BOOK TALK | Peter Biro- The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:

The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) is presenting a panel discussion featuring editor Peter Biro and some contributors of The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter: Rights, Reforms, and Controversies.

Along with Peter Biro, contributors Robert Leckey, Jonathan Montpetit, and Marion Sandilands will be attending the roundtable moderated by Jennifer Elrick.

This is a free event, but registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-notwithstanding-clause-and-the-canadian-charter-tickets-1000117718017

Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1Y2

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and reception. This event is co-organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Copies of the book will be for sale.

Peter L. Biro is the Founder and President of the democracy think-tank, Section 1, Senior Fellow of Massey College, Centre Associate of the University of British Columbia Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies and Chair Emeritus of the Jane Goodall Institute. He is the Editor, most recently, of The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter: Rights, Reforms, and Controversies (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). He is an Adjunct Professor in the University of Toronto Faculty of Law where he teaches Constitutional Law in the GPLLM Program. Peter has published widely in the scholarly, professional, and popular press and is a frequent lecturer, public speaker and commentators on matters of law and politics. He was, for many years a leading member of the litigation bar of Ontario and was a partner at WeirFoulds LLP and Goodman and Carr LLP. Peter obtained an Honours B.A. in political science at the University of Guelph, his M.A. in political theory from McMaster University, and his LLB and BCL at McGill University.

Robert Leckey is dean and Samuel Gale Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, where he teaches and researches in constitutional law and family law. He served as director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law from August 2014 to June 2016. He is editor of a collection entitled After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship (Routledge, 2015). His monograph Bills of Rights in the Common Law appeared in Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Constitutional Law in 2015.

Jonathan Montpetit is a senior investigative journalist with CBC News, where he covers social movements and democracy. He holds graduate degrees in political science from the London School of Economics and McGill University. In 2021, he was a Southam Journalism Fellow at Massey College.

Marion Sandilands practices civil litigation, constitutional and administrative law at Conway Litigation in Ottawa. She has appeared before multiple courts including the Supreme Court of Canada. After her call to the bar, she served as a law clerk to the Hon. Yves De Montigny (now Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Appeal) and the Hon. Andromache Karakatsanis at the Supreme Court of Canada. She teaches Constitutional Law at the University of Ottawa. She speaks and has published on matters of constitutional, public, and administrative law. She has provided expert comments on constitutional issues for the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights (University of Toronto), the Centre for Constitutional Studies (University of Alberta), and for the Toronto Star and Global News. A proud Montrealer by birth, she is a graduate of McGill University’s Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Law.

about the book

Section 33 - what is commonly referred to as the notwithstanding clause (NWC) - was written into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to allow Parliament and the provinces to provisionally override certain Charter rights.

The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter examines the NWC from all angles and perspectives, considering who should have the last word on matters of rights and justice - the legislatures or the unelected judiciary - and what balance liberal democracy requires. In the case of Quebec, the use of the clause has been justified as necessary to preserve the province’s culture and promote its identity as a nation. Yet Quebec’s pre-emptive and sweeping invocation of the clause also challenges the scope of judicial review and citizens’ recourse to it, and it tests the assumption that a dialogue between the judiciary and the legislature is always preferable in instances in which the legislative branch decides to suspend the operation of certain Charter rights and freedoms. By virtue of its contested purposes, interpretations, operation, and applications, the NWC represents and, to an extent, defines both the character and the very real vulnerabilities of liberal constitutionalism in Canada.

The significance, effects, and legitimacy of the NWC have been vigorously debated within scholarship and among politicians and activists since the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. In The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter leading scholars, jurists, and policy experts elucidate and prescribe reforms to the application of this consequential clause about which so much is written, and around which there is relatively little consensus.