Juno News - Ottawa’s latest legal gambit could ignite a constitutional crisis

00:00:00.000 You had a great piece in The Hub, and we're going to pull up a screenshot of it here.

00:00:04.920 And it's where you do a really good explainer of the notwithstanding clause.

00:00:10.240 Now, this is making a lot of news in relation to Quebec with some of its, I believe it's the

00:00:16.180 religious symbols issue. But you described it as a safety belt, the notwithstanding clause as a

00:00:23.820 safety belt. Can you just explain to our audience exactly what the notwithstanding clause is,

00:00:29.260 how long have we had it for, and what is its purpose? Yeah, so the notwithstanding clause was

00:00:34.400 the deliberate democratic compromise arrived at in the original negotiations leading up to

00:00:40.540 the adoption of the charter in 1982. And we know in particular the Prairie premiers, namely

00:00:46.640 Alan Blakely and Peter Lockheed, would not have agreed to the adoption of the charter without

00:00:51.120 Section 33. Now what does Section 33 do? It allows legislatures to adopt legislation notwithstanding

00:00:58.280 the charter. That doesn't purely mean that they're overriding rights. It means that they're signaling

00:01:03.800 we have a different interpretation about the requirements of charter rights than we think

00:01:08.800 judges are going to have. We have different legislative priorities. And so it allows us to

00:01:14.220 wield that judgment and sort of it effectuates this very careful balance between the power of

00:01:20.000 judges and legislatures, which everybody understood the charter was going to give much more judges to

00:01:25.340 to power sorry power to judges judges are unelected they are not accountable to constituencies they're

00:01:31.980 not connected to the realities of governing there's no question that governments overreach

00:01:36.940 all the time we see that as well and so the notwithstanding clause has important limitations

00:01:42.060 it has to be renewed every five years it has to be publicly pronounced and so uh the public has

00:01:48.860 the opportunity to vote governments out if they don't like what they've done with the notwithstanding

00:01:54.660 clause. So it's certainly not a get out of jail free card. Excellent description. So if I may,

00:02:01.080 so on the political side of things and the elected government, right, we have the ability,

00:02:06.100 obviously, to vote for our members of parliament federally. So we're able to hold those individuals

00:02:11.240 to account that way. Here in the province of Alberta, we can vote for our members of the

00:02:15.800 legislature, legislative assembly. And we also have recall legislation here in Alberta. So it

00:02:21.420 kind of warms my heart that it was prairie premiers that were insisting on having this

00:02:25.960 form of a safety bell. And then would you then, is it fair to describe this as a balancing mechanism

00:02:33.060 between the courts and the commons? Yeah, absolutely. And it's also a recognition that

00:02:38.740 Canada has a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. And in Westminster-style parliamentary

00:02:44.620 democracies, parliament is supreme. Parliament decides on the contour and shapes of rights.

00:02:50.220 And so Canada kind of came into more of a hybrid system with this defined Bill of Rights.

Juno News - October 01, 2025