News Analysis The restrictions on worship and assembly during the pandemic, followed more recently by the potential denial of employment for unvaccinated people, have left some Canadians wondering how such things could take place given Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “It’s in those moments where the individual is standing up against the state, and is against the mob … where a constitutional guarantee is so important, because it’s supposed to protect the individual in those circumstances,” Derek James, an Alberta lawyer who has worked on constitutional issues, said in an interview. Ironically, the Charter’s guarantee of such rights in Section 1 also includes the loophole that can suspend them. “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” it reads. The “fundamental …