Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court interprets statutes by referring first to the text of the law and when the statutory text is unclear, to Parliament's publicly stated intent as laid out in the legislative history.
However, when interpreting the Constitution, the court adopts an inferior approach in which the intent of the framers is frequently ignored and the court instead consults with a different kind of extraneous evidence regarding present day Canadian values.
One reason offered for this departure from the sensible rules the court normally applies is that the documentary record regarding the Charter of Rights is simply too vast and too disorganized to permit ready consultation.
To assist with this problem, I am working with the Canadian Constitution Foundation to create, online, a sortable and word searchable database of all documents relating to the debate over the adoption of the Charter of Rights 30 years ago. This work in progress already contains over 100,000 pages of primary documentation. The website will go live on Constitution Day, 2013.
With this resource in hand, it is hoped that our courts will find it possible to more accurately and predictably enforce the rule of constitutional law.