Lisa Taylor - The Unfulfilled Promise of Press Freedom in Canada

LISA TAYLOR

Judicial interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms transformed many aspects of Canadian media practice in the years immediately following the Charters enactment. Those of us who care deeply about free and democratic media and who came of age during that time followed developments in Charter jurisprudence in much the same way our peers might have followed a hit TV drama. At that time, judicial decision-making under the Charter appeared to offer the promise of a new chapter for Canada, one that affirmed and recognized the value of press freedom.

Back then, if you had told me that I would live to see an era in which popular opinion often opposed a free press, I simply would not have believed it. Today, however, as a professor in a school of journalism, I regularly encounter young adults who, despite their apparent desire to practise journalism, are nonetheless troubled by journalists efforts to shine a bright light on aspects of society others would prefer to keep cloaked in darkness. Recently, during a class discussion about impediments to media coverage of the Canadian judicial system, one upper-year journalism student questioned the publics right to know. A criminal trial is about one person, she said, so why should we have the right to pry into the details of that persons life?

Dear student, Im so glad you asked. The courts are a vital component of a democratic society and, as such, they must be open to public scrutiny; in that regard, yes, it may be that privacy is sacrificed at the altar of the public interest. Where there is no publicity there is no justice, wrote Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth-century philosopher. Publicity is the very soul of justice.

This answer may not be self-evident to the journalism students I teach today. In their lifetime, there has always been a Charter, and its very existence, while not a panacea, has served to blunt some of the more egregious ways in which those in positions of power may try to prevent us from receiving information that will enhance our participation in civil society. But the threats to journalists raison dtre are real, our victories have often been partial, and those gains we have made under the Charter often appear to be at risk.

A free press is a democratic cornerstone and, for that reason, measures which prohibit the media from publishing information deemed of interest obviously restrict that freedom. This collection aims to contextualize the first decades of press freedom under the Charter, reflect on the developments in Canadian press freedom law since 1982, critically interrogate the current state of affairs, and advance possible remedies to the ongoing challenges related to access to information and freedom of expression faced by both traditional and emerging media.