Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
I'm not a lawyer, but I read the link you posted (thanks!) and it doesn't seem like they enshrined abortion access as an inalienable charter right to me.
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It's not inalienable - there are two possibilities. First, a government could impose a restriction on abortion that doesn't contravene this and other SCC rulings about the extent of application of S.7 in this context. That has actually been tried, unsurprisingly - without success. So, in short, there is a legal right to an abortion that no Canadian government can encroach on, but that right has - at least in theory - limits, beyond which the government is free to legislate. In practice, actually legislating restrictions on abortion without running afoul of s.7 has been less than fruitful. There are obviously other subsequent cases on this topic, and experts in the law on this area can speak to those better than I can. But I doubt you'll be surprised to find that after the 1988 decision I linked to, which struck down the criminal law in question, the SCC has taken it further, to a point where even if they don't explicitly say there's a constitutional right to an abortion in so many words, the existence of that right is a practical reality.
The second possibility is that the Supreme Court could revisit the area and change the law - that's always open to them. It seems very unlikely that that will ever happen, but it's
technically possible, which also means the right to an abortion in Canada isn't "inalienable".
I suppose that it's also technically true that no Charter right is inalienable. After all, there is a clear set of rules about how to amend the Charter. It's possible, though extremely unlikely, that a set of circumstances could occur that eliminate your right to free expression, for example. So from that perspective no legal right in Canada is inalienable.