PREFACE

“Why should young people care about the law?” This is a question some of you may have as you begin reading this book. The answer is that the law defines specific rights and responsibilities that apply to young people as well as to adults. Our rights oblige other people to treat us in certain ways; our responsibilities oblige us to behave in certain ways. Many people are more interested in their legal rights than in their responsibilities—but the two go hand in hand. If you don’t know what your legal responsibilities are, you can get into trouble. Similarly, if you don’t know what your legal rights are, you won’t know what to expect or what to ask for from others.

You may already have heard things from other people about rules that the law makes for you. Perhaps you’re not sure exactly what these rules are, though, or perhaps you’re wondering whether what they told you is really true. And even if you haven’t been told anything, children and young people are often curious about questions like these:

• Are parents allowed to spank their children?

• What rules can my school make?

• At what age can I make any of my own decisions?

• If my parents get a divorce, can I decide which one I’m going to live with?

• Can my parents kick me out of the house? And if they can, how old do I have to be before they can do that?

• What can happen to me if I’m arrested?

• If I feel like I’m not being treated fairly, who can help me?

We have written this book to answer these and other questions. Our aim is to give you a detailed and practical guide to the laws in Canada that determine what your rights and responsibilities are and at what age a given law may apply to you. We will also tell you about what resources exist to help enforce the rights you do have and what strategies you might use to defend or enhance your rights.

We hope that, as you read, you will realize that you do have some rights under the law, even though those rights are still rather restricted. In some situations, you may indeed have the law on your side if you wish to make your own choices or do things that are normally thought of as adult activities. All the same, the law still usually sees young people as having only a limited ability to make sensible decisions for themselves, and so it gives adults the power to control them in numerous ways.

We also hope that we can help you steer clear of incomplete or inaccurate advice. Some people have misguided ideas about what the law actually says. They may be interested in the law, but they may not understand its rules very well, and so they can spread inaccurate information even if they don’t mean to do so. For that reason, it can be risky to just believe whatever someone tells you about the law. Even websites that provide advice about the law are sometimes not entirely reliable. The information may be incomplete or out of date, or the people who wrote the information may have misinterpreted what the law says. In other words, if you want to get to know your legal rights and responsibilities, you need a trustworthy source of information.

Our goal is to provide you with such a source. Although we have tried to cover a lot of different topics, laws vary a lot from one part of the country to another, and we cannot cover all of them in one book. You may want to find out more about certain issues on your own. You can try to read the law yourself and see what it says, and we hope you will, but legal documents can be easier to make sense of if you know how to read them. We will tell you where to find some of the important laws and explain a little of how to understand them. We will also give references to some of the rules of the law in the book, so you can check what they say for yourself if you want, and we provide a glossary of legal terms in appendix A. Terms defined in the glossary appear in bold the first time we use them.

As we have said, the legal rights of children and teens in this country are currently rather limited, but laws have changed, and they can change again. New laws are passed or existing ones altered when attitudes within a society change. Back in the nineteenth century, for instance, the law gave young people extremely few rights of their own. If a family needed money, children could be forced to work long hours in factories or in other jobs, rather than being given an education. Gradually, though, people came to feel that this was unfair, and so laws were passed that set limits on child labour. And, over the years, young people have continued to acquire greater rights. In 1970, for example, the voting age in Canada was lowered from 21 to 18, and now some people argue that it should be dropped further, to 16. Internationally, the United Nations has done much to challenge governments to respect the idea of “children’s rights” or “youth rights.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed 1979 to be the International Year of the Child, and, in 1989, the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, about which we will have more to say in chapter 1. Canada ratified the Convention in 1991, and, today, numerous countries have laws that require adults to treat youth more like people whose opinions matter.

We find such changes encouraging, and we hope that you do as well. All the same, you will find that the rights youth have in this country, especially rights to make their own decisions, are very limited. We’re disappointed that, despite recent improvements, the law still doesn’t care very much about your need for independence. It’s true that many laws are meant to protect you, perhaps because people suppose you to be immature and vulnerable. But these so-called protections often stop you from doing things just because you are under a fixed age, without giving you a chance to prove you might actually be capable of doing them. Getting a driver’s licence is just one example of such things (see chapter 2). Not only does the law greatly limit even competent youth, but in our opinion it also doesn’t require adults to pay nearly enough attention to young people’s emotional needs. Perhaps, for instance, after reading chapter 3, you may come to believe as we do that the law should require judges to respect children’s wishes when making decisions about parental custody.

These are just a few examples of the reasons why we think Canadian youth should be asking for more legal rights. At the same time, we will say very little in this book about exactly what rights we think you should have. That is a very complex question, and we encourage you to think for yourself about what rights adults should give you and to find good reasons why you should be given those rights.

There’s a lot of information in this book, not only about specific laws but about your rights, about Canada’s legal system, and about what you can (and cannot) expect to get from the law. We hope that this information will be useful to you—that it will answer questions you might have and show you how laws about young people affect your life. We also hope that you will think about the way the law treats youth and what it assumes about them. Finally, we hope that adults who read this book will stop to consider how our laws might do more to support and respect the basic human rights of children and youth in this country.

Ned Lecic and Marvin Zuker