Karen Selick reports on a recent court decision that shows just how far Canadians’ liberties are constrained by the judiciary:
Dairy farmer Michael Schmidt has been campaigning to legalize the sale of raw (unpasteurized) milk for 17 years. In 2010, he was acquitted on 19 charges by a justice of the peace who ruled that “cow sharing” was a legitimate way to provide raw milk to informed consumers who don’t live on farms.
On Sept. 28, a judge reversed portions of that decision and found Schmidt guilty on 13 charges.
But the judge ventured beyond the subject of raw milk, saying: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right.”
The implications are far reaching. If the judge is right about this, future courts could similarly declare that you have no right to eat meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, vegetables or grains, even if government approved. In short, you may have no right to eat anything at all.
[. . .]
In one very technical sense, the courts’ statements are accurate: There is no specific reference to milk, or indeed, any food in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the U.S. Bill of Rights. But both documents are equally silent about any right to get out of bed in the morning, to stretch, to brush your teeth, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes. If constitutions had to enumerate every single thing that North Americans normally consider themselves free to do, they would be a zillion pages long.
Instead, the people who drafted these constitutional documents used a simple shortcut to eliminate the zillion pages. They said that people had the right to liberty.
The Charter was, after all, designed to rein in government, not to rein in individuals. It did not purport to grant us our rights or freedoms; rather, it recognized that those freedoms already existed. It guarantees in its very first section that the state may not infringe on our freedoms except by “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
