Right? Things that created new provinces. We also have amendments to the Constitution, and the Constitution has evolved over time. And we're going to talk about some of the other laws, the documents, that actually make up the Constitution when we go through the history lesson in the next video.
But it's not just one law. It's a series of laws. And in addition to that, it's a bunch of case law. We have a whole bunch of cases that interpret how our Constitution is to be applied. Right, and even now with the Charter we now have a whole bunch of jurisprudence about interpreting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that becomes part of our constitutional law framework.
So we're going to talk later on in the videos about various rights such as the Section 2 rights including the freedom of expression. And I've worked quite a bit in freedom of expression because it's relevant to my area of research around things like tobacco advertising or advertising the kids of food products. And we have Section 2 of the Charter says you have the right to the freedom of expression, but without more, what does that actually mean? So along with that particular right, which is part of the Constitution, as we'll see, there's a bunch of case law that has interpreted what it means to have the right to express oneself.
Case law has had to decide what does expression even mean? And then when we do have a restriction on expression, how do we justify that? So there's a bunch of case law, case law written by judges from various levels of courts that interpret the Constitution, and that becomes part of how the state is regulated.
So we have a whole bunch of different things feeding into the regulation of the state. And so the BNA Act, which is now called the Constitution Act, would be one of many things that you would need to understand to get a full picture of the Constitution. This is why in a first-year law school program, you spend an entire year just talking about the Constitution. It's one of the core courses. And you spend a full eight months of your time in the first year of law school just learning the rules around the Constitution.
That's why this course is just kind of glazing over some of the main concepts. We can't dig in to all the specific nuances. of what the constitutional law framework actually is in Canada because we just don't have time.
There's all sorts of rules that now exist. There's all sorts of case law that now exists that informs what our constitution is. And all of those have the aim of regulating the state.
They aim to limit the power of the state. Now it also has an important function of identifying the appropriate power of the state. And we're going to talk about that. Particularly in our context in Canada of being a federal state with the federal and provincial governments, the Constitution helps to divide the powers between those levels of government.
And we're going to talk about that in upcoming videos. The last thing we're going to talk about with constitutionalism here is just to reflect on what the Constitution actually does. So constitutions express a nation's values, right? Constitutionalism.
tells you a little bit about what the state is really concerned with. And if we were to go through nations and do a comparative analysis about constitutions, we could compare how different constitutions identify what's important for that particular context, right? Undoubtedly, you've thought about this in some sense when we think about the right to bear arms embedded within amendments to the American Constitution. That is a... deeply entrenched idea that now is a reflection of the nation's values.
What's really interesting about that is if you do any research into the right to bear arms, it actually doesn't often, or doesn't mean in many people's interpretations, what it is now used as, which is a right to bear arms as a private citizen, to own guns. It had a deeper meaning that has evolved over time. And that's also a really important part of constitutions. If a constitution expresses a nation's values, well what happens when the nation evolves or changes or their values change?
I don't know the age of the students watching this, but I imagine many of you are in your late teens, early twenties. And your values right now at university are being shaped. Things that you're learning, ideas that you're bringing in, groups that you're hanging out with, activities you're participating in are going to shape your values and they're going to change.
And one of the important things about constitutional law is to look at that evolution of values. Now there are still some deeply entrenched values, deeply embedded ideas that probably aren't going to change or change very slowly. But how do we actually use a constitutional framework to reflect values currently?
Well, that's one of the important roles of the courts, and we're going to see how that can play out at times of how our values change. Within the Canadian Constitution, we can talk about some really important values that are there, that it represents both through the conventions and customs and the laws, the written laws and the case law. And one of those values is that we have a democratically elected system of representatives.
That is a deeply entrenched value in our system, right? That we want to have representation of the people. This is a big part of the history and the evolution of the Canadian Constitution. And indeed, it might be where our Constitution is birthed out of. An idea that we were independent from the UK.
and we needed to have our own representation. Another value that's deeply entrenched in our constitutional law system is that there's a non-partisan administration of the law. Now this gets into some deeper issues we don't really have time to really talk about, but I'll give you some examples from the areas of work that I spend my time researching.
So I work a lot with organizations like Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada. Every time there's an election, we're electing those representatives that sit as members of the federal government or the provincial election, provincial governments, right? They sit as members of parliament or members of legislatures.
We are electing representatives from our various jurisdictions to promote a view based on the majority vote, right? And those individuals are elected by the people. But that's only one small part of the government. Underneath those elected officials are a bunch of bureaucrats and public officials.
Health Canada is full of people that have worked there, some for decades. And if every time there was an election, you had to elect every member of the government, there'd be chaos. There just would not be any ability to do this, and there'd be no continuity. So members of Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, they keep their jobs when there's a new government.
For example, my good friend Tim, he may come up in other contexts. He's my canoeing friend and a close friend for many years. He currently works for the Ontario Ministry of Education.
When Doug Ford was elected, he kept his job. His mandates changed. What he worked on may be changed.
The culture may be changed and shifted in response to Doug Ford's government's initiatives and prerogatives. But they stay in position. Tim kept his job. And we have the idea that Tim, in the administration of his job, right, he is not going to be doing his job in the ministry as a conservative or a liberal or a Green Party member, but as someone who's just there to administrate, right, to make sure the law is administered in an appropriate way.
This also applies to the courts. The courts are nonpartisan, right? Of course you've heard...
Lots of discussion, particularly in the U.S. context, of appointing the right judges to make sure that you get the outcomes you want. Right now, everyone is concerned about RBG to make sure she gets through the next election healthy so that Trump can't appoint another Supreme Court justice. Because, of course, judges are people and they have political views.
But the idea underlying our system is that the administration of the law is going to be done nonpartisan. So the judges that sit at the Supreme Court and the various provincial courts and federal courts, they are not there to represent the views of their political party of choice, but they're there to administer the law in a way that's faithful to the law and not faithful to political ideology. Of course, that's very difficult to do and people still have influences.
And unsurprisingly, judges that have conservative political leanings tend to have conservative... leanings and their judgments. But that's not always the case, right? And one of the benefits of our Canadian system is that our judges are not elected by people, which means they're not running for office and having to raise money because that creates all sorts of other problems that we see in the United States.
But underlying our elected representatives, we have a nonpartisan administration of our legal system. Another deeply entrenched value is the division of powers. And this is going to be a topic we're going to talk about at the very last video of this first module, when we discuss federalism. But we have a federal government. And we have provincial government.
And both levels of government have important roles to play in our system. And both have constitutional authority to act within certain areas. And the federal government has a very specific role, and provincial governments have a very specific role. And this is a deeply entrenched value, because we wanted to have representation that was relevant for the jurisdictions.
And so Ontario gets its say in Ontario. And Quebec gets its say in Quebec. And this is an important part of the history of our Constitution as well, as we'll see. We also have a deep idea in our Constitution of self-government.
As we'll see in the next video, I keep referring to the future videos, but they're all tied in together normally as one lecture, and I'm just making them smaller videos for you. But deep in our idea of our nation, our identity, is this idea that the Canadian people... required a Canadian government. And as we'll see, one of the reasons why we even had a confederation at all was because we wanted representation locally. We wanted to have our own system of government independent of that of the UK, but also deeply embedded in our idea of our nation is this idea of revolution.
The text talks about this a little bit. There is this idea of standing up and being our own. Right?
There is somewhere inside of there this idea of separating ourselves from the UK, from the Queen, from the Motherland, whatever it might be, however you may define it. And these are values, for example, that still make their way.