{"id":12175,"date":"2011-11-22T13:14:58","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T18:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12175"},"modified":"2021-05-07T18:32:47","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T22:32:47","slug":"qotd-our-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/11\/22\/qotd-our-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Our Charter of &#8220;rights&#8221; and &#8220;freedoms&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>On the evening of January 12, 1981, justice minister Jean Chr\u00e9tien sat in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Constitution. \u201cI am proposing that Section 1 read as follows: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis will ensure that any limit on a right must be not only reasonable and prescribed by law, but must also be shown to be demonstrably justified.\u201d Translation: \u201cThis will ensure that even though we pretend the public has rights that are fundamental to any free and democratic society, we can take them away at will, so long as we can convince a judge that such measures are justified.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The language used by Mr. Chr\u00e9tien would eventually become Section 1 of the Charter, which gives government the constitutional cover to infringe the supposedly \u201cfundamental freedoms\u201d that follow it. In order to figure out when such infringements are in fact justified, the Supreme Court came up with the Oakes test.<\/p>\n<p>Using this two-step process, laws that violate our Charter rights must have a \u201cpressing and substantial\u201d objective, and the means of effecting the limit must be reasonable and proportional. The infringement has to be connected to the law\u2019s objective; it has to be as minimal as possible; and it must balance the consequences of such a limitation, with the objective that is being sought.<\/p>\n<p>Jesse Kline, <a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2011\/11\/22\/jesse-kline-freedom-shouldnt-come-with-caveats-but-it-does\/?utm_source=dlvr.it&#038;utm_medium=twitter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Freedom shouldn\u2019t come with caveats, but it does&#8221;, <em>National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2011-11-22<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the evening of January 12, 1981, justice minister Jean Chr\u00e9tien sat in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Constitution. \u201cI am proposing that Section 1 read as follows: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,9,10,41],"tags":[715,212,186,224,769],"class_list":["post-12175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-law","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-constitution","tag-freedomofassembly","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-freedomofthepress","tag-jeanchretien"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3an","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65615,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12175\/revisions\/65615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}