Answer: about $400.

The court has just tossed in the wastebin those peculiarly undemocratic sections of Quebec's referendum law that forbade citizens from campaigning for one side or the other without the approval of the official Yes and No committees. But as seems to be typical of this court, it managed to reach the right verdict for the wrong reasons, inviting governments to pass still worse laws in its place. What should have been a thumping victory for common sense and common liberties has once again been turned into a muddled retreat, thanks to the court's inability or unwillingness to frame its rulings within a coherent reading of the Charter of Rights.

We have been brought to this pass in part because of the court's extreme reluctance to challenge the purpose of the legislation under review. Instead, the court has chosen time and again to take refuge behind the Charter's Section 1, which allows governments to impose such limits on our freedom as are "demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." The court will routinely find that this or that charter right has been violated, then skip quickly, and with an evident sense of relief, to the narrower question of whether the infringement was justified, using the four-part proportionality test devised by former Chief Justice Brian Dickson.

In the present example, the court indeed found that Quebec's referendum law violated the freedoms of assocation and of expression of the complainant, former Equality Party president Robert Libman. You'd think this would be a slam-dunk. By confining all campaign spending within budgets controlled by committees made up of members of the National Assembly, the legislation forced people of quite contrary views into an arbitrary and unequal alliance.

In a referendum on some future constitutional initiative, for example, it would have required federalist groups, like Equality, who might oppose it because it gave too much powers to Quebec, to beg for funds from the official No committee, run by the Parti Quebecois (or perhaps, depending on their mood, the Quebec Liberal Party), who might argue it did not give Quebec enough.

You have to understand: up to this point, the Court <italics>liked<end italics> the legislation, calling it a "highly laudable" attempt to promote balance and fairness in the referendum campaign. If federalist groups were forced to affiliate with a committee controlled by separatists, well, at least they didn't have to actually join the party. And if the commitee chose to allot them just enough funding to pay for busfare to Toronto, they could always lodge a complaint with the official referendum tribunal. It would all get sorted out in a few years.

Before it could be persuaded to find the law unconstitutional, the court had to search out some bizarre special cases. Wholly unconcerned as it might have been about the rights of groups forced into an unwilling affiliation with one committee or the other, it could not ignore those who, for one reason or another, simply could not affiliate: individual dissenters (the law speaks only of groups), and groups who might wish to campaign for neither side.

Ineligible for the rare privilege of sucking up to the official committees, these individuals and groups, if they wanted to spend money to promote their cause, were restricted to those few exceptions spelled out in the legislation. Among other liberties, they were permitted to buy a stamp to mail a letter to the editor; to travel for referendum purposes, provided it came out of their own pocket; or to rent a hall, provided it was a small one: the total costs of such a meeting could not come to more than $600. As the court observed, in a moment of lucidity, the exceptions "are so restrictive that they come close to being a total ban." Only in this narrow regard did it find the law's manifest violation of rights failed the Section 1 test.

So what remedy did the court propose? What sort of limit would be reasonable? Quite gratuitously, it cited federal election legislation, which allows so-called "third parties" not just to write a letter or rent a hall, but to spend for any purpose they like, up to the princely sum of $1000. That would be enough to buy an ad not quite as large as this column in your local newspaper. Once. The legislation in question has been found unconstitutional by an Alberta court, a ruling that has not been appealed.

Pointedly, the court suggested that it would have ruled differently. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Given the substance of the ruling, it is hard to see why the separatists are fuming, or why Libman is celebrating. All the government of Quebec has to do to save the law is to raise, ever so slightly, the piddling amounts that may now be spent outside the official committees' grasp. If you want to campaign on your own, or to urge people to spoil their ballots, you will be marginally less constrained. Everyone else remains firmly under the state's thumb.