freely operate not too far from the seat of power in society. The Court’s response to this is spot on:

While there is no doubt that the Covenant’s refusal to accept LGBTQ expressions of sexuality is deeply offensive and hurtful to the LGBTQ community, and we do not in any way wish to minimize that effect, there is no Charter or other legal right to be free from views that offend and contradict an individual’s strongly held beliefs … Disagreement and discomfort with the views of others is unavoidable in a free and democratic society. [188]

I would add just a couple of observations. The first is that the whole Trinity Western imbroglio, which is of course not over as the case is likely to be headed for the Supreme Court, is one illustration of the perniciousness of the regulation of legal services in Canada (and elsewhere). The existence of law societies, which are at once state-sanctioned cartels and permanently-captured regulators, is a problem. The law societies that denied Trinity Western its accreditation, especially those that did it on the basis of referenda, put their members’ political agenda ahead of the public interest in having reasonably-educated (as all concede Trinity Western’s graduates will be) lawyers competing to provide legal services. That the agenda of LGBT equality is on the whole a very good one does not in any way stop this being a case of capture. If legal services were deregulated, and the law societies denied their privilege of erecting barriers to entry into the market, this would not have happened.

The second observation I wanted to make here concerns contrast between the reactions to the Trinity Western Covenant’s discriminatory effects and some other, similar, issues. One of these, which I have already referred to, is that same Covenant’s illiberalism. “No sex outside marriage” is an illiberal, near-totalitarian position. (It was one which actual totalitarians, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, were quite keen on. They were also quite keen on homophobia, of course.) It would be so even if “marriage” were defined irrespective of gender or sexual orientation. Yet nobody, it seems, has been particularly concerned by Trinity Western’s illiberalism. Only its discrimination got people worked up.

Nor is anyone apparently concerned by other Canadian universities’ questionable approach to individual rights. I am not aware of a comprehensive Canadian resource similar to the Speech Codes Database of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, but consider just one example from British Columbia. UBC’s Student Code of Conduct provides that “[a]ny conduct on the part of a student that has, or might reasonably be seen to have, an adverse affect on the integrity or the proper functioning of the University … is subject to discipline under this Code”. What this means is not defined; although there follows a list of examples of what this prohibition might encompass, the Code is careful to state that they are no more than illustrations. Given the absurd vagueness of this rule, one can only conclude that due process rights are not held in very high regard at UBC; nor is freedom of speech, it would seem, considering the UBC Statement on Respectful Environment for Students, Faculty and Staff purports to proscribe such things as “gossip”. Again, these things do not seem to trouble anyone.

My point, to be clear, is not that these things are necessarily worse than, or even as bad as, the discrimination in the Trinity Western Covenant. It is only that the indignation that the Covenant has aroused seems at least somewhat selective. The law societies that have pounced on it to deny Trinity Western its accreditation are not all that concerned with individual rights. They are, mostly, concerned with one specific right, which just happens to be at the leading edge of contemporary progressivism ― for the time being, anyway (and perhaps not for much longer, as trans rights take over that position). However important that right ― and it is important ― signle-minded obsession with it does not show the law societies in a very good light as regulators in the public interest.

Be that as it may, it is a relief that five judges of the BC Court of Appeal saw this case for what it was ― an attempt by a majority, however well-meaning, to impose its views on a minority, however bigoted, to indulge its own moral preferences, however correct, rather than to defend anyone’s rights from legally cognizable injury, however slight. One can only hope that at least as many of their colleagues on the Supreme Court will see it that way too. Just as municipal functionaries in Québec should not be able to use their regulatory powers to silence a turbulent imam, Canadian law societies should not be able to use theirs to clamp down on turbulent pastors. The contrary result would be, as the Court notes, intolerant and illiberal.

More Dead than Ever

While the Supreme Court is getting ready for the oral argument in Québec’s challenge to the abolition of the long-gun registry by the federal government (set for October 8), a different challenge to the constitutionality of the Ending the Long-Gun Registry Act was dismissed by Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice earlier this month in Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic v. Canada, 2014 ONSC 5140. Justice Morgan held that, contrary to the Clinic’s claims, the abolition of the gun registry did not infringe the right of women either to the security of the person or to equality, and thus did not contravene sections 7 or 15 of the Charter.

Justice Morgan began his s. 7 analysis by discussing the “state action problem” with the Clinic’s argument. The Clinic claimed that the abolition of the gun registry infringed s. 7 because it increased the risk that women would suffer gun violence, in particular from their domestic partners. In its view, its argument was similar to those that prevailed in Canada (Attorney General) v PHS Community Services Society, 2011 SCC 44, [2011] 3 SCR 134 (the Insite case) and in Canada (Attorney General) v Bedford, 2013 SCC 72, [2013] 3 SCR 1101, where the Supreme Court found, respectively, that a denial of an exemption from drug laws to a safe-injection clinic and the prostitution-related provisions of the Criminal Code infringed s. 7 by increasing the risks to which the clinic’s users and sex workers were subject. But the fact a government policy fails to reduce a risk to which a person is exposed as much as possible is not enough, Justice Morgan found:

[c]ontemporary society is permeated by risk, including the risk of violent crime and injurious use of firearms, but unless that risk is a creation of state intervention it is not within government’s constitutional responsibilities. (Par. 25; emphasis mine.)

