B. Drafting the Charter’s Equality Guarantee

• Author: Robert J. Sharpe - Kent Roach
• Profession: Court of Appeal for Ontario - Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
• Pages: 333-334

Page 333

In the debates about the appropriate wording of the equality provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there was a significant lobbying effort to strengthen the guarantee so as to prevent a repetition of the experience under the Canadian Bill of Rights. It is therefore significant that section 15 of the Charter provides that "every individual is equal

Page 334

before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law." The insistence in the careful wording of section 15 that the guarantee includes equality before and under the law, as well as equal protection and equal benefit of the law, was meant to signal to the courts that section 15 was intended to be a much more powerful instrument of protection than its predecessor. In particular, the reference to "equal protection" echoed the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States’ constitution, which had proven to be a powerful tool in the...