Oh no, you don't get off that easily. The government of Alberta may have withdrawn, one day after it was introduced, the odious Bill 26, legislation that would have invoked the constitution's "notwithstanding clause" to deprive some of the province's most vulnerable citizens of their rights. But the spirit of the legislation lingers on, and so do the men who acted upon it.

They should be held to account.

That the government could even have considered such an act is alarming enough. Over a period of more than five decades, nearly 3000 residents of Alberta mental institutions were forcibly sterilized, before the province's eugenics board was finally abolished in 1971. Bill 26, the Institutional Confinement and Sexual Sterilization Compensation Act, would have prevented the survivors from suing the government for compensation, imposing instead an arbitrary limit of $150,000 apiece.

Whether $150,000 is sufficient compensation for such an indignity is not at issue here. Nor is it necessarily beyond the pale for the government to try to limit its liability, so far as the constitution permits.

What is atrocious is that it should have sought to place such legislation above judicial scrutiny, above indeed the Charter of Rights.

If challenged, the government might have asked a court to rule that to allow each of the more than 700 survivors to sue for damages individually would have been so prohibitively expensive as to warrant restricting their access to legal remedy, whatever the Charter's Section 15 guarantee of "equal protection and equal benefit of the law." I don't say they would have won, and I don't say they would have deserved to. But the Charter does allow for "reasonable limits" on rights, and it would at least have been open to the government to argue that this particular limit was reasonable.

Instead, Bill 26 would have simply swept the Charter off the table. Unable to defend the legislation as a reasonable limit, the government availed itself of the "notwithstanding" clause: or as it might be called, the "unreasonable limits" clause. So not only were the victims denied the right to take their claims for compensation to court, they could not even go to court to overturn the legislation that took away their rights.

You can imagine the government's thinking. We're in power. We're popular.

These things happened long ago. And anyways, who's going to listen to the complaints of a few hundred aging retards? Or as Justice Minister Jon Havelock explained, the law was intended to "balance the interests of [the claimants] with the interests of all Albertans." Whether to respect the Charter, then, or whether to slip out the "notwithstanding" escape hatch, was strictly an exercise in electoral arithmetic. Which is more or less to make the Charter useless to anyone who actually needs it: if the claimants were not a marginalized minority, they would not have to go to court to redress their grievances in the first place.

What we have just witnessed, then, was no accident. It was not an overreaction in a moment of crisis. It was a deliberate frontal assault on the Charter, and everything it stands for. Regardless of whether the government had the nerve in this instance to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause, Albertans must now wonder what other rights it proposes to suspend Havelock has made no secret of his distaste for the document or its values, not to mention the independence of the judiciary. In a recent speech, he railed against the legal system's "seeming preoccupation with the rights of the accused," and the incursion of judicial discretion "into areas which traditionally have been the preserve of duly elected representatives," even wondering aloud whether the answer might be to "repeal or amend the Charter." He would not lack for supporters. The Charter has a thousand enemies: Tory sentimentalists, trembling for the sovereignty of Parliament; Osgoode Hall jacobins, vexed that anything should impede the realization of the General Will; Quebec nationalists, repelled by such naked symbols of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism (although of course, in Quebec we have one that is much better); post-modernist charlatans, sneering at the very notion that some ideals might be so universally held as to merit enshrining in a Charter.

For all these groups, the "notwithstanding" clause has been a beacon. But come down from the mountaintop of abstraction, and the clause is revealed in all its thuggish particulars. It's not about judicial activism or parliamentary sovereignty: it's about specific rights being denied to specific people, usually a defenceless minority.

To see it actually in use is the best case for its abolition. For as we have just had demonstrated, any government that insists on the power to override fundamental rights cannot be trusted with it.