No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
14th Amendment, s. 1:
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Sam Stone says that the right to life is so important that it’s not subject to a majority vote.
Representatives and voters in many US states, and at the federal level, have voted that it is proper for the state to kill its citizens in certain circumstances.
Canada doesn’t have the death penalty, but in the Criminal Code our federal legislators have stated that the police can kill citizens in certain circumstances.
I am not aware of any country that meets Sam Stone’s comment that the right to life cannot be put to majority vote.
Yes, and you also don’t have the right to liberty if you are in prison, or the right to pursue your own goals if you declare bankruptcy. This is not what the bill of rights means, or what ‘inalienable’ means. You can forfeit various rights if you have demonstrated your willingness to infringe on the rights of others. Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
I agree, it is basic: you are stating that the state can, for reasons sufficient to the state, conclude that you do not have a right to life, without your consent.
The point is that calling it inalienable, or God given or anything else, doesn’t change the fact that governmental authority can and in some case does remove (or violate, or ignore) these rights in many cases with no consequences.
It can, yes, but that’s not the point. The idea behind an inalienable right is not that you cannot surrender some freedom for breaking the law; the idea is that there are certain fundamental elements inherent to the worth of a human being that we all have a right to. This is humanism, not something uniquely American. It’s the cornerstone of Western liberal civilization; it’s the cornerstone of YOUR way of looking at this stuff, even though most of us aren’t conscious of the fact that it’s not the only way to think of how the world should be arranged.
I mean, WHY does the Charter of Rights and Freedoms say that everyone has the right to vote, to be treated equally, or to enter and leave the country? Those things were not chosen randomly and there’s a reason why most civilized countries have adopted broadly similar bills of rights; because we agree there are certain things that a human being has a right to do because they are a human being. When another country takes away some really fundamental right, even under pretext of law, we condemn them. Most right thinking people agree Iran executing people for blasphemy is disgusting, because we have a common understanding that there are rights people just HAVE, even if a government says they don’t. We can quibble around the details of course - should the voting age be 18 or 21? Do people have the freedom to possess meth? - but there are some core humanist values we consider universal.
This is as distinct from a right in a contextual sense - for instance, if you and I sign a contract for me to buy your car, and I take the car and the check bounces, you have a legal right to get $X from me. That’s not an inalienable right, though.
I think I agree with all that – my point is that these are defined by humans (even if some humans insist they are defined by God or the universe or whatever), and thus they aren’t any safer than anything else defined by humans. Hopefully we’ll all have a consensus about these rights and they won’t be violated.
Well, sure. Not that the American authors of their founding documents used generic terms like “endowed by their Creator,” not generally being at all specific as to which one you were supposed to believe it, or not. It wasn’t “because Jesus said so.” This was late 18th century terminology that deliberately meant something approximating “this is just what people have.”
IANAL but I believe that while you have the “right to remain silent” when you’re detained by the authorities in Canada, there’s no “mandatory” requirement on the police to advise you of that right in the same sense as the Miranda warning in the US. You just simply refuse to answer because statements that can be interpreted as incriminating can be used against you even if no warning of your right to remain silent has been given to you. A judge may refuse to allow the statement(s) in court but they’re not required to like in the US.
it’s more nuanced than that. The common law has always had a right to silence, and judge-made law, pre-Charter, said that any statement by a detained person to a police officer was presumptively inadmissible, if the officer had not warned of the right to silence.
That principle has been implemented in s. 7 of the Charter. Police warnings are not expressly required by the Charter, but are required, as a result of s. 7 and also s. 10, which requires that the detained person be informed of the reason for the detention and the right to retain counsel.
There is a difference between the US and Canada on implementing it. As I understand it, once the right to counsel is invoked in the US, the police cannot interview the detained person unless counsel is present. In Canada, the police must hold off until the detained person has had an opportunity to consult counsel, but after that, they can interview the detained person in the absence of counsel, unless the detained person again asserts they want to speak to their lawyer.
Here’s one example of a Canadian police warning, courtesy the Wikipedia article on the “Right to Silence”:
I am arresting you for (charge). It is my duty to inform you that you have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. You may call any lawyer you want. There is a 24-hour telephone service available which provides a legal aid duty lawyer who can give you legal advice in private. This advice is given without charge and the lawyer can explain the legal aid plan to you. If you wish to contact a legal aid duty lawyer, I can provide you with a telephone number. Do you understand? Do you want to call a lawyer? You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say may be given in evidence in court.
Canada and the UK were never joined as equals. Canada never had representation in the British Parliament, and the British Parliament could pass laws for Canada, whether we wanted them to or not.
That constitution was of course the creation of a very small group of men, most of them tied to the largest corporate interests of the day, and was not a reflection of what the mass of people at the time may have thought, since most of them did not have the vote and were not consulted. As one father of confederation put it, “it is an empire we have in view.” While commerce is mentioned extensively in the confederation debates, democracy is hardly mentioned at all, and not favourably. As John A.Macdonald and George-Etienne Cartier emphasized, the constitution, with its appointed senate, was designed to protect the elite from the rest of the electorate. So it’s hard to know what to make of the “national character” and “peace,order, and good government.”
You seem to be talking about Confederation, many aspects of which favoured elites. This is different from the Constitution signed in 1982 by provincial representatives excluding Québec. In practice, decisions regarding Canada’s supreme laws have taken a fairly expansive view of rights. Even civil matters are increasingly respectful of constitutional values, which are often more democratic and reasonable than the original founding principles. Unless I am misinterpreting what you are saying?
It’s not a separate Constitution. The Constitution was established in 1867 and has been added on ever since. The Constitution Act, 1982 was the culmination of the nation-building process, and in my opinion, it’s misleading to say that Quebec never signed the Constitution. The Province of Canada voted for the Confederation Resolutions, with a majority in Canada East (now Quebec) and a majority in Canada West (now Ontario). Quebec did not agree to the 1982 amendments, but that’s not the same as saying Quebec never signed the Constitution.
Fair enough. However, the 1982 amendments were quite significant. You are both correct in a broader historical context. But it would not be fair to characterize the current Constitution Act as elitist or undemocratic in my opinion.
(My claim for democracy does not cover uses of the notwithstanding clause as interpreted by some provincial governments. These were presumably hard to foresee by the original founders, or accepted as a bulwark against abuses.).