In January 2024, the Centre hosted a workshop on the horizontal effect of Charter rights at UBC 's Allard School of Law, working in collaboration with UBC professors Margot Young and Joel Bakan. The workshop addressed some of the key issues surrounding the case of Cool World v Twitter, which involves a PR firm contesting Twitter's refusal to run paid ads for a documentary (The New Corporation) by arguing that Twitter's common law rights should be interpreted in a way that's consistent with the Charter value of free expression. Some of the papers presented at the workshop addressed Cool World directly, while others engaged more generally with legal and theoretical questions about the manner in which constitutional rights should apply to private legal relations (i.e. the way in which they apply horizontally, between individuals, rather than vertically, between an individual and government).
The main output from the workshop was a special issue of the Constitutional Forum, which compiled a collection of papers written for or after the workshop on the issue of Charter horizontality. As with all Forum issues, this issue is available on our website for free, and can be accessed via the links below.
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Constitutional Forum Special Issue 33.4: Horizontal Effect and the Charter
Editors' Introduction: Beyond Dolphin Delivery
Margot Young, Richard Mailey, Anthony Sangiuliano
The Hidden Promise of Dolphin Delivery: Shields, Swords and Horizontal Application of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Joel Bakan, Sujit Choudhry
Towards a Less Woolly Conception of Horizontal Effect
Johan van der Walt
A Kick in the Caboose: Recovering the Judicial Horizontality of Constitutional Equality Rights
Anthony Sangiuliano
Charter Horizontality, the Public/Private Divide, and Responding to Injustice
Sina Akbari
“We do not really know why this approach was taken”: Explaining and Modifying the Supreme Court’s Approach to the Indirect Horizontal Effect of Charter Rights
Richard Mailey
