One key individual who has shaped Canadian law was former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. In 1982,he patriated (This means brought under Canadian control.) the Constitution. The Constitution Act, 1982 included the responsibilities of the different levels of government; federal, provincial and municipal, the amending formula (These are the rules for making changes to our Constitution.) and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He built upon the legal traditions of the British system of government and upon the work of another former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to create a document that was unique to Canada.
Alt text: This is a photo of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Take a few moments to view The Charter of Rights and Freedoms for an introduction to the Constitution and the Charter. As you watch, consider the legal significance of this legal change. Ask yourself: Why is the Constitution and the Charter so important to our legal system? Fill in the graphic organizer. Remember to record 5 key details.
Women in contemporary Canada enjoy the same rights and freedoms as men. This has not always been true. In the past, women were unwelcome in the workplace and in public roles such as judges and senators; women were unable to own property or make decisions regarding money independently.
A great deal of progress has been made over the course of the twentieth century. One of most important developments was winning the right to vote because of the power that democratic rights convey. Voters choose the representatives to sit in Parliament and those Members of Parliament are responsible to make laws for the country. Those laws apply to all citizens; including women. With the right to vote, women now had a voice in the shaping of the laws of the nation.
One woman who was fundamental to this achievement was Nellie McClung.
Please watch the video History of the Vote. As you watch, consider the interrelationships that existed between law, politics and the international conflict of the time. Ask yourself: How was the Military Service Act of 1917 related to the development of voting rights for women? Fill in the graphic organizer.
Alt tag: This is a photo of Nellie McClung.
Caption: Nellie McClung was a suffragist.(This is a person who fought for voting rights for women.)
Source of Photo: By Cyril Jessop [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Alt tag: This is a photo of a stop sign. There are trees in the background.
Caption: We are familiar with this common road sign. When did the government start to use these signs to regulate cars on the road?
Have a peek at 100 Years of the Car. What changes do you notice in the cars? What do you think prompted those changes?
Take a few moments to review the timeline below to see a few of the changes in laws that regulate automobiles. These changes were created by our elected representatives and passed into law through the provincial legislatures or through the federal House of Commons. Notice that regulation in this area is a shared responsibility between the federal and provincial levels of government.
As you look at the timeline consider change and continuity. Ask yourself: What laws have changed over time and what purpose do they serve? Which laws have stayed the same? How might laws regulating cars change in the future? Fill in the graphic organizer.
Timeframe
Change
1903 Ontario first licenses motor vehicles in the province. What purpose might this serve?
1908 PEI legislators ban cars because of noise and pollution. Within a decade this ban has been removed.
1921 Introduction of impaired driving to the Criminal Code (This is a book published annually that describes all criminal offences and their respective penalties.) There have been many adaptations to this area of law including the severity of the punishments. Lobby groups such as MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) have been influential in educating the public and advocating for strict laws.
1920s British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces switch to driving on the right by the end of the decade. What reasons can you suggest for the fact that some countries drive on the right while other nations drive on the left?
1939 Canada introduces the first four lane highway.
1949 The Trans-Canada Highway Act of 1949 articulates the sharing of costs between the federal and provincial levels of government. This nation-wide project is fully completed in 1971.
1951 First carmaker to introduce seatbelts. This new safety feature will not become law for another 25 years. Why did this change take so long?
1971 Canada introduces the first federal regulations on exhaust emissions.
1976 Ontario is the first province to pass a law making seat belts mandatory. All provinces and territories have similar laws by 1988.
1990 Canada Motor Vehicle Safety Standard requires cars to have daytime running lights.
1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act - The federal department; Environment Canada, has legal authority to regulate regulate emissions from on-road vehicles. This used to be under the control of Transport Canada.
2015 Distracted Driving law in Ontario increases fines and demerit points. Provinces across the nation are addressing this challenge through new legislation.
