Acceso usuarios
Mark S. Harding, Rainer Knopff
Explicit constitutional provisions can be seen as mere examples of broader zones of constitutional protection based on underlying values or principles, in which case the constitution has a broad, elastic scope. Alternatively, a constitution might protect only the explicit examples of its underlying values, thus leaving much of public importance beyond its reach. In Canada, controversy about these different understandings revolves in part around the appropriate judicial use of “Charter values,” an issue that most recently divided the Supreme Court in Ontario (Attorney General) v. Fraser, 2011. While “constitutionalizing everything” — or nearly everything of public importance — in the name of underlying values has become an increasingly dominant international perspective, it remains a matter of significant and enduring controversy. We explore this controversy by setting the Charter values debate in Fraser in the context of similar debates in other cases.
