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At a McGill University event that day marking the Charter’s 25th anniversary, Scalia faced off against Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ian Binnie.

The mild-mannered Binnie, who retired in 2011, argued that a society’s fundamental values cannot be effectively frozen in time and viewed through the mindset of men who lived in the 1800s.

Rather, the values and principles expressed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and British North America Act are meant to be interpreted and evolve as society evolves, what’s commonly called the living tree doctrine, which the current Supreme Court of Canada has clearly embraced.

Without it, women in Canada might still not be considered legal persons and the federal government and aboriginals might have far worse relations.

Besides, Binnie noted, Canada’s constitutional amending formulas are impractical to the point of being almost useless.

For more than an hour, the two battled before a packed auditorium. Here are a few (random) excerpts:

Scalia: “We are talking about who, in a democratic society, should have the power to determine the government’s view of what natural law is. In an open, democratic society the people can debate these issues. And the people, unlike the courts, can even compromise on these issues. But in these early years of the 21st century, we have become addicted to abstract moralizing,” from the bench.

Binnie: The doctrine of original meaning, “relieves the judges of the responsibility of making sense of the Constitution for their day and generation and what it does is it hands off the responsibility to the framers of, in the case of the Americans, 1789. ‘Don’t blame me, blame the framers and if you want to do something about it, go and get an amendment’. And that, it seems to me, at least in our tradition, is really an abdication of judicial responsibility.”