Mr. Speaker, the federal Parliament, a provincial legislature, or a territorial legislature may declare that one of its laws or part of a law applies temporarily, notwithstanding countermanding sections of the charter, thereby nullifying any judicial review by overriding the charter protections for a limited period of time.
The clause was a compromise that was reached during the debate over the new Constitution in the early 1980s. Among the provinces' major complaints with the charter was its effect of shifting power from elected officials to the judiciary, giving the courts the final word. As I said in my comments, premiers across this country, especially those in Alberta and Saskatchewan, believed it needed to be part of the charter to strongly object to a court overriding the laws they had put in place.