Democracy and the Right to Vote: Rethinking Democratic Rights under the Charter

Abstract

This article addresses the Supreme Court of Canada’s theory of democracy and the right to vote. After setting forth the Court’s general approach to democracy, I develop a new conceptual framework for the Court’s approach to democratic rights. First, I argue that the Court has adopted a “bundle of democratic rights” approach to the right to vote. By this I mean that the Court has interpreted the right to vote as consisting of multiple democratic rights, each of which is concerned with a particular facet of democratic governance. Second, I claim that the democratic rights recognized by the Court are best understood as structural rights. Structural rights theory offers a new way to account for the individual and institutional dimensions of democratic rights. I argue that the Court’s recognition of multiple democratic rights, and its attention to the structural dimension of these rights, has enabled it to regulate the democratic process with respect to a wide array of complex issues, including representation, electoral redistricting, the role of money in elections, individual participation, political equality, and the regulation of political parties.