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As my beloved readers know, I have always enjoyed Canadian appellate law in the spirit of a knowledgeable spectator. And I have always believed that the news media may not have been devoting enough attention and resources to this element in the political life of the Dominion. In adopting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and thus giving strong American-style powers of legal revision to our appeal courts, we put ourselves on an inevitable course toward having everything else that this implies.
Or almost everything. We experimented briefly with heavier parliamentary involvement in scrutinizing Supreme Court candidates, and seem to have reached a quiet consensus that this isn’t quite the Canadian way of doing things. But we are increasingly aware of the individual personalities on our Supreme Court. The media apparatus that discusses its activity has become more sophisticated. And the legal profession engages with it more actively. We are bound to perceive the Court, in time, as less of a secretive, harmonious single divine voice, and more of a legislative assembly in miniature — an arena of democratic struggle unto itself. A banner at Trinity Western University, a private Christian institution in Langley, B.C. Friday’s twin Supreme Court rulings concerning the law school at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., have given us an advance snapshot of this future. TWU, a private institution in the “Free Evangelical” tradition, sued the law societies of Ontario and British Columbia when they refused to accredit its school. TWU proposed to require students and faculty to agree to a “Covenant” concerning their private behaviour.
The Covenant outlaws, among other things, “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.” Students were expected to police one another for violations of the Covenant — which was understood to forbid same-sex relations as well as heterosexual fornication outside marriage — and they could, under TWU’s proposed scheme, be disciplined or expelled for breaking it.
TWU had lost its case in Ontario’s highest appeal court, and won the one in B.C.; both decisions were appealed by the losing side. A simple, ostensive view of […]