Mr. Speaker, the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn legislation passed by the House regarding the advertising of tobacco products is the latest evidence of a shifting balance of power away from Parliament toward the unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court.
In this and other decisions the court has extended the rights of individual citizens to business corporations as presumed legal individuals. This presumption has transformed the charter from a guarantor of individual rights to a political lever that allows corporations to evade the legitimate regulatory actions of a democratically elected government and House of Commons.
In addition, the court has also in some cases interpreted laws or extended them in ways deliberately not articulated by Parliament at the time the law was passed. This growing shift in power toward the court requires new measures to improve the accountability of the court.
I call on the government to consider a royal commission to propose measures that would add transparency to and wider participation in the process of selecting Supreme Court judges in a manner consistent with our parliamentary system of government.