The problem I read, is that it redraws constituencies during an election. That was the problem the Judge had. Before, after, no problem.

Exactly. Why not just make the change the day after the election instead of wasting all this taxpayer money on unnecessary legal battles?

The Ford family has always demonstrated that they don't give two shits for the people of Ontario.

The Province is getting what it deserves.

But if you were really worried about taxpayer money why would you want an outrageously inflated City Council in the first place?

And seeing as this is the same judge who made sure Khadr got his $10.5 million I seriously doubt waste of taxpayer money is high on her priority list.

How have them demonstrated that?

Feb, 10, 2011: Ford tells an Ontario Coalition Against Poverty protester to “get a job,” after being confronted during an anti-poverty demonstration at city hall.

May 17, 2014: Ford expresses his desire to relocate the Griffin Centre, a group home for developmentally disabled youth, away from his ward.

July 4, 2014: Ford apologizes for using the word “jihadist” when referring to CityNews journalist Cynthia Mulligan and another journalist.

Aug. 14, 2014: Ford issues a written apology to Toronto police Chief Bill Blair after accusing him of leaking information about a police investigation involving the mayor. Blair accepts the apology and drops the defamation suit.

Aug. 1, 2014: Ford publicly accuses Blair of leaking information about an investigation involving the mayor.

There is quite a bit out there, the Ford's are quite the spectacle.

Some constitutional law experts are scratching their heads after an Ontario judge declared that the new Progressive Conservative government’s mid-election cuts to the size of Toronto’s city council are unconstitutional because they violate freedom of expression rights.

Justice Edward P. Belobaba struck down most of the province’s Better Local Government Act after finding that it interfered “with both the candidate’s and the voters’ right to freedom of expression as guaranteed under Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Belobaba wrote that redrawing Toronto’s ward map to match the boundaries of federal and provincial ridings, which would leave one councillor for every 111,000 residents instead of one for every 61,000, “substantially interfered with the municipal voter’s freedom of expression … and in particular her right to cast a vote that can result in effective representation.”

Section 2(b) of the 1982 Charter states that “everyone has” the “fundamental freedom” to “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”

Carissima Mathen, a vice-dean at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, told CTV’s Power Play that the judge’s assertion that the bill violates freedom of expression was “a little eyebrow raising.”


“The issue here is whether he was really drawing in elements from another Charter right, which is the Section 3 right to vote,” she wrote.

“My read is that he was really concerned by how arbitrary the government’s decision was,” Mathen added.

University of Toronto constitutional law professor Yasmin Dawood took to Twitter just after the ruling came down Monday to question whether Belobaba’s use of 2(b) “comports with past use” of the section by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in a similar context.

“While the SCC has used s 2(b) to protect electoral fairness especially with respect to political financing ... it’s a novel argument to say that it protects the ‘right to cast a ballot that can result in effective representation,’” Dawood wrote.

Howard Anglin, director of the Canadian Construction Foundation and former deputy chief of staff to then-prime minister Stephen Harper, called the decision “looney tunes” and said that it was poorly reasoned and “definitely a candidate” for invoking the notwithstanding clause – a legal override of the Charter that Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he plans to use for the first time in the province’s history.

“People often make the mistake of calling judicial decisions they disagree with activist. This is not one of those cases,” Anglin writes. “Because the judge couldn’t invoke Section 3 of the Charter (which doesn’t apply to municipalities), he wrote himself a new Charter in which Section 2 does the work of Section 3.”

It would be great theatrics if John Tory used the notwithstanding clause as well.

It doesn't apply to municipal governments.

Does Trudeau even have that option? I thought the notwithstanding clause was strictly for provinces to opt out of over-reaching and intrusive federal interference in provincial affairs, not for the feds to get out of legal rulings that get in the way of their policy objectives.

As for Ford, it's only fitting that he torment the Ontario left for a while, if for no other reason than it's amusing to a lot of the rest of us. It's not like the Toronto hipster-diversity mob hasn't had it coming to them for a long time for their own aggression against anyone who isn't with their SJW/identity-politics agenda. They over-did it and now they're reaping the whirlwind in the form of a new angry premier that obviously really hates them. Can't say they couldn't see something like this coming for the past few years.