From my latest op-ed on iPolitics:<\/p>\n
I take the position that the Supreme Court\u2019s decisions [in the TWU law school case] were themselves unreasonable and are a harbinger for serious disputes to come.<\/p>\n
First, until this decision, the law societies had no statutory authority to investigate the admissions policies of law schools. Their role was to ascertain whether graduates will be competent to practice law. No one has contested the academic calibre of TWU\u2019s program, with its innovative focus on practical training, charity law, and justice for the marginalized and impoverished.<\/p>\n
Despite this, the Court majority claimed that the law societies were operating in the \u201cpublic interest\u201d and were therefore entitled to go beyond their mandate to promote the \u201cCharter value\u201d of \u201cequality\u201d. According to the Court, such \u201cvalues\u201d are now \u201caccepted principles of constitutional interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a worrying development. Here\u2019s why. Charter \u201cvalues\u201d are subjective. As dissenting justices C\u00f4t\u00e9 and Brown observe, Charter values are \u201centirely the product of the idiosyncrasies of the judicial mind that pronounces them to be so.\u201d One judge may have a different set of values than another and they may or may not be shared by all Canadians.<\/p>\n
Read the rest of the article in the Weekender, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n For a more in-depth discussion of these points, watch my latest Intersection Video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From my latest op-ed on iPolitics: I take the position that the Supreme Court\u2019s decisions were themselves unreasonable and are a harbinger for serious disputes to come. First, until this decision, the law societies had no statutory authority to investigate the admissions policies of… More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ts_fic_featured_image_caption":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[395,399,394,141,400,390],"series":[],"class_list":["post-27733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-canadian-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms","tag-charter-rights","tag-charter-values","tag-religious-freedom","tag-supreme-court","tag-twu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27733"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=27733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}