Andrew Coyne/The Globe and Mail: Which is to say, not the notwithstanding clause, but the Charter. It might be about the notwithstanding clause, as it was originally envisaged: as a temporary, emergency stopgap, to be used only in the most dire and unusual cases, and in the absence of any less drastic remedy – where the Court had ruled in such a disastrous way, on such a vital piece of legislation, and with so little opportunity for the government to redraft the law to take account of its objections, that there was no alternative.
But these are vanishingly rare, and in any case that is not how governments, particularly conservative governments, have lately taken to using it. Not only has it been invoked pre-emptively, rather than retrospectively, but with such accelerating frequency and in matters of such infinitesimal urgency that it is easy to see what they are up to…