As a Canadian I'd be surprised to learn our constitution was considered top notch by legal scholars.
The amendment process is very onerous. 7/10 provinces haven't ever really agreed on the colour of the sky, let alone something as important as new constitutional rules. It took some very special backroom wrangling to pass it in the first place and I don't see a path to amending it during my lifetime. Meech Lake came close and very nearly broke the country.
The notwithstanding clause was necessary to get it passed at all, but really takes some of the teeth out of the charter of rights and freedoms. When parties hold majority control of the House of Commons or a provincial legislature a lot of what keeps their power in check is mostly norms it turns out. One of the few actual laws that would really impede them is the charter, but portions of it can be ignored.
Overall I'm very happy we have the 1982 Constitution Act, but I certainly wouldn't offer it up as a blueprint if someone came asking for assistance in drafting a constitution. The Charter itself as a portion of the larger constitution (minus the notwithstanding clause) is a very special piece of law that deserves some recognition internationally, but as a whole it wasn't even 10 years before the real issues were exposed with the whole document.
Ruth Badger Ginsburg should be a Supreme Court Justice on a kids show filled with animals who makes landmark decisions the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have proud of.
Your own link contains my very point: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a modern piece of human rights legislation. RBG specifically calls out the Charter, not the Canadian constitution as a whole.
The Charter is like the US Bill of Rights, a small section of a larger document dealing specifically with civil rights. The rest of the Canadian constitution is a messy bit of parliamentary wrangling from across 2 centuries delegating the country of Canada into existence and separating it from the UK.
"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
So the law can override it as they please? I prefer the US version that says "Congress shall make no law ..."
For a long time now I have tried to sum up the differences between the US and Canada in our founding principals. Canada's is "Peace, Order, and Good Government". Contrast that against the "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and the fundamental differences in our approaches to government make a lot more sense.
We're much more like the UK than the US in the function of government and the construction of laws, though Parliamentary Sovereignty is expressly subject to judicial review in Canada, something the UK is going to have to grapple with over the next decade now that they are no longer subject to the European Court of Human Rights.
The government can't just override the charter as they please using the language in the Guarantee. The charter allows for things like hate speech laws, but they have to fall under "reasonable limits", something the Supreme Court of Canada rules on all the time, nearly always in favour of citizens compared to the government. A recent example being medically assist death, where the Supreme Court ruled bans on assisted death violated the Charter.
The US is a free speech extremist country, but since even the US Supreme Court has ruled there are limits on speech (like threats) this isn't a night and day difference between our countries in my view. The US allows far more speech than Canada does, yet we rank higher on the press freedom index.
The thing that really lets the Charter down is section 33, the 'notwithstanding clause'. It allows the federal and provincial governments to pass laws overriding certain rights for a period of 5 years. The charter itself would likely never have come into being without it, but it does take some of the teeth away.
I could easily be mistaken. I think it's currently a weird grey area where the UK government has said they will continue to respect it, but there is nothing binding them to that decision.
Jeez, it is hardly extreme. BTW, free speech does not include libel, slander, specific threats, or inciting riots.
> we rank higher on the press freedom index
Canada does? Based on what? Note that no matter how extremely negative the press was about Trump, never once did the government make any legal threats against them about it.
The US has the most expansive free speech laws in the entire world. Perhaps 'extremist' is a bit hyperbolic, but it's certainly true US free speech laws go far beyond any others.
Reporters Without Borders maintains a press freedom index. Their justification is detailed here: https://rsf.org/en/index
But neither are really great or terrible. Canada didn’t really change much, and South Africa hasn’t been doing great.
The “West German Basic Law” was widely condemned:
* it was unrealistic to have strong privacy protections for a nation filled with refugee camps and few private homes
* the protections for the family were meaningless when so few nuclear families survived (something like 70% of the country was female)
* the mandate to reunify was unrealistic and possibly undesirable
* there were no provisions for the victims of Nazi Germany
* it favored the establishment of strong, stable leaders - which brought back memories of Hitler
* many of the civil liberties - such as abolishing the death penalty - were just excuses to prevent punishment of war criminals (which was true)
* claiming the lands East of the Oder as part of Germany was unrealistic
Buy it turned out to be an extremely effective Constitution that lead to the transformation of Germany and its eventual reunification (mostly).