Monthly Archives: March 2015

A mediated collision between freedom of religion and state secularism: Loyola High School v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 12

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[Photo of religious educators in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec]

Yet again, the Supreme Court of Canada wrestled with the thorny issue caused by the intersection of religious freedom and the secular state. In Loyola High School v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 12, the Court conceded some measure of victory to both sides of the equation. In a 4:3 majority decision, Justice Abella (LeBel, Cromwell and Karakatsanis JJ concurring) held that a private denominational school could be required to teach a state prescribed curriculum on world religions, religious cultures and their respective religious ethics from a neutral and secular perspective with the exception of the school’s own denomination. For that particular religion (here, Catholicism), the school was entitled to an exemption to teach its students from a Catholic perspective, an exemption that the provincial Minister had refused to provide.

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Senate Reform in Canada – Going Boldly Where No Senate Has Gone Before?

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This weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a conference at the Centre for Constitutional Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. The conference was entitled “Time for Boldness on Senate Reform”. Its opening speaker was the Right Honourable Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada. She delivered a thoughtful review of her experience both as a minister under Brian Mulroney’s government and as prime minister and her recollections about how the Senate had acted in response to both the Progressive Conservative’s government’s proposal for free trade with the United States and to the Mulroney government’s later proposal for the Goods and Services Tax (“GST”). The conference ended with the eminent professor and scholar Roger Gibbins reviewing the results of the various speakers and summarizing his experience at the conference. Professor Gibbins asked himself two questions. First, he asked whether the conference participants had been successful in living up to the conference’s : were they “bold” in their suggestions for Senate reform. He answered that question with a “No”. Then, he asked whether he learned whether Canada had to be bold in reforming the Senate. To that, he responded “Yes”.

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How technology and freedom of expression are inextricably intertwined – and how the iRevolution takes it another step further

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Paintings found on wall of Chauvet Cave – made circa 30,000 BCE

Recently, last Friday March 6th in fact, I had the privilege of speaking about freedom of expression to the Association des juristes d’expression française de la Colombie britannique. Normally, I would take my speaking notes and just convert them into a blog post. This is not possible here because first, my notes were “en français” and second, I undoubtedly butchered that otherwise beautiful language. This is part of the reason why there has been a bit of a lull between posts – I have been too busy reactivating old French language brain cells to prepare a new post.

This post is another in the series of posts in which I have explored the new Internet Age realities that exist for freedom of expression (for the other posts see “Freedom of expression and copyright in the Internet – The new realities of a cyberspace inhabited by copycats” (January 24, 2014), “The Internet Turns 25 Years Old – the Courts and the World Wide Web” (March 19, 2014) and, “The iRevolution revisited: when you share, are you expressing?” (November 13, 2014). In this blog post, I advance the thesis that the protection of freedom of expression must include not only the protection of the things expressed but the modalities and, specifically the technological modalities, by which human expression is transmitted and received.

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