Introduction: People Matter The Supreme Court decides cases on big constitutional issues that directly impact the lives of Canadians: Do Canadians have the right to assisted suicide? What rights does a person have when they are arrested on criminal charges? Do women have the right to an abortion? Can the government out-law hate speech or child pornography? It also decides issues of broader principle that indirectly affect Canadians: Are government officials -- including premiers and the prime minister -- subject to the law? How far does freedom of religion or the freedom to protest go? Some of these landmark decisions are well known to some Canadians, but most are not. Even less known are the people behind these historic cases that changed the lives of Canadians. Lawsuits are brought by people, by groups, and sometimes by governments. In criminal prosecutions, the state marshals its significant resources against individuals. Some of the people involved in these monumental decisions are heroes, others are villains, a determined few are crusaders, and many are unlikely passengers. Heroes, Villains, Crusaders (and Passengers) Most of us have heroes -- people we admire for something they did or stood for. We need heroes in our lives and in our society: people to admire, venerate, and celebrate. They make us feel good, and they give us faith that we and our society can do better, and that we can do good.

Canada has national heroes like Terry Fox, Rocket Richard, Viola Desmond, David Suzuki, Tommy Douglas, and Rick Hansen, among others. Our heroes can change over time or with the times. Sometimes they fade into history because we forget about them or because we learn things about their past that tarnish our views of them. But we often forget that our heroes are human, not saints. We shouldn''t judge them by a standard of perfection. We live in a deeply flawed world, in which horrible people have done horrible things over the course of history. Although I have never seen a Canadian on a list of global villains, we have certainly had our share of bad characters. I grew up in Vancouver in the 1980s, when mass murderer Clifford Robert Olson was abducting and killing children.

I was a student at McGill University when Marc Lépine murdered fourteen women across town at the École Polytechnique. These killers were the evilest of villains. The villains featured in Constitutional Challengers are people who did things or stood for things most of us find abhorrent, that strike at the core of our values. They aren''t simply distasteful; they are repulsive. Of course, whether someone is a hero or a villain is a matter of perspective. Prime ministers are often embraced as heroes by some and disdained as villains by others. The labels also change with time and historical perspective. The same applies to groups.

In the 1930s and 1940s, a small group of Jehovah''s Witnesses were seen as villains by many in Quebec. Others saw them as an unpopular religious minority that was being unfairly targeted. Today, many see them as heroes for championing civil liberties and freedom of religion against an authoritarian state. Some heroes or villains are crusaders: people who campaign for a cause and set out to change other people''s views and make broader social change. Dr. Henry Morgentaler was a crusader for abortion rights. James Keegstra was on a crusade to impart his antisemitic views to his students. Terri-Jean Bedford was a crusader for the rights of sex workers, and Harry Daniels was a crusader for Métis rights.

These people devoted significant portions of their time or their lives to a cause bigger than themselves. But most of the people behind landmark legal decisions are not crusaders. I call them passengers because they were carried along by our legal system, often all the way to the Supreme Court. They weren''t championing a cause; they were just trying to achieve a result for themselves that ended up being much bigger than themselves. They were along for the ride -- often a long and convoluted one -- in the Canadian justice system. There are different types of passengers. Some people get caught up in the criminal justice system, having been arrested on a criminal charge, and all they want to do is stop the car and get out, however they can. They aren''t trying to change the world, just to get out of trouble.

Many of the biggest criminal decisions featured passengers as protagonists. Other passengers were using the justice system as a way to get what they needed or wanted: to become a lawyer as a non-citizen in Canada (Mark David Andrews); to wear a kirpan to school (Gurbaj Singh Multani); or to get married to a same-sex partner (Michael Leshner and Michael Stark). All of these people are part of the Canadian constitutional story. Readers will reach their own conclusions whether these constitutional challengers are heroes or villains. An Extremely Brief Constitutional History of Canada Many stories can be told about Canada''s constitutional history, and they can differ depending on who is telling them, and from what perspective. There are English stories of Canada, and there are French stories, Indigenous stories, immigrant Chinese stories, and so on. One story from 1867 is the development of Canada''s constitutional independence. Unlike the United States and other countries, Canada was not created through a revolution.

Instead, it evolved as an independent country over two centuries. And unlike many other countries, there is no single document in Canada called "the Constitution." Instead, our Constitution is made up of more than twenty documents, including British and Canadian statutes and orders in council passed by the British Cabinet. One of the most important Canadian constitutional documents is the British North America Act (often simply called the BNA Act), which created the Dominion of Canada in 1867. Canada was no longer a colony, but it was not quite a fully independent country. The BNA Act, a law made by the British Parliament, was concerned mostly with the structure of government: the Crown, the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments, the House of Commons, the Senate, and the courts. It left a lot unwritten. We continued to rely on British constitutional principles, British courts, and the British Parliament for a long time.

The Supreme Court of Canada was created in 1875, but it did not become truly supreme until 1949. Until then, Canadians could appeal decisions of the Supreme Court to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. That body, the highest court of law in the British Empire, was largely composed of "Law Lords" from the House of Lords who had never set foot in Canada. Civil liberties, like freedom of expression or freedom of assembly, were not protected under the BNA Act. In 1960, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker enacted the Canadian Bill of Rights, but it was just an ordinary statute that did not stand above other federal laws. And it did not apply to any provincial laws. In cases like Bliss (chapter 4), the Supreme Court gave the Canadian Bill of Rights a narrow and technical interpretation. This fuelled the movement for a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights that would be superior to all laws, federal and provincial -- a goal that was achieved in 1982 with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the recognition of certain Indigenous rights (known in the Constitution as "Aboriginal rights").

Overview of This Book Constitutional Challengers is divided into three parts. Part I tells the stories of several cases that contributed to the making of our Constitution. Some, like Roncarelli v. Duplessis (1959), are celebrated as great wins for big constitutional principles like the rule of law. But as you will read in chapter 3, the person at the centre of this case -- Montreal restaurateur Frank Roncarelli -- lost a lot along the way. Other cases, like Bliss, are considered losses and are not widely known, even in legal circles. But the determination of Stella Bliss in bringing her case all the way to the Supreme Court paved the way for the constitutional protection of equality rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. Part II includes cases under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Some of these featured high-profile personalities like abortion crusader Henry Morgentaler, child pornographer Robin Sharpe, and Canada''s most famous dominatrix, sex worker Terri-Jean Bedford. Others, high-profile as they were, had protagonists who were not well known, though their last names may be: David Oakes, the most famous name in Canadian constitutional law, and Elijah Askov, whose name became synonymous with delays in our criminal justice system. Other protagonists achieved brief notoriety during their cases but returned to lives of relative obscurity: Chantale Daigle captured the interest of the media when she fought an injunction obtained by her exboyfriend to prevent her from having an abortion; Delwin Vriend became a lightning rod for social debate over gay rights when he was fired from his job in Alberta for being gay and the Supreme Court ruled in his favour. In almost all of these cases, the legal rule established by the Supreme Court lives on, but knowledge of the people involved has faded. Part III tells the stories of people and nations who fought for constitutional recognition of Ind.