There is, furthermore, a crucial difference between the alleged increase of risk as a result of the abolition of the long-gun registry and the facts of the Insite case and Bedford, in that in those cases the government had prevented people from taking steps, on their own, to minimize the risks they were subject to, whereas the gun registry is a government-created risk mitigation scheme (if indeed it is that). The upshot of the Insite case and Bedford is that the government cannot prevent people from reducing the risks they run, not that it has a duty to do it by itself. Indeed, Justice Morgan pointed out,

[t]he Supreme Court indicated in Bedford, at para 88, that while the state cannot make prostitution even riskier than it is, the claimants [in that case] were “not asking the government to put into place measures making prostitution safe” (par. 34).

When Parliament itself creates a risk-reduction scheme, it can expand or limit it as it in its wisdom sees fit. So long as it doesn’t interfere with people’s autonomous risk-reduction endeavours, it does not act unconstitutionally.

The Clinic’s position also suffered, according to Justice Morgan, from a “baseline problem.” As he saw it, the Clinic

use[d] the 1995 Firearms Act [which had created the long-gun registry] as a baseline against which to measure the [new] licensing and registration system … , and finds the latter lacking. In the Applicant’s characterization, while the regulatory regime that existed from 1995 until … 2012 “provided an essential element in the effective protection for the s. 7 rights of women”, the “[Ending the Long Gun Registry] Act’s purpose appears to relate primarily to political aims”. (Par. 41)

But a statutory scheme cannot be made into a constitutional standard in this way. The gun registry’s creation was no more “politically neutral” than its abolition (par. 45). It was a choice of policy and politics, and it can be reversed or revised.

Justice Morgan then turned to the evidence which the Clinic adduced in support of its s. 7 claim, and found it insufficient. That evidence seems mainly to have consisted of statistics showing that gun violence declined in Canada while the long-gun registry was in operation. But, Justice Morgan said, gun violence had been declining before the registry was set up, and the early indications are that gun violence against women has not increased after it was abolished. In fact, as the government argued, there is a long-term trend towards the reduction of violent crime, so that what the Clinic showed was correlation, but not causation. Furthermore, police officers ― including those who served as the Clinic’s expert witnesses ― suggest that the effectiveness of gun registration (as opposed to licensing and background checks, which the abolition of the registry does not affect) is debated and, at best, limited. Thus even if an increase of risk resulting from the abolition of the long-gun registry were a constitutionally cognizable harm, the Clinic, in Justice Morgan’s view, had not demonstrated that the abolition had that effect.

Justice Morgan found that similar evidentiary problems undermined the Clinic’s claim that the abolition of the long-gun registry infringed the Charter’s equality guarantee becaused it would disproportionately affect women would be the victims of domestic gun violence. Again, there is evidence that gun both violence and domestic violence are decreasing. But given the multiplicity of causes likely to be involved, it is very difficult to isolate the gun registry’s role, if any, in these processes. The point, Justice Morgan said, is “not that there is no place for statistical data, but rather that statistical data can rarely, if ever, do the work of proof on its own” (par. 100). Nor was there anything to show that whatever effects the abolition of the gun registry might have on women were discriminatory in the sense of stereotyping or perpetuating past disadvantage. The overall statutory scheme for regulating firearms still tries to reduce gun violence, including in particular gun violence against women. Changing the mix of criminal and regulatory elements in that scheme was not, Justice Morgan said, discrimination.

I think this is the right decision. Justice Morgan’s point about the “state action problem” and the “baseline problem” are well taken, and his concerns about the insufficiency of the evidence to show that the gun registry’s abolition would have the disastrous consequences its supporters expect are justified.

I don’t know whether the Clinic intends to appeal his decision, but its chances of success would be very low indeed, given the Supreme Court’s insistence, in Bedford, that a trial judge’s assessment of social science evidence in constitutional cases is entitled to as much deference on appeal as any other form of fact-finding. Even if Justice Morgan were wrong in has approach to the issue of state action (and I don’t think that he is), his conclusions regarding the evidence would still stand.

For better or worse, this is the brave new world of Charter litigation ― a world in which cases live and die depending on the lawyers’ ability to assemble an evidentiary record and to convince a trial judge of this record of that record’s persuasiveness. And as I wrote here in discussing the potential dangers of this approach, “[t]he government, as the best funded and most powerful interest group of them all, is more likely to have the resources to put together a solid record than those who challenge it.” So here the government was able to show that the general trends in crime reduction, and its other (purportedly) crime-preventing policies meant that it was not possible to establish the effects of the gun registry’s abolition or continued existence with any degree of certainty.

This is not to say that I regret the outcome of this particular case, though others will find it regrettable. I will, however, note the irony of the government’s reliance on statistics showing a long-term general decrease in crime to defend this one element of its criminal-law legislative programme while implementing other, “tough-on-crime,” policies with a total disregard for these statistics. I hope that the courts which will consider the constitutionality of these measures will take good note. The gun registry is more dead than ever ― though the Supreme Court might still resurrect it in Québec. But in killing it, the government might just have inflicted some collateral damage on its other policies. No regrets from me there, either.