Summary of Article:

~ Pierre Elliot Trudeau believes to live in a society where all citizens are above the law and before the State itself, we need individual rights.

~ Trudeau mentions, "I am not trying to say that those people who give preference to a collective society and collective rights over individual rights, do nothave the right to state such a preference. I am saying to them that it is not just an emotional decision they are called on to make. We have to look at history- above all we have to look at contemporary history, the history of yesterday and today."

~ There he is saying that, people who want collective rights cannot just base it{)fl emotion, they need to look at how it will affect the society as a whole.

~ The Constitution Act of 1982 enshrined the values which, back in 1968, defined as those that should be respected in the constitution of a Just Society.

~ Trudeau is talking about the Referendum and the rights of French and English- speaking Canadians.

~ The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a new beginning for the Canadian nation; it sought to strengthen the country's unity by basing the sovereignty of the Canadian people on a set of values common to all, and in particular on the notion of equality among all Canadians.

~ Trudeau makes a good point about individual rights, "... what is to prevent a

majority from riding roughshod over the rights of a minority? '" the Charter of

Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution. They do this generally, by enshrining the rights of the individual members within minorities; but certain instances, where the rights of individuals may be indistinct and difficult to defme, they also enshrine some collective rights of minorities." For example, the Canadian Constitution of 1867 provided that in educational matters, Sections 93(1) would protect any "class of Persons... with respect to Discrimination Schools," and Section 93(3) would apply to the "Protestant or Roman Catholic Minority."

~ The Charter leaves no doubt at all: all are equal before the law and are entitled to the same protection "without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability."

~ Canada is by nature pluralist -"a mosaic" as Laurier put it -not an American-style melting pot.

~ Throughout the negotiations leading to the Charter in 1982, our government kept in mind that Canadian history has consisted of a difficult advance toward a national unity that is still fragile and is often threatened by intolerance -the intolerance of the English-speaking majority towards francophones, etc...

~ If Canada had tried to identify each of the minorities in Canada in order to protect all the characteristics that made them different, not only would we have been faced with an impossible task, but we would shortly have been presiding over the balkanization of Canada.

~ The tensions of Anglophones and francophones have always been a large source of disunity in Canada.