…That implies its use should be judicious, and not an easy shortcut to a policy goal. Yet there has been a growing willingness to use it to brush aside Charter inconveniences – sometimes to replace the need to file a court appeal or draft new legislation that meets a policy objective without unreasonably infringing on Charter rights.
It’s true that Quebec’s political culture is different. For a period after the 1982 repatriation of the Constitution, the Parti Québécois government invoked the clause on every bill as a protest. There was never as much of a taboo on the use of the notwithstanding clause.
But Mr. Legault has in the past used it to override the enshrined rights in Quebec’s own Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, too. It has become an easy reflex.
Lot’s of (negative) commentary on the latest TMU initiative.
…All of this is in service to a genuinely noble goal. But the school’s execution – it’s practically boasting of its lax admission requirements – is clumsy, short-sighted and does a disservice to its own prospective students. The unintended consequences are obvious: Canadian patients will start Googling their physician’s educational background and wonder if the resident doctor performing their next procedure was one of the TMU students who got into med school with an art-history degree, a 3.3 GPA and a compelling personal essay. Indeed, the school’s quota system will inevitably condemn all of its graduates to public skepticism about their qualifications and capabilities, even if the physicians TMU produces are in fact very capable, qualified and skilled. It’s a bias of the school’s own making that it will have to fight to counter, and probably lose anyway….
What is striking about most of the similar commentary I have seen, is that most do not look at what the data says about med school diversity. Earlier and the most recent study I found show largely an issue for Blacks and Indigenous; Chinese and South Asians are over-represented, whites under-represented.The latest analysis of diversity among medical students (English universities) that I found shows that:
A total of 1388 students responded to the survey, representing a response rate of 16.6%. Most respondents identified as women (63.1%) and were born after 1989 (82.1%). Respondents were less likely, compared to the Canadian Census population, to identify as black (1.7% vs 6.4%) (P < 0.001) or Aboriginal (3.5% vs. 7.4%) (P < 0.001), and have grown up in a rural area (6.4% vs. 18.7%) (P < 0.001). Respondents had higher socioeconomic status, indicated by parental education (29.0% of respondents’ parents had a master’s or doctoral degree, compared to 6.6% of Canadians aged 45–64), occupation (59.7% of respondents’ parents were high-level managers or professionals, compared to 19.2% of Canadians aged 45–64), and income (62.9% of respondents grew up in households with income >$100,000/year, compared to 32.4% of Canadians). [2016 census]
Multicultural Meanderings 