The death of deference

The author would like to thank all of the staff and Fellows at the Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy and Tom McIntosh for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the presentations and the paper, and Ross Macnab of the Constitutional Law Branch of the Saskatchewan Department of Justice for kindly tracking down difficult-to-find case citations. [...] To understand the cause of the death of deference, one needs to return to the events leading up to the adoption of the Charter in 1982. [...] One must understand the impact that equity groups had on the substance of the Charter, through their advocacy in the Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution in the winter of 1980-81,2 and the sense of empowerment and attachment to the 1982 Constitution, as a statement of fundamental human values, that was a consequence of these events. [...] The short time-frame in which the Meech Lake negotiations were completed and the unwillingness of the First Ministers to alter the Accord in response to public debate, except in the case of “egregious errors”3, locked the First Ministers into a clash with the public which not only made the defeat of the Accord inevitable, but dealt a death-blow to the public’s willingness to defer to their elected [...] In Manitoba, the refusal of Elijah Harper, an Aboriginal Member of the Legislative Assembly, to agree to changing the rules of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly to allow for Manitoba’s approval of the Accord by the three-year deadline made unanimous approval of the Accord impossible.11.