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A Disenchanted Charter? The Common Law Tradition and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Bryce Weber
Bryce Weber
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, York University
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Abstract

The statutory entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms marks a break with the common law practice of protecting civil liberties by means of socio-legal convention. This article argues that such a break with common law practice can be justified at a theoretical level through reference to Max Weber's liberal rationalist account of the effects of modernization on law and society and, at a practical level, points out parallels between Weber's position on modern law, the pre-entrenchment doctrine of the Supreme Court and Pierre Trudeau's advocacy of the Charter. However, the article argues that a Weberian account of modernity and law is based upon too narrow a conception of rationality to allow it to deal with the normative questions that are raised by the substantively democratic claims made by the Charter and with which the courts will have to deal in making judgements in Charter cases. The article concludes that in order for court interpretation to take the substantive sections of the Charter into account in a meaningful fashion, it will be forced to abandon what, until the entrenchment of the Charter, was a narrow, positivist interpretation of rights and democracy; and that this can be accomplished by means of a reconstruction of the democratic ethos that is nascent within the common law tradition but remains as yet undeveloped in a clear fashion.

Résumé

L'enchâssement constitutionnel de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés marque une rupture avec la pratique des systèmes de Common Law de protéger les libertés civiles au moyen de déclarations de type socio-juridique. Cet article soumet qu'une telle rupture peut être justifiée du point de vue théorique par une référence à l'analyse libérale-rationaliste de Max Weber des effets de la modernisation sur le droit et la société. Du point de vue pratique, cette rupture suggère des analogies entre la position de Weber sur le droit moderne, la doctrine de la Cour Suprême antérieurement à l'enchâssement de la Charte et la promotion de cette dernière par Pierre Trudeau. Toutefois, l'auteur soutient que la description wébérienne de la modernité et du droit repose sur une conception trop étroite de la rationalité pour que l'on puisse y traiter convenablement des questions normatives soulevées par les prétentions de démocratie matérielle que les tribunaux devront aborder en disposant des litiges relatifs à l'interprétation de la Charte. L'article conclut que pour parvenir à interpréter les dispositions substantives de la Charte d'une façon cohérente, les tribunaux devront renoncer à l'interprétation restrictive et positiviste des droits et de la démocratie qui a prévalu jusqu'à l'enchâssement de la Charte. Cela ne pourra se faire qu'au moyen d'une reconstruction de l'éthos démocratique qui émerge dans la tradition du Common Law mais n'est pas encore clairement développée.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 3 , 1988 , pp. 195 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1988

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References

Notes

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5. See Tonnies, Ferdinand, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), translated and edited by Loomis, Charles P. (East Lansing, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

6. Weber's approach is also of note because, as the paper will attempt to show in the section on Trudeau's position on the entrenchment of the Charter, the logic of Trudeau's arguments in favour of entrenchment bear some strong resemblances to Weber's position.

7. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, sections 1.1 and 1.7 respectively.

8. Duff's decision in the Alberta Press Case is the most notable exception to this practice. See the section on the courts in Canada below.

9. See the section on Trudeau's position on the entrenchment of the Charter below; see also below the section on the courts in Canada.

10. Most germane to the work at hand Habermas, Jurgen, Theory of Communicative Action, translated and introduced by McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1986), Volumes One and TwoGoogle Scholar. Hereafter cited as TCA 1; TCA 2.

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15. Ibid., 656–657. It is Weber's notion of the possibility of a hermeneutic interpretation of norms that allows his theory of law to escape a simplistic positivism which would restrict law to what is written in fact and justice to formally correct legal procedures.

16. Ibid., 657.

17. Ibid., 847.

18. Ibid., 854.

19. As A. Lovell puts this, “the essence of common law was case law…. There was (and is) no single repository for the entire law on any subject. Specific cases and the recorded decisions of the court were the law; thus common law can be said to be unwritten only in a limited sense. There was no codified system of legislation …” when common law was initiated by Henry II. Lovell, Colin R., English Constitutional and Legal History: A Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 109–110Google Scholar.

