welcome to module three now this is my ninth take of this video i've made a series of errors including not liking the light which i still can't get quite right some very very unfortunate speech issues and very recently just really fumbling through a particular topic that i got under a tangent that was really unnecessary um i tend to do that in person and um but on these videos it just seems so much more um wasteful i don't want to waste your time watching these videos i imagine by now videos are becoming a bit uh old news now the good news going forward in this module is that there will be one video for all the lessons because i have switched my recording devices so that there is one continuous video without needing to stitch things together because my computer that i use my laptop simply does not have the power to process that kind of video quickly and won't take me hours and hours and hours and hours just to get one file completed so this is a big improvement for for you you don't have to toggle between videos and a lot easier for me the challenge is when i make a big mistake like i just did 15 minutes in do you try to edit it you just do it again you're going to get better as you go practice practice practice sometimes these videos go off without a hitch and sometimes i'm here for a lot longer than i imagined anyhow we are going to in this module look at the charter of rights and freedoms and we're going to look at six things in particular first we're going to start with a discussion of the charter before then turning towards the question of how do you interpret rights and we talk about having rights how do we interpret them and then we're going to look at the limits on the charter then discuss how we enforce those charter rights before turning to two examples of rights within the charter we will have some more uh discussion about how these rights actually play out in case law now at the end i'm going to give you a bonus lecture the bonus lecture i've already alluded to i will work my way through the history of a particular important tobacco litigation case around advertising of tobacco and we will through that case be able to look at all or most of the concepts that we've discussed thus far in the modules i have been with you now i hope that module two i believe the constitution says module three i get the numbers wrong all the time i keep calling this module two because it's my second one with you but i hope that the previous module went well and that you were able to follow along i know i can speak uh quickly at times i'm sure that i mumble and there's some weird shadows with the lights but i've been working on that and hopefully this is not so bad so without further ado let's get going the joys of recording from home as a car alarm that possibly could go off all night it has happened before repeatedly goes on and off you may not even hear it so perhaps i don't need to mention it but there's lots of excitement in the hood we're going to start our discussion today with looking at writes in general what are they just a kind of a basic primer my previous video that was far too long i spent way too long in this section it's a fascinating topic and i'll try to truncate it a little bit and just make it a bit more uh digestible the second topic we're going to look at is a history of human rights i think it's very important to situate where the documents the concepts come from particularly when we're talking about written texts like the charter why do we have the charter what came before so we'll look at the history before we actually look at the charter itself and what it actually does and that will include a discussion of the application of the charter and the various parts of the charter now you have the charter in your text so you can read along with the various sections in the constitutional section i said you should look at the constitution that's in that's replicated in the text the sections of it and read it and kind of be generally familiar with it just because it's very important for general purposes just by living in this country and being under this constitution with the charter i would encourage you to read it all it's not very long it's really really important for a lot of reasons and both in this section but also in sections that come you are going to hear people talk about section 7 for example or section two or section eight or section fifteen and you should have a general sense of what those are it will take a little bit of time but you will get there um and i apologize for fidgeting i have a mosquito buzzing around my head and i believe i was just bitten it was freezing in this barn this morning i'm recording at night because it's actually about 10 degrees warmer by the end of the day and i can be in this barn without seeing my breath but either can't be in here is too cold or i have my friend the mosquito i also have a new roommate i've discovered uh we are so far naming our roommate steve norton cmorton is a name that's carved into the building in the bar in a few places but it's chipmunk chipmunk morton i have a little chipmunk that lives somewhere behind me in the wall of the barn and all day long he scurries or she scurries back and forth collecting his food her food for the winter and i'm going to let it live in here because i feel like it's done so much work already it'd be cruel to try to close it off or not let it live in here i'm just going to hope it doesn't die and make it snow in the office but i digress see what i mean about tangents that was an important one though chipmunk is an important one okay a primer on rights so rights are really about the protection of individual rights and freedoms and the things that are our rights and freedoms we're gonna talk about there's a bunch of different categories the charter only covers some of them but it is this idea that we protect rights and freedoms and who do we protect them of we protect them of humans now in some discourse in some literature you might hear the term civil rights civil rights movement for example a phrase i'm sure you've heard about civil rights marches civil rights refer to the same sorts of things of human rights but sometimes they are a subset and sometimes they refer to the whole basket we like to use the same terms and for different purposes so civil rights could mean things like your right to vote participate and vote or right to to assemble the civil rights could also refer to potentially a whole basket of rights that might include things that look more like economic or social rights we don't need to worry about that too much other than to know that sometimes we talk