How has the Court interpreted the Charter as an aid to statutory interpretation?

British Columbia, Canada


The following excerpt is from Lewin v. British Columbia (Income Assistance Appeal Board), 1997 CanLII 3052 (BC SC):

It was conceded by the respondent Ministry that the IAAB erred in failure to apply the Charter as an aid to statutory interpretation, assuming that there existed an ambiguity in the regulation. Instead, the IAAB said that it lacked jurisdiction to apply the Charter. It was not asked to do so. The petitioners sought the interpretation of an ambiguous regulation in a manner consistent with the Charter. As discussed above, the usual rules of statutory interpretation were sufficient to resolve the ambiguity here without resort to the Charter. However, insofar as the IAAB only considered application of the Charter without response to the request to interpret according to Charter values, it was clearly wrong (see Cooper v. Canada (Human Rights Commission), 1996 CanLII 152 (SCC), [1996] 3 S.C.R. 854.; Canada (Attorney General) v. Mossop, supra.).

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