Suchergebnisse

The social benefit challenges under the Charter's equality guarantee offer insight into the Supreme Court of Canada's approach to claims for distributive justice. In most of these cases, the financial costs to government of rights recognition play a role in the analysis. A survey of the outcomes of these cases and the "dollars" at stake reveals a "follow the money" pattern. In all cases in which the claim that the government regime creates an inequality was successful, the cost to the public purse of finding in favour of the equality claimant was characterized by the Court as low or inexpensive. All those cases in which the public cost of recognition was regarded as significantly high have failed, although some inexpensive claims have also failed. The correlation suggests that a minimal budgetary impact is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for a successful social benefit challenge. Conversely, the correlation indicates that a significant budgetary impact poses a serious, if not insurmountable, barrier to success. The social benefit equality cases have also been the occasion of the Court's elaboration of a doctrinal framework for factoring budgetary impacts into the adjudication of rights claims under the Charter. Much of the discussion in this regard has been on the question of at what stage of Charter analysis — the rights analysis, the section 1 analysis (and its subparts), and/or the remedy stage — the public cost of rights recognition should or should not be weighed against other factors. From an initial position of high principle — that governmental concerns about saving time and money should not trump rights — the jurisprudence has, over the past 30 years, reached a point at which the financial impact on government may play a significant role at all three stages of analysis, often curtailing a meaningful exploration of both the Charter values and the non-monetary regulatory concerns at stake. If the Charter equality guarantee is truly to be given substantive content, the n judges, lawyers and legal scholars need to work out a more coherent framework for taking account of budgetary impacts. an overview is provided of the sorts of considerations that need to be integrated into such a framework.

This article uses the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in G.(J.) v. New Brunswick to frame a discussion of the historical and ideological character of Canadian child welfare regimes on the nature and experience of women's citizenship within the liberal political order and, in particular, within the current neo-liberal restructuring of welfare provision. The article also analyzes traditional understandings of the political character of child welfare in terms of state intervention and non-intervention, by placing the state ordering of parent-child relations in the context of larger issues of colonialism, gendered parenting discourses, and the linkage between child neglect and poverty. The article argues that this more complex account of state/family relations exposes the rhetorical slippage between a family privacy and family support interpretation of liberal respect for family autonomy in both judicial discourse and the broader political sphere.

This article in scrapbook form represents the endeavour of the eight authors to document a recent, collective, academic journey. The project was one embarked upon as a means to explore tensions between the ideas of embodiment that connected our work, and the rigidities of academic convention. Using various media, this article strives, in substance and form, to provoke, challenge and confront its audience into dialogue, while simultaneously asking questions about the limits of our own legal imaginations.