about these things differently but really what we're talking about are human rights and human rights have some very uh defining characteristics one thing about them is that they're inherent the idea of them being inherent is that you're born as a human being with these rights you do nothing to earn them you do nothing to buy them etc that they're just inherent in your very humanness now this can raise really interesting problems right what makes a human a human being and as we get closer and closer to artificial intelligence that that looks and acts and functions like a human being does it have the same sorts of rights and i've been in debates and had conversations with colleagues and given talks with colleagues about this very idea of the idea of rights within the context of ai particularly as we think about ai that may serve really important purposes moving forward such as being companions there's there's caregiving device technology that's coming about that what if you could have ai be the the mode of delivery for home care and you could then have more interaction and more safe interaction potentially with with some individuals so is that a human right and is it just about the human like qualities or is there something about the actual thing that makes us human the various parts our dna the the biological the mental uh psychological aspects of humanity in any event we're born with human rights how far they go also becomes an issue um at what point do our rights as human beings dissipate is it upon the moment of death or in some traditions it's it's the body remains part of the human right so it can be undignities to a human body because there's still rights in the idea of the humanness so there's this is a very intricate concept that we could talk a lot about when we won't this is why my last video went along there's so much fun stuff in here but the idea is that we are born and there's an inherent uh aspect to these human rights the second uh idea around human rights is that they're universal that they belong to everyone now we we clearly have examples of how that is not the case we clearly do not universally give human rights and and it's unfortunate it's a reality that is is long overdue to change but but part of what makes it so upsetting is that part of the i very idea of human rights is that they're universal and based on the humanity of the subject and yet we do not afford all human beings the same access to rights i'm a cisgendered white male in a position of relative authority and power my human rights do not get impacted the same way that others might now it's not that i'm a law professor and i'm in a position of power per se or that i'm educated because i have colleagues in the exact same position as me but modify one aspect and and how they are treated is shifted it changes so i have a colleague who uh is in the same position as me the difference is he's black and he's faced so much more uh challenges in his life and violations of his human rights by that mere fact or i have colleagues that face the same sort of challenges by the mere fact that they are women so we don't apply these universally but the idea of them intrinsically is that they're universal we also would say that the rights and human rights in general are i'm saying the rights to refer to the charter but in general they're interrelated that rights are interrelated but beyond that they're also interdependent that they rely on one another and they need each other so there are some interrelated aspects so your freedom of expression is tied to your freedom of religion these are both charter rights your ability to practice your religious beliefs might be to the very expression right wearing a cross perhaps wearing another identifying religious garment or the things you may say the signs you may hold you have the freedom of expression to do those things that are part of voicing and giving life to your freedom of religion so they're interrelated but they're also interdependent in that your religious beliefs might depend on that expression there might be an aspect to your religious beliefs that requires that expression to be protected and in this respect rights are also indivisible the idea here being that they can't be taken away from the the idea of uh one right can't be taken away without affecting another one so you can't take away freedom of expression expect the freedom of religion to be unaffected they're indivisible they're connected to uh one another and that the advancement of one advances another so allowing people to have more freedom of expression allows for more freedom and religious belief one of the ways to curtail or circumscribe beliefs in a particular community is to not allow free expression of ideas part of what made uh the the reformation a big deal was that luther when he translated the bible from latin to the vernacular people could read it they could now express their own opinions about what the bible said and that was a huge change in how the protestant church existed or sorry the catholic church existed bringing about the protestant revolution reformation right because now you've had the ability for commoners to read and express themselves or before the the clergy had control over over what was actually able to be expressed so they're indivisible you can't remove one without expecting it to hurt other they build each other up they work together now in this class we're talking about human rights in a specific context we're talking about rights against the state's interference now rights exist beyond this you can have rights claims that are against an employer or against a landlord or against a variety of other institutions or individuals who may violate your rights and it's often a vernacular kind of term that you use that my rights have been violated and often i've had discussions with colleagues one in particular when people say well that's an abuse of my rights we quickly say well which one like identify it because not everything is a right sometimes we want things to be right some things are entitlements some things we purchase some things are agreements but not everything is a human right and not every action is a violation of a human right but there can be violations by other institutions and organizations and individuals but in this module we're talking about violations by the state now we're talking with the states important to recognize that there are intertwined ideas here of rights and obligations and here really all i'm trying to say is that the state actually has obligations to protect rights in to protect particular groups against abuse that's part of what we're