Just to nitpick, but as I pointed out to matt_mcl, Trudeau was not the Prime Minister at the time. He was Justice Minister under Pearson.
What is patriation of the constitution? I was on vacation in Nova Scotia last week, American-ly ignorant, getting an inadvertent lesson on Canadian politics and history through mass media coverage of You-Know-Who. But patriation was (presumably) too monumental an event to define.
OK. It used to be that the official constitution of Canada was an act of the English parliament called the British North America Act. In 1982, Trudeau arranged for this to be brought to Canada, revised, supplied with a charter of rights and freedoms, and become our constitution. Our constitution is therefore now an act of our own parliament, not that of England’s. This was called the Patriation of the Constitution.
And what a charter of rights it is! Notwithstanding anything the charter says about such rights and freedoms, any provincial legislature, or the federal legislature itself, may pass laws that repudiate and abrogate those rights. In other words, Canadians have these rights and freedoms only so long as a government declines to rescind them. Yes, thank God for Pierre.
And by the way, to paraphrase a letter in The National Post, the mountain that should be renamed to commemorate Pierre should not be Mt. Logan. No, “Mt. Trudeau” should be the name for the Canadian mountain of debt that Trudeau heaped up. Unlike Mt. Logan, it has yet to be scaled.
In fairness to Pierre and Clause 33,
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The notwithstanding clause only applies to certain parts of the Charter, a fact that seems to be largely forgotten. You cannot use it to take away the right to vote, for instance - arguably the most significant of all rights, since it would allow you to boot out the assholes trying to use the notwithstanding clause.
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It’s hardly ever used. You have to concede that 999 times out of a thousand, when the courts nail legislation for contravening the Charter, the courts win.
My reading tells me that (note Section 33(1) contains the so-called ‘notwithstanding clause’):
"Section 33(1) of the Charter of Rights permits Parliament or a provincial legislature to adopt legislation to override section 2 of the Charter (containing such fundamental rights as freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of association and freedom of assembly) and sections 7-15 of the Charter (containing the right to life, liberty and security of the person, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention, a number of other legal rights, and the right to equality).
These are not trivial rights (as if any were). Frankly, I don’t see your point. The right to vote is not the be all and end all. Indeed, IMO, in the absence of the associated rights, the right to vote is almost meaningless.
The fact that it’s unlikely to be invoked is hardly reassuring. The fact that it may is chilling.