“I always think it’s a bit odd to think of a tension between rights and Catholicism,” said Daniel Cere, professor of religion, ethics and public policy at McGill University in an interview during… the “Charter @ 25 conference,” organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada…
McGill professor and faculty of arts dean Chris Manfredi, one of the conference organizers, said the
preamble “has never had any legal force… “It’s understood as a secular document for a modern multicultural society”… Less than 10 years after the Charter came in force, a British Columbia judge… declared the preamble “a dead letter” that could “only be resurrected by the Supreme Court of Canada”
Subsequent rulings in the Supreme Court that Canada is a “secular society” have indicated, Cere said, that the problem is not the nature of the Charter, but the nature of the courts. “They don’t want any suggestion that there is any other power competing with their power,” he said, noting that by effectively deleting “supremacy of God” they are making “the law the referee, not God.”
