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Ben Woodfinden: Dear Supreme Court, you don't have to do this

Leave Section 33 alone

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This week, the Supreme Court spent four days hearing interveners on Quebec’s Bill 21, An Act respecting the Laicity of the State, one of the longest hearings in the court’s history.

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If the Supreme Court of Canada uses this case to limit or defang Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the notwithstanding clause), as the federal Liberals and progressive activists groups are asking, it will be doing something extraordinarily dangerous and anti-democratic, judicially rewriting a foundational provision of our constitutional order and reading things into the Charter that simply don’t exist.

Ben Woodfinden: Dear Supreme Court, you don't have to do this Back to video

And it will be detonating a political earthquake whose aftershocks could rip the country apart.

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Quebec’s Bill 21, enacted in 2019, bans certain public-sector workers from wearing religious symbols on the job. It has survived years of legal challenge because Quebec pre-emptively invoked Section 33, shielding it from judicial overruling. There are a myriad of challengers and interveners now before the........

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