Dalhousie law students decide to study Charter of Rights, not the War of 1812.
by Allison Smith
One effect of the Harper government’s decision to allot nearly the entire Heritage Ministry budget for 2012 (more than $28 million) to commemorating the bicentennial of the war of 1812 is that no funds were allotted to celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Some Canadians think the Charter is essential to Canadian law and policy, and deserves a good airing on important anniversaries. They say the Canadian government's silence about the 30th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a statement.
The Charter is the expression of values so vital to our country that we have enshrined them as part of our Constitution. To disregard the importance of the Charter, as the Harper regime has done, is a silence that speaks volumes about the importance of equality rights in the eyes of our current government. “It limits the opportunity for a dialogue on how equal rights are not being protected or how they might be expanded,” said law student Bailey Duller, co-chair of the Dalhousie Feminist Law Association (DFLA).
DFLA held its own celebration of the Charter at the Weldon Law Building on October 26. At the core of the event was a panel discussion with some of the key women responsible for the drafting of sections 15 and 28, the equality provisions of the Charter.
The Prime Minister’s public position is that to celebrate the Charter would be insensitive to Quebec — yet he shut down the long gun registry over Quebec's objections.
The panel discussion, which drew close to 150 students and members of the public, focused on the legacy, the present, and the future of gender equality in Canada. Collectively, the panelists recognized the significance of women's right advocacy leading up to 1982 and the many challenges facing equality activists today.
Senator Nancy Ruth catalogued the results of extensive legal audit and lobbying efforts from 1981-84, during the three-year moratorium that federal and provincial governments granted themselves to clean sexism out of their legislation — clean-ups accelerated by presentations from women’s groups. In her observation, she said, change will not happen just because it is the right thing to do — but because women make it happen.
Award winning journalist and author Penney Kome discussed the GLBTQQI strategy to win legal equality through the courts, relying on Section 15, presenting legal arguments that moved the Supreme Court of Canada from 8 – 1 opposed (to recognizing same sex bereavement leave) to unanimously in favour of recognizing same sex marriage, in less than 20 years.
Queen's law professor Beverley Baines spoke about how, to this date, none of the Charter challenges about women's equality has been successful. Alexandra Dobrowolsky, author and professor at St. Mary's University, spoke about how the federal government's notion that women's equality has been achieved has in fact had deleterious effects on women's rights in Canada. The final speaker, Mary Eberts, Ariel Sallows Chair in Human Rights at the University of Saskatchewan, discussed the need for more conversations in Canada about social equality.
Chief Justice Beverley McLaughlin said that the Charter has quickly become one of the top three things that Canadians cite as a source of national pride, along with hockey and health care. Most Canadians have whole-heartedly embraced the Canadian promise not to allow discrimination on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, or sexual orientation.
Therefore, an observer can only conclude that the Harper government’s lopsided distribution of resources towards celebrating war reflects the Harper government's political priorities. Drum beating and sabre rattling promote a certain kind of swaggering nationalism, a nationalism without discussion of equal rights, or acknowledgement of women's rights, gay rights, the rights of racial minorities, and human rights generally as a core part of our culture and history.
The Prime Minister’s public position is that to celebrate the Charter would be to celebrate a divisive history. By this, he means that the Charter is indivisible from the 1982 repatriation of the Canadian Constitution, which the Quebec government never formally approved. If being sensitive to Quebec were a real concern, however, the Conservatives would not have celebrated the shutting down of the long-gun registry, unanimously opposed by Quebec National Assembly, with a cocktail party on Parliament Hill.
Many believe the watershed case on gay and lesbian rights tried at the Supreme Court of Canada as a Charter matter was that of Delwin Vriend, a gay rights activist. Vriend was fired from his job at an Albertan college in 1991 when the school discovered his sexual orientation. At that point, Albertan human rights law did not include sexual orientation as a prohibited grounds of discrimination. Using the Charter, Vriend took the province to court.
Alberta’s Attorney-General tried to persuade the Supreme Court that omission from the provincial Individual Rights Protection Act had the same effect as specifically protecting sexual orientation, an argument the Supreme Court Justices dismissed in two seconds so they could spend the rest of the session putting the hapless AG through a very thorough interrogation. The Justices then held that the omission of sexual orientation from Alberta's human rights protections was, in itself, a statement about the inherent worth of a marginalized group of people.
The government's refusal to celebrate the Charter is, in a manner of speaking, a similar omission. It speaks to the level of concern our government has for equality rights.
We as Canadians, defined by our Constitution, must speak back when such silence carries a message about our values and our worth as individuals deserving of equal protection and dignity. Through vital conversations about the past and the future of equality in Canada, DFLA's event was designed to ensure that the Charter’s anniversary was fittingly acknowledged and to generate further conversations about what the Charter means to Canadians. It was a much needed opportunity for unheard voices to speak out and discuss the importance of the document that has enshrined equal rights as part of our supreme law.
McGIll students also celebrate feminism
About Allison Smith
Allison Smith is a law student at Dalhousie University, a writer, and a passionate equal rights advocate. She plans to use her law degree to work in the field of human rights.
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