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27. Dicey, A. V., Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, with an introduction by E.C.S. Wade (10th ed.; London: Macmillan and Company, 1965), 202ffGoogle Scholar. In response to Dicey, Jennings argues that the former's emphasis upon the rights of the individual reflects Dicey's Whig liberalism, but that in the era of the welfare state this emphasis may be somewhat out of place. Jennings does not offer an alternative to Dicey's position at the same level of theoretical claim as Dicey's. What he does instead is to point to the empirical situation extant in the Labour Government in Britain in the mid-1950s. What Jennings does not himself claim, but what can be interpolated into his position, is that the “rule of law” is dependent upon a political culture in which others' rights are acknowledged and respected. In other words, Jennings's treatment of the British constitution implies a notion of political culture. [Jennings, W.I., The Law and the Constitution (5th ed.; London: University of London Press, 1959), 314–316Google Scholar.] However, where both Dicey's and Jennings's explanations encounter a contradiction is that they presuppose a kind of political culture that is external to the law, but attempt to account for the results of this culture through reference to the law, independent of this culture.

28. Hott, , Magna Carta, 61ffGoogle Scholar.

29. Weber, , Economy and Society, 323Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 762–763.

31. Ibid., 890–891.

32. Ibid., 1395.

33. Ibid., 162.

34. Ibid., 891.

35. Ibid., 638.

36. TCA 1, 270.

37. TCA 1, 340.

38. This is the general conclusion of Habermas's project. For a partial account of how modernity provides the discursive preconditions necessary for the emergence of a substantive democracy, see TCA 2, 146.

39. TCA 1, xl.

40. TCA 1, 22.

41. While it is true that scientists often do appeal to a kind of aesthetic of parsimony in developing theories--what they call a theory's “elegance”--the final arbiter to the acceptability of a theory will be its heuristic power in relation to the facts for which it attempts to provide an explanation.

42. TCA 1, 76ff.

43. This position vis-à-vis the lifeworld differentiates his position from the sociological phenomenologists from whom he appropriates the notion of the lifeworld. See, TCA 2, 126ff.

44. Habermas, Jurgen, “Talcott Parsons: Problems of Theory Construction,” Sociological Inquiry 51 (1981), no. 3-4, 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. TCA 1, 45ff.

46. The ideological struggle between the Church and temporal authority in medieval Europe would provide a case in point here.

47. TCA 2, 156, passim.

48. The Church's dogmatic denunciation of Galileo's observation of sunspots provides a good example of Western society in transition.

49. TCA 2, 354–355.

50. TCA 2, 358–359.

51. TCA 2, 355.

52. TCA 2, 305.

53. For a discussion of particular instances of this in the modern welfare state see TCA 2, 386–396. The internal colonization of the lifeworld can also be seen as antidemocratic inasmuch as it declares the normative competencies and claims of a nonexpert public to be non-rational and hence inadmissible on their own terms as inputs into policy making and priority setting. In other words, the internal colonization of the lifeworld leads to a distortedly rational socio-political discourse which stifles the kind of open, rational critical debate needed to make a modern polity truly democratic.

54. TCA 2, 172–174.

55. Habermas notes two strategies the modem liberal democratic state can adopt to cope with this situation. First, it can attempt to argue that formal procedure is selfevidently legitimate. This is a tautological dead end. Second, it can attempt to argue that the procedural approach of modern law is legitimate because the legal system should not interfere with the content of laws that have been democratically enacted. This latter defence of procedural law is undermined by the fact that it depends on the claim that democracy is a legitimate form of government. According to Habermas, the legitimacy of democratic government rests on an assumption of the legitimacy of the “sovereignty of the people” and this, in turn, presupposes an imputation of a post-conventional capacity to the public at large, otherwise they would not be fit to rule themselves and democracy could not be argued to be a legitimate form of government in the first place. TCA 2, 365.

56. Trudeau, Pierre E., “A Constitutional Declaration of Rights,” in Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1969), 54Google Scholar.

57. Russell, Peter, “Political Purposes of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” The Canadian Bar Review 61 (1983), 34–38Google Scholar.

58. This liberal rationalist strain in Trudeau's thinking is not something that is brought forward simply in his remarks concerning the rights of human beings--qua individuals. It is also evident, as Doern points out, in the kind of philosophy that guided Trudeau's ideas concerning the rationalization of the bureaucracy and central agencies. Doern, G. Bruce, “Recent Changes in the Philosophy of Policy-making in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 4 (June 1971), no. 2, 243–264CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.

