Is it purely advisory or does it have some teeth? Have their been any cases where the constitution has affected the outcome of a court decision?
There have been tons of times that courts have cited the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A bit older, but in the early 2000s when courts started legalizing same-sex marriage province-by-province their decisions were often based off of the Equality Clause.
Worth noting of course that unlike in the US our constitution doesn’t provide absolute freedoms. A good example of this is the role of free speech - in Canada we have restrictions on how you can spend money in elections to support a political party, whereas in the US their constitution protects speech absolutely, which makes it impossible to restrict the role of money in elections. And of course our constitution has the notwithstanding clause which just lets legislatures temporarily bypass some parts of the constitution, which is what Quebec does to keep its language laws.
That doesn’t sound so temporary. Also not sure what freedom of speech has to do with freedom to spend money. I got a bit lost there.
However it does seem to explain how it was overruled during the Ottawa protests.
The notwithstanding clause has to get renewed every 5 years, that’s the temporary part.
Regarding speech and money, the idea the US Supreme Court has is that restrictions on buying advertising to support a candidate during an election is a restriction on speech. I’d agree that the link is somewhat tenuous.
Essentially, Canadians have no inherent or inalienable rights.
Even in the US free speech is not absolute. You can’t threaten our intimidate and you can’t defame our slander just to name a couple of examples. Just about every law limits in some way what would be considered an absolute right.
The constitution affects the outcome of many cases because it defines what types of evidence and evidence collection are admissable.
From wiki:
[Section 24] also allows courts to exclude evidence in trials if the evidence was acquired in a way that conflicts with the Charter and might damage the reputation of the justice system.
Québec did not signed up for that.
The cliff was also unscalable, until it wasn’t.
