SCCA revised residency requirements, intent requirement, the Charter of Rights, and court challenges:
quasar81 said:
The C-24 is illegal. Constitution says 'ALL Citizens are equal'.
One citizen can live wherever in the world forever, but from another citizen you expect to live in Canada only. C-24 is illegal at its face....and should/will be defeated in courts.
The
SCCA ("Bill C-24" when it was before Parliament) does
NOT have any impact on the mobility rights of citizens, and thus does not conflict in any way with the mobility rights of citizens protected by the Charter of Rights.
That is, the following is correct:
ZingyDNA said:
Where do you get that idea? After you get citizenship, you can live wherever whenever w/o worrying about losing it.
Challenges; judicial review:
CanadianCountry said:
C-24 legal challenge already got defeated In the court. Dont know if there would be any more court challenges.
Only provisions of the
SCCA so far challenged, that I have seen (two cases, the Galati challenge being the most well known one), were those adding grounds for revoking citizenship based on criminal court convictions for acts of terrorism or treason. While Justice Rennie expressed an opinion regarding the substantive argument, since Justice Rennie decided there was no judiciable question before the court (not an actual case to be decided) that should be considered dicta.
Interpretation or application of other provisions, such as the revised residency requirements, or the
intent requirement, have not been challenged yet, and indeed they are not yet in force so of course there is no judiciable case yet regarding these provisions.
Whether or not there will be more court challenges, of course there will. Even right now, this year, there are court challenges regarding the interpretation and application of the current residency requirement adopted in the 1970s, more than three decades ago, and in-between there have been, literally hundreds of Federal Court decisions regarding the proper interpretation and application of section 5(1)(c) in the
Citizenship Act.
Likewise the revised provisions will likely face judicial scrutiny, in appellate review, for many, many years to come; the decisions will continually refine and clarify issues of interpretation and application. That's how law works in a legal system based a balance of statutory and case law like Canada's.
It is not likely there will be any challenges to the constitutionality of the
SCCA as a whole, since there are no apparent grounds for making any such challenge (contrary to uninformed rhetoric still circulating the Internet and invading forums like this one).
But for sure, the
intent requirement is bound to be a contested issue on appeal in many cases in the future, sooner or later anyway. As I have noted, the
intent requirement will mostly be a straight-forward requisite for citizenship and not much if any of an issue in the vast majority of cases. But it is of course the kind of requirement which, in the more difficult cases, inherently invites a range of discretion which tends to generate judicial review. Such review will be largely in case-by-case challenges to particular decisions. However, new judicial review provisions, in the
SCCA, will allow for questions to be certified and taken to the Federal Court of Appeals, so sometime in the future (not before 2016 at the very earliest, if even then) there should appellate decisions which offer more definitive guidelines on how certain factors or circumstances are considered in determining whether an applicant has the requisite intent.
let`s not turn this to war against this government.