Svend Robinson
Member of Parliament
1979 - 2004
October 27 - 28, 2005
Svend Robinson was a member of the Special Joint Committee on the Constitution in 1980-81. In this short address at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Conference October 27 - 28, 2005, he discusses many of the presentations made to this Joint Committee.
In 25 years of public life, I had a lot of remarkable experiences as a Member of Parliament. There is no doubt that for me as I look back, that time that I spent as a member of the committee that wrote the Constitution was just an extraordinary experience, and was the highlight of my time as a Member of Parliament. Remember I was, I was 28 years old, just 3 years out of law school and here I was helping to write the Constitution of the country. And it was a, it was quite an experience.
I was the justice critic for the party. And, at the time, that Trudeau tabled the package. I was very critical of the package. I felt that it was far too weak; particularly the provisions on the Charter were far too weak, and I felt that Ed as leader had jumped too fast to embrace it and that we should have been more critical. And, in fact, I was the only member of the New Democrat caucus that actually voted against the package. I said, "No, this is, this is, this is not my notion. This shouldn't be the notion of New Democrats of what a Constitutional Charter of Rights is all about." Well to punish me for that vote Ed put me on the committee.
There were 25 members of the committee, 15 members of the House of Commons, 10 senators. It was co-chaired by, very ably I might add, by Serge Joyal on the House side, and by Senator Harry Hayes on the Senate side. And there was some early battles. In fact, to get the package into the committee, the government had to bring in closure. They shut the debate down in the House. A group of Tories stormed the Speaker's chair. It was pandemonium, and that was the environment in which the deliberations of the committee got under way. We had a battle about televising the proceedings of the committee. It took a couple of weeks but ultimately we won that battle and, and the proceedings were televised and it was amazing how many Canadians actually watched the hearings of the committee. We tried to travel across the country but the government wouldn't allow that. The initial deadline was absurdly short. The committee deliberations started on the 6th of November [1981] and we were told we had to wrap up by the 9th of December. A little over a month to write the Constitution. Well that was extended ultimately for another couple of months to the 6th of February and then to the 13th of February.
Those hearings were really quite incredible. And I, in preparing for this conference I went back over the minutes and, it was really, it was for me, it was really a great experience. The first witness that we heard in the committee after Jean Chrétien was Gordon Fairweather, the Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. We heard from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who spoke about the, what they call the 'Mack truck clause' which was Section 1 of the Charter. They said it had so many holes in it, you could drive a Mack truck through it and, and they were right. The Canadian Jewish Congress, the national president at the time was a guy named Irwin Cotler who spoke, just, and I remember spoke with such eloquence and such passion about how important it was to strengthen the Charter. For me, the highlight of the hearings was the National Association of Japanese Canadians. Art Miki spoke and reminded us of why it was so important that there be this check on the absolute untrammeled power of elected representatives and what had happened to Canadians of Japanese origin under the War Measures Act. We heard again powerful representations from a number of national women's groups, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Doris Anderson and a number of others and, in fact, it was at the conclusion of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women's presentation that the co-chair, Harry Hayes, in thanking the members of the National Action Committee said this, "We appreciate you coming, and as a matter of fact we are honoured. However, your time is up, and I was just wondering why we do not have a section in here for babies and children. All you girls are going to be working and we're not going to have anybody to look after them." Can you imagine? I mean, I sat there stunned. Did he say that? Did he actually? Well he did. The next day Stanley Knowles was up in the House together with Pauline Jewett and Margaret Mitchell demanding his resignation, of course. Well, we got nowhere on that.
First Nations groups, Aboriginal groups, just again moved the committee. There's no question. The Indian, Inuit and Metis National Organizations made very powerful presentations. It was the Nisga'a and Joseph Gosnell, Joe Gosnell who spoke um and we were just riveted. And I think people that were watching the proceedings were riveted by what he said and he said, "There will be no entrenchment of our rights after patriation." He said, "You, as a committee and the Parliament of Canada, hold the future, hold the responsibility in your hands of determining our lives as aboriginal peoples. The Nisga'a destiny is in your hands." Because there was nothing of substance for aboriginal peoples in the package as it was presented to us.
We heard from groups representing people with physical and mental disabilities and uh one of those was a, a young um law student named David Lepofsky who you're going to hear from very shortly, and David speaking on behalf of the CNIB, and I wanted to share with you some of the, just one of the sentences from David because, again, it was one of those things that, that moved us. That actually convinced us that we had to, to change the package. He said this, he talked about the concept of justice is blind and he said, "While justice may have the opportunity to experience blindness, we are asking for blind persons to be given at last an opportunity to experience justice." It was wonderful and it moved the committee.
