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Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.
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Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.
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Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.
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This article draws on debates about the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory to consider the normative challenges raised by descent-based Aboriginal membership rules in Canada. The boundary paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles of democratic theory. If a demos is necessarily bounded, so that some people are excluded, what normative principle could justify these exclusions? Liberal theory tends to insist on the primacy of consent as the basis of political society and so fails to explain the reliance of liberal democracies on birthright membership, especially the distribution of citizenship to foreign-born descendants of citizens. Applied to expressly kinship-based polities like Aboriginal communities, liberal approaches prioritize non-discrimination, potentially denying to those communities the capacity to distribute membership by reference to characteristics listed as ‘prohibited grounds’ in human rights law, including, most problematically, race and ethnicity. The article outlines the parallels between Canadian citizenship law, the Indian Act regime, and First Nations’ membership codes, and examines the distinctive role to be played by section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act 1982 in tempering non-discrimination logics. It concludes that existing justificatory tests (the ‘valid legislative object’ test, and the section 1 ‘reasonable limits’ test) are unlikely to provide a way forward, but that a promising methodology can be discerned in Canadian law and policy, in which the ‘reasonableness’ of Aboriginal descent–based exclusions is assessed relative to the characteristics of a free and democratic Aboriginal community. I suggest that this adaptation of liberal non-discrimination norms is an expression of the continuing importance of kinship and descent boundaries in settler-state constitutionalism. Although many questions remain to be resolved, Canadian human rights laws and methodologies could assist in the primary challenge posed to settler-state political theory: the reconciliation of tribal and liberal forms of political organization.
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Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.
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Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.
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Le privilège parlementaire, essentiel au bon fonctionnement du parlementarisme canadien, est trop souvent mal compris par les tribunaux, mais également par les parlementaires eux-mêmes, qui vont parfois l’invoquer de manière abusive. Depuis l’avènement de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, les tribunaux tentent, avec un succès mitigé, de réconcilier le privilège parlementaire avec les droits et libertés constitutionnels. À l’aide d’une étude de la jurisprudence et de la doctrine, l’auteur analyse de manière critique le modèle canadien de privilège parlementaire. Il tente tout d’abord de bien comprendre les bases historiques et constitutionnelles du privilège au Canada. Par la suite, il circonscrit les principaux problèmes de l’approche de la Cour suprême du Canada en la matière pour ensuite proposer des pistes de solution, adressées aux tribunaux, mais aussi aux parlementaires, afin de mieux adapter le privilège parlementaire aux réalités du xxie siècle.
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Prisons present a special context for the interpretation of constitutional rights, where prisoner complaints are pitched against the justifications of prison administrators. In the United States, the history of prisoner rights can be told as a story of the ebb and flow of judicial willingness to defer to the expertise-infused claims of prison administrators. Deference is ostensibly justified by a judicial worry that prison administrators possess specialized knowledge and navigate unique risks, beyond the purview of courts. In recent years, expansive judicial deference in the face of “correctional expertise” has eroded the scope and viability of prisoners’ rights, serving to restore elements of the historical category of “civil death” to the legal conception of the American prisoner. In Canada too, courts have often articulated standards of extreme deference to prison administrators, both before and after the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and notwithstanding that the Charter places a burden on government to justify any infringement of rights. Recently, however, two cases from the Supreme Court of British Columbia mark a break from excessive deference and signify the (late) arrival of a Charter-based prison jurisprudence. In each case, prisoner success depended on expert evidence that challenged the assertions and presumed expertise of institutional defendants. In order to prove a rights infringement and avoid justification under section 1, the evidence must illuminate and specify the effects of penal techniques and policies on both prisoners and third parties. The litigation must interrogate the internal penal world, including presumptions about the workings of prisoner society and conceptions of risk management.