Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2012 ONCA ... - York University

Page: 121context, those expressions assist in understanding the need for the claimants toshow that the balance tips significantly in their favour.[301] Extending the metaphor, at the first step of the s. 7 analysis – i.e.determining whether the claimant has established an infringement of her right tolife, liberty and security of the person – the court‟s task is simply to decide if thereis anything to put on the scale in the first place. As long as the claimant canshow that the law interferes in some meaningful way with her s. 7 rights, this issufficient to move to an assessment of whether that interference offends theprinciple against gross disproportionality.[302] At the next step, it is not sufficient for the court to mechanically place thesefactors on either side of the scale and see what happens. Rather, the court‟stask is to decide how much weight to attribute to each factor based on the recordbefore it, and then to place those factors on the scale for comparison.[303] When assessing the weight of the “legislative objective” factor, the courtmust take full account of the value to society of the objective underlying thechallenged law.That assessment demands an accurate description of thatobjective.[304] When assessing the weight of the “impact” factor, the court mustdetermine the nature and extent of the infringement. This requires an attempt toquantify in some way the harm to the s. 7 rights of the claimant properly