Clause for Concern? Notwithstanding Canada's Charter

By coincidence, we're releasing this final episode about the way section 33 has been deployed in Western Canada just a few days after Alberta tabled and passed Bill 2, which uses the notwithstanding clause to force striking teachers back to work. This is the first Alberta invocation in 25 years, but it's far from the first time that Western provinces have dabbled with section 33. In this episode,...

While the notwithstanding clause was once aptly described as a "sleeping giant," things were always more complicated in Quebec. Having seen the Constitution partiated without its consent in 1982, the Quebec government promptly used section 33 as a tool of protest, applying it to all existing provincial legislation to blunt the force of the new Charter . More than a dozen invocations followed in th...

After ignoring the notwithstanding clause for nearly forty years, the Ontario government has recently changed tack, starting with its (successful) attempt to restructure Toronto City Council during a municipal election in 2018. Although a Court of Appeal decision rendered the invocation of section 33 unnecessary in that instance, the Ford government's readiness to hit the notwithstanding button wa...

In this first episode, we talk to Professor Eric Adams (University of Alberta) about the history of, thinking behind, and debates surrounding the notwithstanding clause. Professor Adams provides an overview of how the clause works, walks us through the various limits that are baked into it, and tells us why Western provincial premiers on different sides of the political aisle argued for its inclus...