Timeline Sources:
“ Brief to the Standing Committee on Justice, Human Rights” Canadian Criminal Justice Association, Ottawa: April 20, 200. https://www.ccja-acjp.ca/pub/en/briefs-articles/bill-c-32-the-victims-bill-of-rights-act/
“Distracted Driving Laws in Canada” Canadian Automobile Association, http://distracteddriving.caa.ca/education/distracted-driving-laws-in-canada.php
“Emissions Standards:Background” DieselNet. https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/ca/
“In Search of the Canadian Car: History TImeline” Canadian Science Technology Museum; virtualmuseum.ca http://www.canadiancar.technomuses.ca/eng/frise_chronologique-timeline/1900/
“Seat belt legislation in Canada” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_legislation_in_Canada
Sporting events are often cause for celebration; they can unify a population, highlight the positive aspects of a particular region or nation, boost the economy and showcase the talent of the athletes. Unfortunately, the preparations for some sporting events can cause major disruptions and hardships for those living in the host country. Take a few minutes to look at sports from a legal perspective. The rights of people can be threatened or violated in a number of ways. These violations have occurred in the past but human rights concerns are a contemporary issue. Take a moment to read the article below. Ask yourself: What are the rights violations identified by the author? What is the impact of that violation? Fill in the graphic organizer.
Alt text -This image has 25 small black and white stick figure characters performing different sporting events such as cycling and sailing.
Caption: There are many sporting events that have witnessed human rights violations.
Please watch The Exclusion Games. What do you see? What questions do you ask? What is the ‘big idea’ presented?
Did you know?
Clearly the video has a particular perspective on the issue of the Olympics. Having an opinion or taking a stand on a specific issue is an important part of being an engaged citizen. It is however, always important to ask questions about your sources. Is there a bias in my source? Is the point of view supported with evidence? What else do I need to know in order to draw my own conclusions?
Source for article: Worden, Minky. “Raising the Bar: Mega-Sporting Events and Human Rights” Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/global-1#7e9b6b Great article
While you are reading the following article, please pay particular attention to the underlined words and the use of italics.
When athletes break the rules in Olympic competitions, they are harshly sanctioned. When host countries flout the rules, they have largely got away with it. Former IOC President Jacques Rogge often insisted that the Olympics are a “force for good” but refused to criticize blatant violations of the Olympic Charter by Olympic hosts.
Human Rights Watch has extensively documented how mega-sporting events can bring mega-violations when Games are awarded to governments who fail to respect human rights. No country has a perfect human rights record, but increasingly it is the more abusive states that most want to burnish their international reputation and need the patriotic boost gained by hosting world media and leaders for a global sport extravaganza.
Over a decade of research, Human Rights Watch has documented five signature types of serious human rights violations that are typically tied to mega-sporting events.
The first is forced evictions without due process or compensation due to massive new infrastructure construction. Before 2008, thousands of citizens in Beijing were forcibly evicted from their homes with little due process in terms of consultation or adequate compensation.
Residents who protested the demolition of their homes were arrested. Fair compensation and due process were serious problems in Sochi as well.
As massive stadiums are constructed for opening ceremonies, soccer games, or swimming and other events, the bulk of the work is often done by abused and exploited migrant workers, who face hazardous working conditions, long hours, and being cheated of pay.
Major infrastructure construction often also leads to environmental and other complaints.The silencing of civil society and rights activists has been a signature abuse ahead of both the Beijing and Russian Olympics. Instead of the promised human rights improvements, the period leading up to the Beijing Games was marred by jailings and house arrests of activists who criticized the Olympics (including Sakharov Prize winner Hu Jia), and a three-year jail sentence for an environmental activist in Russia. In Beijing, citizens like 59-year-old Ji Sizun—who attempted to use the “Olympic protest zones” officially set up by the Chinese government to supposedly allow peaceful protest—were arrested. In Sochi, members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot who staged a small protest during the Winter Games in February 2014 were visibly tackled and beaten by Cossacks while the police did nothing.
The Olympic Charter expressly guarantees press freedom—the sale of media rights is a major source of revenue for the International Olympic Committee. But both the Beijing and Sochi Olympics were marred by threats, intimidation, and arrests of journalists. When 25,000 journalists arrived in China to cover the Beijing Olympics, they were surprised to find Internet news blocked—until the IOC forced China to cease web censorship for the duration of the Games. News that China's milk supply was poisoned nationwide with melamine was censored until after the Games closed, and at least six babies died as a result of this tragic poisoning (and the media blackout about it). In the lead-up to the Sochi Games, Russian police harassed, detained, and threatened to imprison two journalists from a Norwegian television station, before sarcastically saying, “Welcome to Sochi” when the journalists’ ordeal was over. So egregious was their treatment that Russian authorities issued a rare apology.
