Along with the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms got a lot of attention a few days ago because it all happened thirty years ago. I was looking through some ancient stuff I'd written years ago and found the following. You may or may not find it interesting.
Ed July 1, 2003, Canada Day! It was once "Dominion Day", which I still prefer, perhaps for no better reason than I grew up with it. Yet "Canada Day" may really be better. "Dominion" suggests that someone is lording it over us, and that is no longer true. It was still true when I was a kid in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps no one was lording it over us in terms of telling us what we, as a nation, could and couldn't do, but the mindset was there. We sang "God Save the King" before school or movies started, our teachers made us sing about the glories of the British navy, and we studied British history on the assumption that Canada had no history without Britain. It all made those of us whose parents didn't come from the British Isles feel a little second class. So much has changed over the past fifty years. Canadians now willingly and openly recognize their diversity. Whether one's forebears came from Britain, Central Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia doesn't matter. What matters is citizenship. If you have that, you are guaranteed equality of treatment under the law, and you are guaranteed equality of access to services available to all citizens. And your children no longer have to sing about the British navy keeping the foes at bay unless they want to. I like to think that the biggest step in recognizing and defining what it means to be Canadian was the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part 1 of the Constitution Act, 1982. Included among our rights and freedoms as citizens are: freedom of expression; the right to a democratic government; the right to live and to seek employment anywhere in Canada; legal rights of persons accused of crimes; Aboriginal peoples' rights; the right to equality, including the equality of men and women; the right to use either of Canada's official languages; the right of French and English linguistic minorities to an education in their language; and the protection of Canada's multicultural heritage. If you have ever traveled in countries whose citizens do not have such rights and freedoms, you'll recognize their importance. But many countries have rights and freedoms on paper without a good system of courts to back them up. Here Canada has been fortunate. Its courts, based on the British system, have always been good. Nevertheless, the existence of Constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, and the need to interpret what they mean in particular circumstances, has greatly raised our court system's profile. That the legal system is now in a position of some parity with the political system has caused politicians more than a little discomfort. They feel and often publicly argue that power has shifted away from them, thus impairing their ability to do what they have been elected to do in a democratic society. I don't agree. Politicians have done some rather awful things in the past, and there's no guarantee that they wouldn't do them again in future. In my opinion, any increase in the ability to challenge arbitrary power is a good thing, and that is what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms enables us to do.
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