59. Pierre Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism and Reason,” in Federalism and the French Canadians.

60. Trudeau, Pierre, “Les droits de l'homme et la supréinatie parlementaire,” in Gotlieb, Alan (ed.), Human Rights, Federalism and Minorities (Toronto: Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1970), 7Google Scholar.

61. Ibid.

62. Weiler, Paul, “Two Models of the Judicial Decision Making,” Canadian Bar Review 46 (September 1968), no. 3, 409Google Scholar.

63. Laskin, Bora, “The Supreme Court of Canada: The Final Court of and for Canadians,” Canadian Bar Review 29 (1951), 1046Google Scholar. Laskin also points out in this context that the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, within limits, “… verified the right to differ in and by legislation even before Confederation…,” and so can be seen to infer that the CLVA provided an opportunity that might have been exploited by British North American courts, had they been less conservative to begin with. Ibid., 1069. Cf. Cairns, Alan, “The Judicial Committee and its Critics,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 3 (1970), no. 3, 301–345Google Scholar, for a less hostile attitude toward the JCPC.

64. Russell, Peter, “Judicial Power in Canada's Political Culture,” in Friedland, M.L., Courts and Trials: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 78–79Google Scholar.

65. By way of illustration, one can cite the changes within family law in this country. See Peter Russell, “Charter and Policy Making,” 13. Russell argues that the reason family litigation has increased may be that there has been “a reduction in our capacity as a society to settle conflict in less formal, more conciliatory ways.”

66. Laskin, Bora, Laskin's Canadian Constitutional Law, Abel, Albert S. (ed.) (4th ed.; Toronto: Carswell Company, 1975), 900.22Google Scholar, my emphasis. Laskin makes reference to the Dicey/Jennings debate, but gives it a different interpretation than I do.

67. Laskin, , Laskin's Canadian Constitutional Law, 900.20ffGoogle Scholar.

68. See, for instance, “Opening Remarks by Premier Peter Lougheed, Federal Provincial Conference of First Ministers on the Constitution,” September 8, 1980, typescript, Document: 800–14/030, 1–2. I am indebted to Peter Russell for the loan of this and the following material.

69. Lyon, Sterling, “Notes for a Statement on the Entrenchment of a Charter of Rights” First Ministers' Conference on the Constitution,” Ottawa, September 9, 1980, Document 800–14/072Google Scholar, passim.

70. Ibid., 1–2.

71. Allan Blakeney, “Opening Statement, ‘Charter of Rights,’ First Ministers' Conference on the Constitution,” Document 800–14/023.

72. Browne, G.P., “On the Entrenchment of a Bill of Rights,” (Browne, G.P., Department of History, Carleton University, August 10, 1980), 10Google Scholar.

73. Government of Saskatchewan, “Resources: The Saskatchewan Position,” First Ministers' Conference on the Constitution, Ottawa, September 8–12, 1980, 16Google Scholar. Cf., Hogg, Peter, “Is the Supreme Court of Canada Biased in Constitutional Cases?” The Canadian Bar Review 57 (1979), 721–739Google Scholar, where he argues, on balance, that it is not.

74. Smiley, Donald, “The Case Against the Canadian Charter of Human Rights,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 2 (1969), no. 3, 278–291CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Toronto: Ontario Economic Council–Discussion Paper Series, 1981)Google Scholar.

75. Smiley, “The Case Against the Canadian Charter,” 284.

76. See Russell, Peter, “Judicial Power in Canada's Political Culture,” in Friedland, M.L. (ed.), Courts and Trials, 75–88Google Scholar; Russell, P., “The Effect of a Charter of Rights on the Policy-Making Role of Canadian Courts,” Canadian Public Administration 25 (1982), number 1, 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russell, P., “Political Purposes of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” The Canadian Bar Review 61 (1983), 30–54Google Scholar; Russell, P., “Constitutional Reform of the Judicial Branch: Symbolic Versus Operational Considerations,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 17 (1984), no. 2, 227–252CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russell, P., “The First Three Years in Charterland,” Canadian Public Adminstration 28 (1985), no. 3, 367–396CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. Russell, “Charter and Policy Making,” 4, for a discussion of the loss of trial by jury; cf., Laskin, Bora, The British Tradition in Canadian Law (London: Stevens and Sons under the auspices of The Hamlyn Trust, 1969), 46Google Scholar.

78. Smiley, “The Case Against the Canadian Charter,” 291.