going to talk about in the the context of equality but there is a distinction that sometimes emerges between positive and negative rights and positive rights were to say that the state is required to do something that you are entitled for the state to give you something for example the right to food that would require the state to actually provide you with food or the right to education means the state is required to provide education the freedom of expression is referred to more as a negative right because it's simply the state is required to not interfere with your right i.e you can express yourself irrespective of the state the state must simply keep its business out of your expression or not interfere with your expression and they're different because in the one hand is the state doing something to provide like welfare checks health care benefits education housing food these are all things that the state would have to give they're sometimes described as entitlements whereas things like expression freedom of conscience uh freedom of religion freedom of mobility these are simply the state not being able to interfere with your rights there's an important distinction there that i can't get into that there's lots of good literature to read about sometimes we i think in person that we we don't have intellectual honesty about entitlements we don't have intellectual honesty about who has the ability for example mobility or expression that comes with certain already implanted and or pre-existing conditions because insofar as we have the freedom to express ourselves we never get there without food so there there is a bigger picture here we're going to see how our charter doesn't deal with a whole bunch of the things i've identified on my left here like housing and food but there are ongoing efforts i got an email today one of my colleagues at the university of toronto he works in the legal clinic there who is trying to pursue a claim to protect the rights of those that are vulnerable vulnerably housed during covet from being evicted and sometimes this gets no traction i digress a little i can't help it i may even be longer than the video that i messed up in but rights are a fascinating topic you will get more about that this topic in this course later on now before we actually talk what the charter is this application what it does i wanted to go through a history of human rights now you should recognize this yellow line i have used it before and we can place on this yellow line two very important dates we can place 1867 with the british north america act which was the birth of canada we can place 1982 which is the patriation of the constitution and this is where the charter of rights and freedoms came in to be part of the constitution and again you should recall from last day that that's our last module story that's really important because of section 52 because anything that's inconsistent with the constitution and now the charter is to the extent of that inconsistency of no force or effect meaning that laws passed by the state have to comply with the charter it's a very important document but we didn't start at the charter we actually started much similar much older than that back when we enacted our constitution when we talked about this a few lessons ago i mentioned in the preamble that it actually states that the the canadian constitution was supposed to be similar to that of the uk this is actually a very very important little phrase that may not seem to actually convey that much but in this are a whole bunch of ideas we've talked about some of them in previous lectures but we have in this the idea of of human rights there's a long tradition in the uk of recognizing civil rights and we we talked about the the magna carta we talked about uh the evolution of power over time just in passing and in 1869 the british passed a bill of rights and so while it was shortly after our constitution was passed there was already this idea that the constitution was protecting those rights now they haven't all been expressed or identified or recognized equally over time but there was this tradition nevertheless of civil rights and we see that emerging early on in many in many nations so we have the declaration of independence in the usa in 1776 and we have a declaration of the rights of man in france in 1789 so early on very early on in in modern human history civil rights were recognized as an important part of of any constitutional framework now tragically as you are going to be well aware those rights were only provided to some individuals predominantly rich white men and so it wasn't a universal concept even though it was treated as such and this is one of the great frustrations of of the civil rights kind of history is that we have a long history of recognizing but not necessarily a long history of actually implementing implementing and honoring what it actually uh meant and so we inherited this common law system of protecting civil liberties from the uk this has been something that has been part of our constitutional fabric uh since the beginning and so um there are some different ways of articulating it uh i i don't have the clip maybe i'll i'll find maybe i should have put it in the intro there's a scene in the simpsons many many years ago where bart and lisa are fighting and barge says i'm gonna walk like i think he was kicking you can't see my legs he came but they are kicking i'm gonna walk kicking down the room and if you get in my way elise is like well i'm gonna walk like this and if you get in my way and the idea is like i can do whatever i want as long as you don't interfere with me we've evolved from that kind of maybe more basic way of understanding to recognize some of the things we do actually do interfere with the rights of others sometimes unintentionally but sometimes there are positive prohibitions on what we are able to do because of our our uh our interference with the rights of others so we have a long history of of human rights that emerges long before our constitution so this is um an important part of the backdrop so the rule of law civil rights these are all part of our constitutional principles that actually are really really important for how we interpret the the constitutional documents themselves now let's jump a little bit ahead because there's other important things that happen in this story so first off we have a common law system in canada as we talked about before so there are case law that has been used to actually help identify some of these rights and but the other reality is that our common law system also has this principle that if the