Fraser calls provinces’ demand to scrap Ottawa’s SCC arguments on notwithstanding clause ‘untenable’

By Cristin Schmitz ( October 8, 2025, 5:29 PM EDT) -- Attorney General of Canada Sean Fraser has pushed back against the demands of five premiers that Ottawa should drop its novel arguments at the Supreme Court that there are substantive constraints on governments’ powers to invoke the Charter’s s. 33 “notwithstanding” clause — arguments that those five provinces contend “represent a complete disavowal of the constitutional bargain that brought the Charter into being” in 1982....