Dwight G. Newman (University of Saskatchewan College of Law) has posted God in the Constitution: The Supremacy of God Clause in the Preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ((2022) 105 Supreme Court Law Review (2d) 39-56) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper engages with the supremacy of God clause in the preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a forgotten foundation of the Canadian Constitution. The supremacy of God clause in the preamble has often been dismissed as legally irrelevant, but such an approach is inconsistent with case law about the other part of the preamble. The 2015 Saguenay decision of the Supreme Court of Canada has opened new possibilities on the supremacy of God clause. This paper examines how some of the historical backdrop to 1982 must inform the meaning of the clause, drawing upon the Canadian Bill of Rights context, implications of US state constitutions, and the immediate drafting history (with some key statements set out in the Appendix to the paper). The paper goes on to argue that the case law has not fully lived up to the meaning of the clause and concludes with several parameters for a revised interpretation of the clause, suggesting that scholarship that has dismissed the clause must be rejected and scholarship that has read the clause in limited ways must be understood as having only partially developed the clause thus far, with more to come in the decades ahead.
