A Bookworm Bonus
Pearl Eliadis on the values behind “Canada Strong”
Next Friday, the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University will convene Not Politics as Usual: Challenges to Constitutional Governance in Canada and the United States, a gathering of the Slater Family Canada-US Policy Series that will bring together leading scholars and law practitioners. As the conference’s media sponsor, the Literary Review of Canada wanted to offer a taste of what’s on the agenda with the following from Pearl Eliadis.
Sweat the Softer Stuff
Since the 2025 federal election, building “Canada Strong” has anchored a new national narrative. Cast in the pragmatic mould of physical infrastructure, defence spending, economic resilience, and strengthened connectivity, Ottawa is shoring up Canada’s security, protecting sovereignty, and diversifying international relationships in a more volatile world.
But as Canada invests heavily in the hard architecture of strength, other questions demand our attention: What values will animate and constrain this project? What distinguishes this realigned, reinforced Canada from other countries?
The qualities often treated as the “softer stuff”—human rights, pluralism, and equality between men and women—are not the collateral or downstream products of economic prosperity. They reflect the legacy of decades of international norm-building. As the Supreme Court of Canada has long acknowledged, they are also reflected in this country’s unwritten constitutional principles: democracy, federalism, the rule of law, access to justice, respect for the Constitution, and the protection of minorities. These principles are not aspirational. They structure lawful governance itself.
Canada’s credibility as an international actor depends on its willingness to reinforce the institutions sustaining these values, both at home and globally. Human rights and democratic norms are not luxuries made possible by prosperity. They are preconditions for sustainable, rules-based order, both domestically and internationally.
That order is clearly under strain. But the fragility of multilateral institutions did not emerge overnight. From their origins after the Second World War, institutions like the United Nations were built on an uneasy compromise: the formal equality of sovereign states and the political reality of great-power dominance. The ideal of co-operative, law-bound governance was never fully realized. Yet despite their flaws, multilateral institutions remain our best hope. In a world defined by asymmetric power and shared vulnerability, there are no credible alternatives.
The challenge, then, is not whether the same rules-based order should endure, but how it should be renewed. Reframing such renewal around compliance with human rights, democratic accountability, and the rule of law must be central to building Canada Strong. We can play a more assertive leadership role within international institutions—not simply to secure seats on UN bodies, but by acting as a principled partner and leading by example. That begins at home.
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While threats to constitutional democracy in Canada are less dramatic than those unfolding elsewhere, particularly in the United States, they still merit serious scrutiny. A pressing concern is the use of section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—the notwithstanding clause.
The accelerating pace of section 33’s invocation cuts against the values Canada claims to champion. It may be part of the Constitution, but the clause is incompatible with Canada’s international human rights obligations, including the International Bill of Rights that we signed on to fifty years ago.
Section 33 should be a political nuclear option, reserved for exceptional circumstances. Yet, in certain provinces, it has increasingly become a routine policy instrument, threatening to whittle away our constitutional rights. The Supreme Court’s pending decision in the Bill 21 case may clarify aspects of the clause’s operation. Or it may not.
International concern is already mounting. The UN Human Rights Committee has expressed alarm over the expanding reliance on the notwithstanding clause by Canadian provinces. Counsel in the Bill 21 litigation argued before the Supreme Court that key human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, can be bypassed only in times of national emergency.
Nothing associated with the use of section 33 to date approaches that threshold. Even during emergencies, international law is unambiguous: certain rights—including freedom from discrimination and the right to life—cannot be suppressed under any circumstances. Normalizing section 33 is therefore not merely a domestic constitutional choice; it is an international signal about the fragility of rights protections in Canada.
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A second area of concern is linked to judicial independence and the rule of law, core components of Canada’s values infrastructure and essential safeguards against majoritarian excess. It should go without saying that any long-standing single judicial vacancy represents a threat to access to justice.
Canada benefits from a judiciary that remains highly respected and relatively insulated from the polarized attacks that afflict courts elsewhere. That legitimacy matters. Courts are democratic, not despite their independence, but because of it. Unelected judges serve as nonpartisan arbiters of legality, which is an indispensable function in any constitutional democracy.
Political leaders who suggest they will no longer “defer” to judges misunderstand the structure of democratic governance and risk undermining one of its central supports. Treating judicial independence as optional is a constitutional regression.
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Migration policy presents a third strain on Canada’s professed values. Fundamental human rights protections in Canada are meant to apply to everyone, regardless of immigration status, including the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. At a moment of declining public support for newcomers, how Canada balances border control, fairness, and dignity will challenge our value system as a country where immigration has played an outsized role in defining our national identity.
Canada’s current migration challenges are partly self-inflicted. Chronic under-resourcing of immigration processing and poor policy integration of different components of the immigration and visitor programs are partly to blame. Authorities have rolled out student visas for questionable educational institutions with few controls on the quality of those institutions. Fixing these mistakes should not penalize the people who seek to come here.
Yet Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, does precisely that. Among its most troubling provisions is the authorization to cancel large backlogs of pending visa applications for reasons amounting to administrative convenience. New restrictions on asylum claims raise concerns about compliance with Canada’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Another issue is the Safe Third Country Agreement, which was challenged before the courts. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision partly upheld the agreement, but the question of the impact on equality rights is back before the Federal Court. The treatment of undocumented migrants, including asylum seekers in the United States, has demonstrably deteriorated, raising fresh concerns about the treatment of protected groups.
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Finally, Canada’s human rights infrastructure shows signs of stress. Currently, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has no permanent, publicly appointed chief commissioner, a state of affairs that has persisted since 2022, aside from the brief and ill-fated appointment of Birju Dattani. The federal government created an advisory council on rights, equality, and inclusion, which is difficult to justify given the commission’s existing mandate. Fragmentation, rather than consolidation, risks diluting institutional effectiveness. Creating agencies, boards, and special positions with overlapping mandates is the surest way to weaken them all.
At a time when liberal democracy and the rule of law are faltering globally, the International Development Research Centre’s decision to eliminate its Democratic and Inclusive Governance Division, which focused on democracy, human rights, and access to justice, could not be more poorly timed. Research in these areas remains essential to navigating today’s geopolitical environment. Moreover, investment in democratic governance costs a fraction of the resources now flowing into physical and defence infrastructure.
Canada can confront today’s geopolitical realities without abandoning its constitutional ballast. The institutions that protect human rights and the rule of law helped underpin one of the most stable and prosperous periods in human history. Reinforcing our values infrastructure is a recommitment to an essential part of who we are as a country and what we aspire to offer: a more stable, safer world.
Pearl Eliadis is an author, human rights lawyer, and associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy. She has previously written about the differences between Canadian free expression and American free speech, among other topics, in the Literary Review of Canada.