Mega-sporting events are supposed to be moments to celebrate diversity and human achievement. But too often they are settings that expose ugly discrimination. Until just days before the launch of the London 2012 Olympics, Saudi Arabia was still planning to send a male-only national team, as in all past Olympics, and also to the 2014 Asian Games. Extreme pressure—brought about in part by Human Rights Watch’s “Let Them Play” campaign—finally led to two Saudi women being allowed to compete in 2012. But back in Saudi Arabia, as documented by Human Rights Watch’s 2012 report “Steps of the Devil,” the country still bans sport for all girls in state schools and has no women’s sports federations, a clear violation of the Olympic Charter’s non-discrimination clause.
In June 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law an anti-LGBT “propaganda” bill. The law uses the pretext of protecting children to ban spreading information about equality, tolerance, and other issues affecting the LGBT community and demonized LGBT people and activists in the public eye. This has helped spark a surge in harassment and violent attacks against LGBT people, and the IOC raised no concerns about how this could be compatible with a commitment to non-discrimination.
In some parts of the world, women cannot even attend a sporting event as a spectator. Equal access to sporting events for women has become a serious concern, with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the international governing body for soccer known as FIFA, allowing a ban on women spectators for football matches since the 1980s in Iran. In 2012, Iranian officials extended the ban to volleyball matches.
Law student Ghoncheh Ghavami was arrested in June 2014 and jailed for months in Iran’s notorious Evin prison after she and others protested a ban on women entering a stadium to watch a World League match. In November, the International Federation for Volleyball (known as FIVB) called on the Iranian government to release Ghavami, and affirmed its commitment to “inclusivity and the right of women to participate in sport on an equal basis” at the organization’s World Congress. The FIVB flagged that Iran’s policy could limit its ability to host international tournaments in the future. Ghavami was released on bail in late November, but not before a revolutionary court convicted her of “propaganda against the state” and sentenced her to one year in prison. She was appealing the decision at time of writing.
In November 2014, the Asian Volleyball Confederation announced that it had selected Iran to co-host the 2015 Asian Men’s Volleyball Championships. Ghavami’s conviction and Iran’s continuing ban on women spectators attending men’s sporting events should prompt international sporting groups to pull all major tournaments from offending countries until women are guaranteed the right to attend matches as spectators without the prospect of arrest and jailing.
Did you know?
It is common to encounter words that are unfamiliar; in fact, if you never encounter a new word in your reading, then you can draw a simple conclusion: You are reading texts that are too simple for you and are not challenging your language development. As a “rule of thumb” (This phrase means ‘as a general rule.’), if you encounter 3-5 new words a page, you will acquire new words and expand your vocabulary. Who cares about words? Language is a tool that you can use to communicate your ideas clearly. Words are like money in your pocket; if you have 5 toonies at your disposal, you have more choices. Having choices is the goal.
Take a moment to check your understanding of some of the vocabulary presented in the reading above.
sanction - This word means to limit or restrict certain actions. For example; Canada imposed these against Russia to express its displeasure over Russia’s actions in the Ukraine.
pretext - This word refers to a reason given in justification of a course of action that is not the real reason.
hazardous - This word refers to something that is very dangerous.
appealing - Used in a legal context, this refers to be in the process of asking a court to reconsider a verdict from a trial.
censorship - To limit information or restrict access to certain material.
egregious - This word means ‘outstandingly bad;shocking.’
spectators - The group of people who watch or view an event.
compatible - A word used to describe two things that are able to exist or occur together without conflict.
evictions - The action of expelling someone, especially a tenant, from a property; expulsion.
marred - To disfigure or spoil something.
revenue - This word refers to money or income.
infrastructure - This term refers to the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g., buildings, roads and power supply) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.
Just for fun, try to use each one of the words above in your conversations with friends and family today. You will become comfortable with new words if you use them.