A Regina judge has ruled that the Saskatchewan government’s naming and pronoun policy should be paused for the time being, but Premier Scott Moe says he’ll use the notwithstanding clause to override it.
Moe, responding to today’s injunction issued by a Regina Court of King’s Bench Justice Michael Megaw, said he intends to recall the legislature Oct. 10 to “pass legislation to protect parents’ rights.”
“Our government is extremely dismayed by the judicial overreach of the court blocking implementation of the Parental Inclusion and Consent policy - a policy which has the strong support of a majority of Saskatchewan residents, in particular, Saskatchewan parents,” Moe said in a written statement Thursday afternoon. “The default position should never be to keep a child’s information from their parents.”
Last month, the province announced that all students under 16 needed parental consent to change their names or pronouns.
The notwithstanding clause is only ever used to suppress the rights of groups a given provincial government doesn’t like. It’s inclusion in the Charter was a mistake and as long as it remains all of our ‘rights’ are merely privileges.
My understanding was that it was intended as an “emergency brake” - a circuit breaker that could be tripped in an urgent situation, at the cost of the user’s career. But, that requires a politically literate population that would discourage its use.
So, instead we have strongman premiers using it as a hammer to point their profoundly unpopular policies through, and an apathetic and disengaged voter base willing to look the other way.
I see it as part of the broader erosion of the “checks and balances” we were assured would prevent this type of creeping dismantling of democracy.
In my opinion, and personal experience, it also has a lot to do with not having enough time and energy to think about anything other then putting food on the table, or even where your next meal is coming from. Certainly there are people that just don’t give a fuck, but I think that would be the minority if more people weren’t living paycheque to paycheque.
On the other hand, let’s not pretend that we don’t all waste time on Kardashians, Lemmy and other inane activities. I think the bigger problem is that we are overwhelmed with information, much of it inconsequential stuff, and that detracts from our ability to focus on and prioritize important but difficult topics.
For me at that time, the “inane” activities were sleep, rarely I had time to go on my shitty computer some evenings.
Who knew we’d have more than a few semi neo-nazis as premiers tho?
Actually, withholding Assent is the circuit breaker. The NWC is a mechanism to ensure that parliament makes the law, not judges. A judge may have a perfectly reason for making their verdict, and it totally makes sense to do so by a good number of the populous, but parliament is in charge and they’re allowed to set the rules.
If they have to suspend the rules to make the rules, what does that mean?
Technically, what it’s the parliament saying “this is the law, no matter what anyone else thinks of it.” It’s not suspension of law - an equal legal branch forming government is a feature of the United States. Here, like a lot of Westminster Parliamentary style governments, democracy is supreme to any rise of a kritarchy.
Except that the Notwithstanding clause literally suspends part of the charter of rights and freedoms in order to pass a law that the government deems more important than citizens’ rights, like in war time, or during a pandemic (which they didn’t even use the clause for), not to push through right wing identity politics that have been deemed unconstitutional.
Well, depends. It certainly can be used in a variety of situations. The basis of the notwithstanding clause doesn’t require that rights be set aside, it can be used to identify that an interpretation of rights is incorrect. For instance, where rights have been determined in the outcome of a case that isn’t deliberately mentioned in the relevant act, it would be perfectly acceptable for parliament to use the notwithstanding clause to say “no, that’s not what is written in the law we wrote.” The ‘threat’ of using the notwithstanding cause in Ontario recently in the Ford government is a good example of that. They ended up not needing it because the courts determined that the original ruling was probably ‘wrong’ before it was needed…
In this case, gender expression is a right that has been established repeatedly despite it not being explicitly mentioned in Section 15. (1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom (the basis is that gender expression is related to the sex of the individual). So, it ‘technically’ could be used correctly in this situation, but they are certainly assholes for fighting people for expressing their gender when it has been firmly set outside of the language.