FIRST READING: The seven words in the Charter yielding all of Canada's wackiest court decisions - National Post

A protester holds a copy of Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Photo by Photo by Artur WidakArticle contentFirst Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

When a B.C. court declared this week that Canadians had a Charter-protected right to traffic in illicit drugs, any veteran court-watcher would have been able to guess the precise section of the Constitution that underlay the new right.  

It was Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the right to “life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof.”

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Like the rest of the Charter, Section 7 is only 44 years old. And it was written mostly as a means of ensuring fair trials and guarding against unreasonable detention. One early Section 7 decision, for instance, deemed it unconstitutional to automatically jail Canadians for driving with a suspended licence, as the driver might not know their licence was suspended.

But particularly over the past 15 years, Section 7 has wound up doing the heaviest lifting of any other section of the Constitution, with its provisions being used to strike down virtually any law or government action that might theoretically have some adverse impact on life, liberty or personal security.

Legal scholar Dave Snow has called Section 7 an “unconstrained” mechanism for Canadian courts to shape public policy. Snow has also noted that Section 7 challenges are a substantial chunk of what the Supreme Court of Canada deals with each year. In any given year, roughly one third of cases on the Supreme Court docket are challenging some aspect of civil society deemed to be a violation of “life, liberty and security of the person.”

Below, a cursory summary of just some of the new rights that Canadian judges have derived from the words “life, liberty and security of the person.”