Horizontal Effect and Caboose Constitutionalism

This chapter picks up the story where the previous chapter left off, showing how the Supreme Court of Canada initially made a show of rejecting the application of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to private law relationships in Dolphin Delivery . But at the same time, the Court left itself room to interpret the common law to comport with Charter values. In the years since, litigants have pressed the Court to use this power to meet their normative demands, and the Court has done so on many occasions. At the same time, the Court has showed solicitude for legislative initiatives, often using the Charter to shape private-party obligations to one other only after the legislature has taken some rights-protective action in that area, in a strategy that might be called caboose constitutionalism.

Charter · Constitutionalism · Democracy · Legislature · Normative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Supreme court · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies