Hurray for common sense, even at the lofty level of the Supreme Court of Canada.
(Oh, and I secretly love it when the Supreme Court agrees with me.)
Last January, I wrote an editorial about an appeal being heard before the Supreme Court, an appeal on which the court has now issued its verdict.
The case came out of Quebec, where a company, 9147-0732 Quebec Inc., was given a mandatory minimum fine of $30,843 for doing construction without a contractor’s licence. (The province of Quebec has two different levels of minimum fines for the offence, one for individuals, the other for corporations.)
The firm was not pleased, and launched a court action to overturn the fine, claiming that the fine constituted cruel and unusual punishment, therefore violating the company’s rights under Section 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It lost that gambit at a few different levels of Quebec’s courts, before the Quebec Court of Appeal agreed that the case should be heard again. Eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court.
Giving corporations an even stronger position under the Charter would make Charter rights just another business tool.
Under Canadian law, companies enjoy some protection as “legal persons” — there are other rights that have been generally viewed as belonging only to humans.
It’s already not a level playing field between “legal” persons and “human” persons.
As I wrote in January, “Corporations already have some special benefits ordinary ‘persons’ don’t have — for example, the ability to plead guilty to offences as a corporation, instead of having the person who actually made a negligent business decision carry responsibility for their actions.
“For example, if a person pleads guilty to bribery, they get time in prison. For corporations, as the recent SNC-Lavalin case points out, a subsidiary firm can take the fall, pay a fine, and things continue as normal.
“Companies also have the wonder of limited liability. Real people can form a company, pool resources, take on debts and other responsibilities, and unless they’ve signed personal guarantees, can simply surrender the company’s assets if something goes south, and walk away, keeping their personal resources separate, even if some of those resources came directly from the company in question. Corporate status also protects shareholders from things like corporate tax liabilities.”
Giving corporations an even stronger position under the Charter would make Charter rights just another business tool. And it seems ridiculous to even imagine a company feeling the impact of cruelty; even if a corporation has people in it, it can’t really experience any sort of suffering.
That’s the tack the Supreme Court took, too — unanimously. The core of the majority decision read, “The ordinary meaning of the word ‘cruel’ does not permit its application to inanimate objects or legal entities such as corporations. The words ‘cruel and unusual treatment or punishment’ refer to human pain and suffering, both physical and mental. … This threshold is, in accordance with the purpose of (Section 12) inextricably anchored in human dignity and cannot apply to treatments or punishments imposed on corporations.”
Three other judges were even more plain-spoken; “The purpose of Section 12 of the Charter is to prevent the state from inflicting physical or mental pain and suffering through degrading and dehumanizing treatment or punishment. It is meant to protect human dignity and respect the inherent worth of individuals. Its intended beneficiaries are people, not corporations.”
Now, it is the Supreme Court, so they said it in 24,236 words, instead of the 600 or so I have here.
But the distinction is an important one: human rights can’t be just another tool to be added to the corporate toolbox.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada.
He can be reached at [email protected]
Twitter: @wangersky
