Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".
If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.
If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.
Say one country has this type of "feel-good document," but it's consistently interpreted by powerful courts as a strong protection, and the government generally leaves people alone due to democratic norms. Another country has a strict and absolute constitution, but courts in practice don't interpret it as such, or people are more frequently harassed when criticising the government. Where would you feel more comfortable speaking your mind, and which document is more useful for protecting freedoms?
I'm not making a specific claim about any real countries, though I would say that freedoms are not strictly worse-protected in Canada than in the US. I'm only stating that a law or other document in and of itself can't protect anything - government and society need to respect it.
Democracy is about more than just elections, and freedom is about more than just laws.
I disagree as there's often reasonable exceptions to "rights", especially when they might infringe other people's rights. e.g. The right to freedom isn't absolute in any country that has prisons.
My point revolves around the unlimitedness of the other right that is being used to override the first right in question. A large part of that "insane leeway" is exactly due to the corpos' rights being taken as unlimited/absolute - note how the argument in Pruneyard was trying to use property rights to override free speech rights.
But sure, rather than tweaking the conception of rights, we could instead target reform at reigning in the "rights" of corpos - they are merely whole-cloth creations of government, after all. But I suspect we'd still hit corner cases with sufficient power imbalances between individuals (say a small-time landlord and their tenant, with the landlord attempting to curtail the tenant's speech).
At least with American system, they actually have to come up with an opposing right that's in conflict with the one they're limiting. In Canada, any right can be limited even without any conflicts.
Of course that's the same everywhere else, including the US, meaning it's not worth pointing out.