Law Commons^™

Democracy And The Right To Vote: Rethinking Democratic Rights Under The Charter, Yasmin Dawood

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article addresses the Supreme Court of Canada’s theory of democracy and the right to vote. After setting forth the Court’s general approach to democracy, I develop a new conceptual framework for the Court’s approach to democratic rights. First, I argue that the Court has adopted a “bundle of democratic rights” approach to the right to vote. By this I mean that the Court has interpreted the right to vote as consisting of multiple democratic rights, each of which is concerned with a particular facet of democratic governance. Second, I claim that the democratic rights recognized by the Court are …