The change i'd make to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is to relegate it to a descriptive section in the Constitution, rather than one guaranteeing a legal remedy in the control of the courts.
All of the arguments against placing it as such in the Constitution have been realized. We have created a judicial tyranny.. without responsibility to the people of Canada through its elected representatives. The top court is filled with intellectual and moral mediocrities.. none more so than our Chief Justice, Bev MacLaughlin.. a radical 60s era feminist... and a fool totally out of her depth.
We have clogged the judicial system with inane 'human rights' cases that have fomented division and an attitude of assumed offense and separate and unequal privileges for 'victim's groups'. It has usurped Parliament's ability to create national unity and consensus.. taking into consideration the priorities and identity of the nation as whole.. rather than special interests.
A Charter of Rights and Freedoms of this sort is an ANATHEMA to a Parliamentary system.. which does not have the checks and balances to control it. It provides for a facile concept of rights, free of any commensurate responsibility to the community as as whole.
It was Pierre Trudeau's biggest blunder. It's been a disaster.
But the whole point of a Constitution is precisely to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. A country like Canada with over one hundred years of the residential school system, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Gradual Civilization Act, the abrogation of the right of Germans to send their children to school in German after WWI, and Japanese internment are all examples of the problem with the tyranny of the majority without proper checks and balances, unless of course we started to expect the Governor General, while still remaining non-partisan, to exercize more authority in deciding whether or not to sign any Bill into law. But considering the public outcry, you'd need a Governor General with balls of steele to do that.
Even today on-reserve schools continue to be underfunded relative to other schools. And the list of majority abuses of democracy go on today. So definitely we need some kind of Constitution that protects the minority from the majority. Absolutely essential.
One problem with the current Charter though is that it was written by the majority to protect the interests fo the majority, which defeats the whole point of a Bill of Rights.
