Incidentally, that (the charter being put into the constitution and the constitution being put under Canadian control) happened during Pierre Trudeau's term.
There's also the notwithstanding clause in the charter, which allows for the government to temporarily (for up to 5 years, subject to renewal) pass bills violating some of the charter rights so long as they declare they are doing so, but Pierre Trudeau, and Justin Trudeau, and in fact the federal legislature as a whole, have never used it.
Edit: Ah, someone else pointed out that he's talking about Trudeau invoking the war measures act... that didn't implicate any constitutional rights, because there basically weren't any. There was a bill of rights and freedoms at the time, but that was a normal law not constitutional, and apparently exceptions had been passed for the war measures act...
And a very dishonest portrayal of the October Crisis, a time when English Canada was shocked that PET would go so far to stop the FLQ.
A journo even asked PET how far he was willing to go to rid Quebec of the FLQ and got the famous answer: “just watch me”
No, PET knew he was violating the basic principles of Canadian freedom, but didnt care.
I assure you, it's not dishonest, it might be ill informed. I'm not a Canadian legal history scholar...
What, pray tell, constitutional rights did Canadians derive as subjects to her Majesty prior to 1982? Also how was the Canadian parliament able to bypass those rights when they didn't have authority over the constitution? Sources would be appreciated.
> And a very dishonest portrayal of the October Crisis
It's not a portrayal of that at all, it's a simple statement that an act and was invoked and a point of law without discussing the events that caused it to be invoked.
The US arguably makes some of the robust constitutional guarantees in the world, but they still pose little obstacle for a government that wants to subvert them. The illusion of civil liberties is even weaker in most of the rest of the world, where they’re often granted only by ordinary legislation, which can of course be changed by ordinary legislative processes.
The argument for this system is that the government must be able to suspend rights in response to an emergency, but the problem with that is that there’s always an emergency going on somewhere. The war on terror is already in its 4th presidential administration of being an emergency.
>1. 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.
So its basically more of a guideline when it matters.
No, its just explicit in Canada, where in the US it is, for the federal government, found implicitly in the tension between positive grants and negative restrictions in the Constitution, and, for States, the actual limits are only implicit in vague language (the 14th Amendment “Due Process” clause, into which much of the content of the Bill of Rights has been read in a form applicable against the States.)
You realize that those are just two different ways of saying the exact same thing, right?
> and the judges are political.
While the judicial branch in the US is sometimes distinguished from the elected “political” branches, federal judges and especially thise of the highest court which serves as the ultimate arbiter of Constitutional interpretation are very much tied into partisan politics; if that hadn't been clear before, all doubt of that was erased during the Reagan Administration (continuing similarly thereafter), and the further heightened judicial political drama of the Obama and Trump Administrations has bolded and underlined that for anyone who still somehow had doubts.
It's really not.
That's a thing in the US too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...