statute takes away rights if there's legislation that takes away a civil liberty the courts can't be used to protect the individuals this is the kind of the starting point so there were ways of getting protection through courts but courts couldn't override override statutes or legislation now there are lots of things to be said about this this is known as the concept of parliamentary supremacy we're not going to go into this in great detail here um uh but in in in short kind of um explanation you can think of a lot of historical examples so the japanese internment camps during the second world war were perceived to be as valid restrictions on rights because they were passed through legislation but you know over time the in hindsight we realized that actually we were depriving individuals of rights and as our rights kind of consciousness evolves we now later look back and go we shouldn't have done these things and when i talked the other day about uh about some of the philosophical basicies of law and i mentioned that there are many legal societies that have used the law to do horrible things the fact that parliamentary supremacy is a reality shouldn't detract from the fact that while it may have been legal in the sense that parliament passed it it may have nevertheless been a violation of race so what do you do in this kind of context and what do you do specifically following the atrocities of the second world war where you have a society in germany that actually practiced legally the extermination of of the jews of gypsies of homosexuals or political prisoners and dissidents how do you actually deal with that kind of atrocity and the response internationally was to pass um i felt behind my slides to pass in 1930s i'm falling behind my slides i'm very excited past the universal declaration of human rights finally got caught up i'm sorry about that i sometimes get caught up in what i know is coming and i don't click i'm trying to be subtle with my mouse but busted there's a mouse right here connected to my computer over there i don't have any fancy technology yet so here's the timeline i was just explaining right we saw this emergence of of just vile treatment of humans that was within this idea of parliamentary supremacy that look this is legal this is a law that's been passed they can treat them this way these individuals and the international community said we can't stand for this there has to be some recognition of human rights that are inherent irrespective of the state that even the state can't violate and out of this in 1948 we have the passing of the u.n declaration of human rights now i believe you're going to learn about this later on in the term so i'm not going to go into great detail but you should take some time and and google it and just read through some of the rights that uh were declared or recognized by the un-48 and then you can also see the parallels see where the charter as we learned those rights adopted the language and the approach and you can also see some very important diverges or divergences some differences between the u.n declaration of human rights and the charter so the ui declaration of human rights is a really really important evolution and this was followed in many places by legislation so in 1960 we have a canadian bill of rights now importantly there were actual uh legislations passed elsewhere so in in saskatchewan actually passed the human rights legislation prior to the federal government now the canadian bill of rights is a really important document but if you put on your constitutional hat from last module and think about what does it mean for there to be a federal law well the division of powers would suggest that whatever the federal law is passed about with the bill of rights it applies only to federal jurisdiction which means that it's a very limited document in some respects it doesn't cover a bunch of jurisdictional territory that belongs to provinces including and importantly property and civil rights and so we have now civil rights there meaning slightly can mean slightly different things but but we have a federal law but that's not sufficient so we see the provinces enacting legislation following this so 1962 ontario passed the human rights code and we start seeing provincial laws being put into place now there's another challenge with just putting laws into place because unlike the constitution laws can be changed so you can add you can take away a government could be an act that says look we don't want to recognize these rights because we disagree with whatever it is and they can either take white rights away or change them or modify them or limit them or they can add new rights in because the bill of rights that on human human rights code they're just legislation which means they go through the same process as any other piece of legislation which makes them vulnerable so we have we have important developments but this canadian bill of rights didn't actually have a huge impact overall um on on canada it had some impact but since the charter has also lost a lot of its importance not that it's irrelevant now there's still some really important aspects of it but the charter has kind of supplanted it and rendered canadian bill of rights less important now the federal legislation part is also why this still has some value because there might be aspects of federal legislation that are not covered by the state and that will make more sense hopefully in just a minute and so then 1982 as you know the constitution was repatriated or patrioted uh to canada this is the problem with uh speaking at night when it's quiet and the trains are loud and the car alarms go off it's easy to be distracted so i apologize for my my foibles but the constitution act which included the charter actually takes these rights such before were just parts of statutes that applied to limited jurisdictions could be changed and embedded them within the actual constitution and that's really important because of section 52 and i've talked with a bunch and i say it again again and again but the supremacy clause says right it is not consistent with the constitution which is now including the charter so no force or effect so every law has to be consistent with the charter so suddenly we go from a symbolic you know important but not necessarily having a big impact piece of legislation in the canadian bill of rights to now having this constitutionally entrenched bill of rights that we call the charter so when we look at uh the differences between the human rights laws now just as a uh kind of a jumping ahead to what you're going to probably learn about in future