Travels with Justice L'Heureux-Dube: Equality Law Abroad

• Author: Margot Young
• Pages: 287-301

Fifteen

Travels

With

Justice L'Heureux-Dube:

Equality

Law

Abroad

MARGOT

YOUNG

Courts

face

a

challenging conceptual task

in

interpreting

and

applying con-

stitutional guarantees

of

equality. This challenge

has

been clearly recognized

by

the

judges

of the

Canadian Supreme Court.

For

instance,

in a

recently pub-

lished paper, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote

that

"of all the

rights,

[the

equality guarantee]

is the

most

difficult."1

And in Law v.

Canada

(Minister

of

Employment

and

Immigration)?

a

benchmark equality case

in

Canadian

Supreme

Court

jurisprudence,

lacobucci

J.

introduced section

15, the

equal-

ity

provision

of the

Canadian Charter

of

Rights

and

Freedoms?

as

"perhaps

the

Charters

most

conceptually

difficult

provision."4

Not all

courts

faced

with

a

constitutional equality provision have done

justice

to

equality aspirations. Indeed, some national courts have

failed

to

rise

to the

task:

a

notable example

is,

perhaps,

the

American judiciary's treatment

of

its

constitution's

equal protection

amendment.5

However,

both

South

African

and

Canadian courts have tackled their respective equality guarantees

in

interesting and, arguably, ambitious

ways—and

some

of the

credit

for

this

occurrence

in

both

of

these jurisdictions goes

to

Justice

L'Heureux-Dube.

This chapter tells this tale

of

bi-continental

influence.

The

chapter begins

with

a

whirlwind

tour

of

Canada's equality jurisprudence, with only

a few pit

stops

to

capture

the flavour of

Canadian equality law,

and

then moves

to the

geography

of

South

African

equality jurisprudence.

It

ends

by

recounting

287