Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an ingenious legal innovation. Section 7 guarantees that everyone, “has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

Lawyers and advocates have used this mechanism to advance many notable improvements in human rights in Canada since the Charter came into force in the early-1980s. The camping example cited in this article is just one of many s.7 success stories:

1. In the last 20 years, s.7 forced the most conservative government of the last 50 years to permit safe injection sites, which have saved hundreds if not thousands of lives in the years since. In the immediate area surrounding “Insite,” the first such safe injection facility, overdose deaths decreased by 35%. This compared to only a 9% decrease in the rest of Vancouver. [1] At the facility itself, there were zero overdose deaths, because medical staff were able to administer naloxone in every case. While the approach remains controversial, in Canada there is no debating that addicts have a right to “life, liberty, and security of the person,” even in the context of using illegal drugs.

2. The Supreme Court used Section 7 to strike down Quebec's ban on private health insurance, ruling that excessive delays in the public system could threaten security of the person when patients face serious physical pain or death [2]. While this challenge perhaps puts the single-payer public provision of healthcare at risk, ultimately it forced the provinces to take public healthcare more seriously and to invest more despite the financial challenges of doing so.

3. The courts established that Section 7 protects psychological integrity, particularly in child protection cases. This led to guaranteeing fair hearings for parents in custody matters and ensuring legal representation for indigent parents when necessary for a fair hearing [3]. The history of the Canadian state in relation to aboriginal children is awful and continues to be awful, but this ruling cracked the door open on making important changes to the system.

4. The Supreme Court determined that imposing imprisonment without requiring mens rea (guilty mind) violates fundamental justice, establishing that Section 7 prohibits both substantive and procedural injustice [4]. This prevents the justice system from throwing people in jail whose mental capacity made it impossible for them to understand that what they were doing was wrong. Ultimately, it guides the justice system to ensuring that people with mental challenges are funneled appropriately into treatment rather than being put in jail. The police are also restrained from fishing expeditions where they bait low-IQ people into becoming terrorists only to be caught in the act (yes, that actually happened).

And more… The right to make reasonable medical choices without fear of criminal prosecution, the ability to choose where to live, parental decision-making rights regarding children's education and health, and more.

Sources

[1] Does evidence support supervised injection sites? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5685449/?t&utm_sour...

[2] Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_7_of_the_Canadian_Char...

[3] Guide to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Canada.ca: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...

[4] Life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter (91-6E): https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/CIR/916-e.htm

[4] [PDF] The Brilliant Career of Section 7 of the Charter https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

[5] Charterpedia - Section 7 – Life, liberty and security of the person https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...