The Carney government’s crime victim legislation is bad constitutional law |
Carney's government is trying to legislate away unpopular Charter rights instead of fixing our overly complex system, Kent Roach writes.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Kent Roach is a professor of law at the University of Toronto and the author of Wrongfully Convicted.
Buried deep in Bill C-16 on protecting crime victims, introduced in early December, are dangerous provisions that purport to tell the courts how to apply the Charter.
Specifically, the bill mandates courts not to count some pretrial delay in determining whether the accused’s Section 11(b) Charter right to a trial in a reasonable time was violated under the Court’s 2016 decision in Jordan. It also attempts to overrule a 1987 Supreme Court decision that says a permanent stay or halt to proceedings is the minimum appropriate and just Charter remedy when an accused’s right to a speedy trial is violated.
These changes were introduced without the use of the notwithstanding clause or an explanation of how they can be reconciled with the Charter. In my view, they cannot.
The Charter decisions that Bill C-16 attacks are controversial. Nevertheless, they are decisions that the Supreme Court was entitled to make and it has declined invitations to overrule them. It seems as if the government now wants to........