FIRST READING: The seven words in the Charter yielding all of Canada’s wackiest court decisions

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And at the decision’s core is the right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”

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While a right to life may seem to contradict a right to die, the Carter decision held that if the state didn’t allow Canadians to die by suicide legally, they might be tempted to do so illegally, which violated their “right to life.”

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Or, as the decision put it, “the prohibition on physician-assisted dying had the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable.”

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It added, “on that basis … the right to life was engaged.”

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A Charter right to bike lanes

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This is the famous one. The one that gets cited most often in critiques of Section 7 overreach.

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Toronto cycling activists took the Ontario government to court, arguing that a provincial initiative to remove bike lanes violated their Section 7 rights. And, in Cycle Toronto v. Ontario, a judge in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice agreed.

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The whole case hinged on the argument that removing the lanes could make cycling less safe, thus increasing the cyclist’s risk of dying. “If the removal of the lanes increases risk of harm, this supports the applicants’ position that the rights to life and security of the person are infringed,” it read.

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Although, this particular Section 7 right did end up being a step too far. In August, the Ontario Court of Appeal not only struck down the “Charter right to bike lanes” decision, but did it with flair.

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Justice Grant Huscroft wrote that while “judges may be tempted to comment on matters of policy,” it was ultimately “illegitimate” to do so.

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Wrote Huscroft, “policy is for politics.”

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A Charter right to do drugs basically everywhere

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This week’s decision from B.C. finding a Section 7 right to traffic in drugs is far from the first time that Section 7 has been used to liberalize the trafficking and consumption of illicit drugs.

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In fact, if Canadian downtowns seem more plagued by drug disorder than ever before, that can largely be placed at the feet of a whole category of Section 7 court decisions that has kneecapped the ability of governments to sanction drug use.

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The most famous was the 2011 Supreme Court decision that found a Charter right to safe injection sites. The argument being that the absence of a safe injection site might cause drug users to inject in an environment that was less safe, thus infringing their Section 7 rights.

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Several subsequent decisions have similarly ruled that it is a Charter violation for the state to take any action that could conceivably make it more dangerous to do illicit drugs. A 2023 B.C. Supreme Court ruling struck down a measure that specifically prohibited drug users from shooting up in playgrounds or splash parks.

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B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson ruled that it risked “irreparable harm” to drug users if the government of B.C. were to follow through with a plan of asking those users to instead do drugs in a slightly different area of the park.

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A Charter right to homeless encampments

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It is now becoming almost routine that a Canadian municipal government will move to clear a homeless encampment on public land, only to be told this is an unconstitutional violation of Section 7.

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The first example came out of B.C. in 2008, with a B.C. Supreme Court decision overruling a City of Victoria bylaw forbidding homeless encampments in city parks, as the bylaw might prompt dispersed campers to seek more dangerous shelter options, thus endangering their right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”