OTTAWA—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says it’s “disappointing” that Ontario Premier Doug Ford has invoked the “notwithstanding” clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to push ahead with his plan to shrink Toronto council but suggests that Ottawa will remain on the sidelines in the bitter debate.

Ford announced his government’s move Monday, just hours after a Superior Court judge ruled that Ontario legislation to cut the size of council to 25 from 47 councillors was unconstitutional.

Speaking in Winnipeg Tuesday, Trudeau said that Canadians value the charter and its protections against “governments that overreach.

“So anytime a government chooses to invoke the notwithstanding clause to override the charter’s protections, it has to be done deliberately, carefully and with the utmost forethought and reflection,” the prime minister said.

But Trudeau suggested that his government won’t get involved.

“We’re disappointed by the provincial government in Ontario’s choice to invoke the notwithstanding clause, but I won’t be weighing in on the debate on how big Toronto municipal council should be,” he said.

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“I will trust that Ontarians will reflect whether or not the provincial government made the right decision on overriding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on this issue,” said Trudeau, who met with Toronto Mayor John Tory on the topic Monday.

The clause was intended to give Ottawa or the provinces a mechanism to overrule Charter rights that conflict with their legislative agenda.

Trudeau’s comments follow a statement Monday by Dominic LeBlanc, the federal intergovernmental affairs minister, who said the notwithstanding clause is an “extraordinary” part of the Constitution and should only be used in the “most exceptional” of cases.

Liberal MP Adam Vaughan, who served on Toronto council before moving to federal politics, said it was too soon to say whether Ottawa would get involved in the case but said his government would be watching the situation carefully to ensure cities are protected.

“The vulnerability of cities and our relationship with cities, which we’ve worked very hard to elevate, is clearly at risk. Cities are at risk,” Vaughan told the Star in an interview from Saskatoon, where he is attending a Liberal caucus meeting.

“We have to be respectful of provincial jurisdiction but at the same time we have to be responsible to the Canadians who live in cities,” he said.

“So we’re looking at it very carefully around what we can and should do,” Vaughan said.

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But the MP for Spadina-Fort York was wary too about setting precedents if Ottawa moved on legal action around Ontario’s use of the notwithstanding clause.

“It sets the federal government up as a court of appeal on all provincial legislation across the entire country,” he said.

“That being said, until we see the legislation … it’s very hard to say what should or shouldn’t be the response,” he said.

Michael Pal, director of the public law group at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of common law, said that the Trudeau government is taking the right approach to voice caution about the use of the notwithstanding clause but avoid direct intervention.

“Is there a really immediate legal mechanism that the federal government has to stop this? The answer is no,” Pal said in an interview Tuesday.

“And as a general matter, you don’t want the federal government necessarily intervening in municipal, City of Toronto elections,” he said.

Pal said the government is right to signal that the clause should be reserved for the “rarest and clearest and most important of cases.”

“To normalize the use of the notwithstanding clause, in relation to political expression, that is very likely to have bad consequences down the road,” he said.

In theory, the federal government could respond with its own rarely employed constitutional weapon — under the Constitution, it can disallow a provincial statute.

But Pal said suggestions that Ottawa should use this to thwart Ford’s plan is a “non-starter” saying that disallowance provision is virtually defunct

“No one seriously thinks it could be used today,” he said. “It’s not a door we want to open in a healthy federation.”

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