Victoria Charter

The Victoria Charter was a set of proposed amendments to the Constitution of Canada in 1971. This document represented a failed attempt on the part of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to patriate the Constitution, add rights and freedoms to it and entrench English and French as Canada's official languages; he later succeeded in all these objectives in 1982 with the enactment of the Canada Act 1982.

The Charter would have also terminated the powers of disallowance and reservation, which remain in the Constitution. There was also a bill of rights and a new amending formula.

The Victoria Charter began with the title "Part I - Political Rights", which contained nine "articles." This bill of rights, however, was not as elaborate as Canada's current constitutional bill of rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The first article "declared" the existence of freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and like the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights, stipulated that "all laws shall be construed and applied so as not to abrogate or abridge any such freedom." Article 2 established the applicability of the bill of rights to Parliament and the legislatures, and article 3 allowed for reasonable limits on rights (compare this to section 1 of the Charter).

Article 4 recognized the importance of the right to vote, and article 5 elaborated on this by saying the right could not be denied due to race, religion or sex. Articles 6 and 7 set the maximum duration of the Canadian House of Commons and provincial legislatures at five years (a function now assumed by section 4 of the Charter).

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