modules with the charter this is a constitutional concept but we're going to see when we talk about the limits very shortly in lesson three that the charter only applies to the government the charter's scope is only government and that means it doesn't apply to some of those ways that you could have your rights violated that i mentioned just a minute ago so if you are fired and you feel your human rights are are being violated or you're being discriminated against the charter doesn't protect you you can't go well you've violated my charter rights by failing to rent me this apartment because the charter doesn't protect you those are instances where you have human rights claims against individuals through provincial legislation the ontario human rights code is very very important so kind of said the canadian bill of rights was not as important didn't have as big of an impact the human rights legislation within provinces has enormous impact still and has been responsible for many things including expanding coverage of employment protection to people that have uh their homosexuals or in same-sex relationships etc like there is a lot of really important things that human rights legislation has done because often those claims are not against the government they're against a private organization or institution or individual so an institution that discriminates against you or that violates your human rights that isn't the government will be subject to provincial legislation so the provincial legislation is still very important you will learn about that but we're going to focus here on on the charter which is protecting you from the state so what is a charter and what it does so first off as i've mentioned and we're going to talk about this again the limitations because this is one of the limits of the charter the charter applies to the parliament and government of canada uh in respects of all matters within the authority of parliament including all matters relating to the yukon and northwest territories and and it also applies the legislature and government of each province so it applies explicitly section 32 of the charter limits its scope to only being the government now this can also be at times confusing because how do you then define what the government is we're going to talk uh in the next modules lesson the next lesson of this module suppose a better way to put it about how to interpret so how would you interpret government who is the government sometimes the courts have a important job of first determining whether the offending institution that is violated or right actually is the government so there's cases where it looks at things like is a hospital the government now public health care but is the hospital a government institution and the answer is well it depends depends on whether the hospital is acting according to provincial mandates or uh or guidance and legislation so it really does depend i guess you have to sometimes spend time to determine who the government is there's also times when the government is not the government for the purposes of the charter and that is because sometimes the government might have a function like ordering its paper it might not have the same kind of impact that a canadian company couldn't claim while the government violated my rights by not buying from us if it's a contractual arrangement so it applies to the legislature and the government uh within the authority of the legislature and this can be um a point that may not matter much for the purpose of this course but at later points it might matter to think about well how does this actually apply so for example is western university government what about fanshawe just down the road well they're not the same because colleges have more government intervention or authority that is relied upon versus the independence option given to universities so there is case all this suggests that colleges may be more subject to the charter whereas universities tend to be independent even though governments help fund universities so it's not just the funding it's beyond that it's the degree of control so this is maybe a small point but it's an important point of determining who the government is but more importantly i think to kind of wrap your head around is that the charter only applies to the government determining who the government is is important but it's it begins and ends there it's only the state your employer your your landlord all those individuals they they are not the government the charter doesn't apply and so it's important when you move forward and you've learned this information you don't go around saying you violated my charter rights when in fact it might simply be you violated my human rights so make sure you know which one you're actually talking about so we're here talking again about the state so what does a charter actually protect now we're going to just fly through this because we're going to focus on a couple of them later we do not have time to go through all of them please please read this part of the charter read through it because i think it'll be very important if you understand but the charter protects quite a bit of stuff but also leaves some important things out so the first section is called fundamental freedoms and it begins in section 2a by identifying conscience and religion so the freedom of conscience to think what we want and freedom of religion to believe what we want section 2b which we'll talk about is the freedom of expression and it also includes here belief thought and opinion uh and including this important category is freedom of the press which we'll talk about when we talk about another limitation on the charter which is the nova standing clause section 2c is the right to for peaceful assembly and section 2d is the right to uh association so we have rights to protests for example or being unions under section 2d so these give us our fundamental freedoms and these are perceived to be fundamental uh to the human experience there's also democratic rights built within the con the charters we have the rights to have to vote rights to parliament sitting for only certain lengths of time we have mobility rights the rights to move back and forth now we were in person much like when i was doing the who joined the const the confederation when part of this last module i probably asked who's moved across this country i moved from ontario to alberta and then back to ontario i've had family moved to nova scotia i've had family moved from ontario to uganda and back i've had family move from ontario to bc to alberta to bc and one of the things that we have in this