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This month, an Ontario court ruled that Canadians have a charter right to bike lanes. Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas struck down a Province of Ontario plan to remove three Toronto bike lanes, stating that it violated the “principles of fundamental justice.”

This seems to be happening a lot — a Canadian judge finding a heretofore undiscovered right in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Most of these decisions are happening thanks to Section 7 of the Charter, which enshrines the right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”

Ever since it was added in 1982, Section 7 has long done some of the heaviest lifting in the Canadian constitution. It’s why Canada has no abortion law, it’s why Canada has the world’s most unrestricted assisted suicide regime, and it’s a big part of the reason that safe injection sites are now ubiquitous across Canadian cities.

But in just the last few years, judges across Canada have looked at the phrase “security of the person” and determined that it also confers a right for everything from bike lanes to tent encampments to doing drugs in playgrounds.

Below, a cursory summary of some of the more out-there Section 7 decisions.

The charter right to bike lanes

Last year, the government of Ontario Premier Doug Ford passed the Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act. It was a series of amendments to the Highway Traffic Act that gave the province increased powers to kibosh proposed bike lanes, and also to remove existing bike lanes.

But in early August, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that they can’t do this because it might get cyclists killed, thus violating the cyclists’ Charter guaranteed “right to life.”

The counterargument from Ontario government lawyers was that the “right to life” was never intended “to constitutionalize the myriad of factors that contribute to highway safety.” But Justice Schabas slapped down this idea because, according to “expert evidence,” bike lanes reduce congestion and make roads safer. Therefore, any government move to restrict them increases “the risk of harm.”

The charter right to prescribe puberty blockers to children

Last year, Alberta became the first Canadian jurisdiction to table legislation dialling back the ability of minors to be given surgery or hormones in the service of changing their gender. Sex reassignment surgery on minors was to be banned, and the prescription of “puberty blockers” and other hormone therapies for children was tightly restricted.

In June, Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench placed a temporary injunction on the measures. Until a wider constitutional challenge against the law can be heard, surgeries and hormone prescriptions will be allowed to continue apace in Alberta.

Lawyers for the Government of Alberta pointed to the results of the Cass Review, a comprehensive British inquiry which found, among other things, that there was “remarkably weak” evidence for treatments such as puberty blockers.

But Justice Allison Kuntz largely rejected the results of the Cass Review, relying instead on the evidence of petitioners saying Alberta children would suffer “irreparable harm” if allowed to go through puberty.

Wrote Kuntz, “the evidence shows that the Ban will cause irreparable harm by causing gender diverse youth to experience permanent changes to their body that do not align with their gender identity.”

The charter right to do drugs in playgrounds

This decision was extreme enough to be publicly condemned by the NDP government of B.C., who were in the process of championing the province’s experiment with the decriminalization of personal-use amounts of illicit drugs.

After decriminalization was widely criticized for increasing chaos and disorder in public spaces, the province dialled back the policy ever-so-slightly with a new amendment requiring illicit drug users to not smoke or shoot up within 15 metres of a playground, skate park or “outdoor spray pool or wading pool.”

But in an emergency injunction issued just before the start of 2024, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson ruled that such a policy would do “irreparable harm” to the province’s illicit drug users, and thus violate their Section 7 rights.

Even a minor sanction against drug consumption, such as asking a drug user not to shoot heroin on a play structure, could shame them into doing the drugs alone, where they risk fatal overdose. “It is apparent that public consumption and consuming drugs in the company of others is oftentimes the safest, healthiest, and/or only available option for an individual,” wrote Hinkson.

The charter right to fill public parks with tent encampments

There have actually been two recent decisions finding that Canada has a Charter right to tent encampments.

The first was in response to a move by authorities in Kitchener, Ont., to clear out a tent encampment established on an abandoned lot that was slated to be developed into a transit hub. The Regional Municipality of Waterloo, which owns the lot, argued that the encampment was in breach of a bylaw banning the un-permitted erection of structures on municipal land.

In a 2023 decision, Ontario Superior Court Michael Valente ruled that authorities had not provided enough shelter spaces for the encampment’s residents, and even criticized the spaces that did exist for failing to “meet their diverse needs.” One example being that some shelters banned the consumption of illicit drugs on site.

As such, the “no structures” bylaw was deemed to “(deprive) the homeless residents of the Encampment of life, liberty and security of the person.”

The second decision, delivered in late 2023, ruled much the same after the Kingston, Ont., tried to evict an encampment they said had become a “lawless, unpoliced zone that serves as a hub for fentanyl trafficking.”

“Creating shelter to protect oneself from the elements is a matter critical to an individual’s dignity and independence,” wrote the Ontario Superior Court. “The state’s intrusion in this process interferes with the individuals’ choice to protect themselves and is a deprivation of liberty and security of the person within the scope of (section 7).”

The charter right for pedophiles to loiter around playgrounds

This particular right is different from the others on this list in that it actually dates back 30 years, but it was recently raised in the context of Nova Scotia’s ongoing “woods bans”; a blanket ban on entering the province’s public forests until the end of wildfire season.

Nova Scotia man Jeff Evely is challenging the ban as an infringement of his Section 7 rights (he intentionally entered the forest in full view of conservation officers and was handed a fine for $28,872).

One of Evely’s lawyers told Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald that their challenge will be leaning heavily on the case of R v. Heywood. This was a 1994 case where convicted sex offender Robert Lorne Heywood was arrested after being spotted repeatedly loitering around a Vancouver playground carrying a camera equipped with a telephoto lens. After he was arrested and charged with vagrancy, police obtained a warrant for the camera’s film and found multiple photos of children’s crotches.

Heywood appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and in a 5-4 decision they ruled that the vagrancy laws under which Heywood had been arrested violated his section 7 rights “to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.”

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