When young people set up tents on university quads to protest a policy, or flood TikTok with posts about global issues, they’re acting out their values. If universities then punish them for erecting those encampments, or social media takes down their content, they often find themselves confused: Were my constitutional rights violated?
There’s no doubt that Canada’s youth are politically engaged. But their attempts to change the world are often limited by a lack of constitutional literacy. They are unfamiliar with what they can expect from their governments, institutions and each other.
I know this gap firsthand. Like every other student across the country, I took a civics class in high school. In it, I learned a bit about how the government is organized and what citizenship means, and I took an end-of-year test to prove it. But I never really learned what my constitutional rights are, let alone their limits. I never learned why our Constitution protects the rights and freedoms it does, and how these affect 21st-century issues such as privacy or censorship.
That’s why I spent my summer helping the Canadian Constitution Foundation design a new civics course for high schoolers across Canada. Called Constitutional Rights, Civic Responsibilities, the course’s goal is to equip students with a stronger understanding of Canada’s Constitution so they are better equipped to shape the future of our democracy.
This goal is urgent. Recent polling suggests serious gaps in Canadians’ constitutional knowledge. A 2023 survey by the Association for Canadian Studies found that nearly three-quarters of young Canadians didn’t know or were wrong about the opening line of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that Canada was “founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” Nearly 90 per cent thought our Charter refers to the “pursuit of happiness” — which are actually words from the U.S. Constitution.
Constitutional literacy matters now more than ever because student activism has surged in recent years, both on campuses and online. While these movements show that Canadian youth care about social issues, many don’t know the boundaries of their rights and freedoms. Does an encampment at a public university count as constitutionally-protected speech and assembly? Can the police record protesters with drones? Can a high school principal search a student’s locker?
Polarization makes Charter education even more critical. We live in an age of instant outrage, where people can be quick to “cancel” — or shame — those with whom they disagree. Studies show that young people experience anxiety about being targeted and socially ostracized, which leads them to self-censor. When civil discourse is chilled like this, democracy is weakened.
Teaching the Constitution doesn’t mean classrooms need to be turned into political battlegrounds. It means equipping students with the tools to critically evaluate real-world problems and how they can engage with them. In the Canadian Constitution Foundation course, we use real cases to show how the Charter applies today. The goal is engaged citizenship. I hope students will learn to listen as well as debate, to respond with reason instead of reflexively reaching for the “cancel” button.
There will always be debate about what belongs in a curriculum. But civic education that does not include thorough instruction on the Charter is insufficient. In times like ours, a constitutionally literate generation is our best hope for a resilient democracy.