country is the ability to do that and with that right of mobility comes important things when you move around this country you don't lose your health care because you move there's agreements and you get to keep your health care and when i moved to alberta for the first three months or so that i lived in alberta ontario paid my health care bills that i had in alberta which were none but had i gotten no car accident or sick they would have helped pay for those bills because there's agreements i also have the right to vote in alberta in an alberta election because i was living in alberta i had the right to move about and actually be a really important one especially for those students that might be in this class from a different province even though right now you may still be in your home province because of copenhagen so we have the right to move about section 7 through 15 or 14 sorry are legal rights now when we say legal rights here we are really talking about criminal rights now they've been expanded beyond this so it's not exclusively criminal this is where they first kind of arose and decided the context of criminal rights we have the freedom the right to life liberty and security of person we have the right against unreasonable search and seizures uh the right to not having arbitrary detentions we have rights to uh to have be upon our arrest or detention there's rights to certain procedures and how we are prosecuted and for the courts we are have the right to not face any cruel or unusual punishments we have the right to not um self-incriminate and we also have uh i can't number 14 is right now and it's not on my screen so it's not going to help me i'm not a criminal law expert you're going to get that so i don't need to be that expert and we're not going to talk about these uh rights during my section with you these are really important rights but they've been expanded beyond criminal law so if you've learned anything or talk talked at all ever about medical assistance and dying the changes in that came because of section 7 which is the right to life liberty and security in person there's just a monumental case of bc around private health care that were around section seven section seven has gone far beyond criminal uh matters to include uh much more uh section 15 we're going to talk about more detail in a few lessons and that's equality um other parts of the sect the charter that are important that we will discuss when we talk about limits are section one section one sets out at the beginning that while the charter guarantees all of these rights and freedoms that there are reasonable limits that can be placed on them we'll get to that so don't worry about it just yet but it's an important section to get to know and we're also going to talk about section 33 which you've already alluded to which is a notwithstanding clause which is a particular power that's embedded in the charter that allows for a government to override essentially rights to say we're going to enact a law that violates these rights notwithstanding the fact but they're protected there's gonna be a whole lecture on these so don't worry so much about them at this point that is the end of our introduction to the charter what's really really important about this particular lesson and about this particular module is that it sets the stage for much of what's going to come in some of your later discussions a lot of our criminal law has been profoundly impacted by the charter our employment law our labor law so many aspects of life have been influenced because of the charter pre-charter i think i mentioned to you is a totally different conception an idea of law that i'm not aware of i was trained in a charter era when we had the charter and has changed how we we function and relate to one another in society so the charter is fundamentally important it's also important to reflect on what's not in the charter and if we were in class i would be asking you to think about what's not there now i haven't enacted any sort of like perusal or voicethread or participation for this particular class in part because there's a lot of you in part because it's just not the model of this particular online learning experience but it'd be interesting for you to sit there i think and contemplate what wasn't included and and then maybe also ask why not so when i was giving examples of human rights i mentioned some that are very very important right to housing right to food right to education why aren't these in our charter there are some very important reasons why part of that is those all cost a lot of money to ensure people are housed and and have you know proper food for health and have you know even have their health uh often people talk about a right to help particularly outside of legal schools and legal thinking and the reality is in canada we don't have a right to help we may have an entitlement to health based on some of our legislation like the canada health act and certain constitutional decisions around health care now but we don't have a proper right to help under the charter and sometimes they're not there because they would have cost a lot sometimes these things were included because of ideology that not everyone saw these as important or were of the same kind of thinking they know the same values perhaps informing their approach to rights there's also another and important thing to consider we talk about the interpretation of rights in the next lesson one of the reasons why interpreting rights is important is because courts have used that power to expand what rights mean we're going to talk about that in a couple of examples in this class in particular freedom of expression what do we mean by expression and we can look at how expression can mean a variety of things but to get there it often requires people to push boundaries to bring claims um and there are folks that have brought claims for example about the right to housing including my friend i mentioned earlier who's still fighting for this cause but there's not a lot of people that are that are doing that and much of our charter jurisprudence has been uh because of either criminal cases or because of uh constitutional challenges by big corporations that could afford to challenge laws that were put in place perhaps to restrict or control them that's the example of tobacco tobacco challenged laws restricting advertising saying you're violating our charter rights that's also part of the interpretation why do the tobacco companies get that opportunity we'll talk about that in the next lesson i sometimes just wait here a long time so i give my space to clip it out