Conflicting Rights?

Far from opposing one another, neither fundamental freedoms nor equality can exist without a meaningful guarantee of the other. The paper critiques case law and scholarship that needlessly pits these constitutional guarantees against one another.Acknowledgements With thanks to Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, Lisa Richmond, and Jenisa Los for their insightful comments as this article was prepared for publication, and with thanks to the peer reviewers for their helpful suggested revisions.Executive Summary This report considers the relationship between fundamental freedoms and the right to equality in Canadian constitutional law, specifically within the context of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the “Charter”).The first part of the report surveys case law from the Supreme Court of Canada on how apparent conflicts between rights and freedoms are to be reconciled. Although early Charter rulings emphasized that constitutional entitlements cannot limit one another, later decisions by the Court held that such apparent conflicts can be resolved by way of reconciliation (i.e., mutual limitation), or by balancing these entitlements against other external “reasonable limits.”