Alan Borovoy
General Counsel
Canadian Civil Liberties Association
February 12, 2009
Video Transcript
You can't resolve in the abstract the limits of freedom of religion or freedom of speech. You can only resolve these things in concrete situations. You, but you can recognize and it's appropriate to recognize that there are limits. There are no absolutes on planet earth. I won't try to testify about anywhere else in the cosmos. Suffice it to say there are no absolutes here. Inevitably these principles we believe in collide with other values with believe in and the question, the, the challenge for us is to sort it out. But in sorting it out we should be careful to ensure that if we have to restrict any of those freedoms, we restrict them no more than we reasonably need to do in order to accommodate the overriding value in that situation. This is what has been called in our constitutional parlance minimal impairment. We should impair those values no more than we have to. And it's a constant ongoing juggling act. It is I suppose I could call it ethical juggling and that's not a term of derision. That's a perfectly legitimate exercise.
