I genuinely can't think of a single time where the clause was used to add rights instead of removing them so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
If your point is that the constitution allows for flexibility then sure yes, but that's more due to the "living constitution" framework that the SCC uses than the conditions itself.
All three cases were decided on Charter grounds. Morgentaler tried challenging abortion pre-Charter and lost.
> Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
The Charter is part of the Constitution:
* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/index.html
The Canadian Constitution and the rights there-in is not absolutist:
> 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.
Tell that to gay people who got to get married because of it—even though there is nothing about the topic in the Charter. This was before it was probably fully accepted socially, and I doubt any politician wanted to make the move.
See also perhaps abortion under the Morgentaler decision in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative.
You can probably say the same thing about euthanasia (which the SCC disallowed in 1993 (Rodriguez, [1993] 3 SCR 519) and then insisted upon more recently, which gave us the euphemistically named MAID).