“Special Education and the Charter: The Right to Equal Benefit of the Law” is an excellent article on the provincial statutory regimes and their relationship to s. 15 of the Charter. It surveys the legislatures' attempts at delivering education to students and highlights the shortcomings in these attempts, focussing on the inability or unwillingness of the legislatures to provide an appropriate education to mentally disabled individuals. The article then takes a prospective approach, illustrating how a generous interpretation of s. 15 of the Charter might be used to correct deficiencies in educational statutes. Both the survey of statute law and the commentary on its relationship to the equality provisions of the Charter provide a valuable addition to scholarly writing on the provision of appropriate education to the mentally disabled.
However, there is some danger in assuming that the right to education derives solely from statute. Statutes are creations of legislatures. If the right to education exists only in these statutes, education may be viewed not as the right of every child, but as a privilege bestowed by the legislature, to be determined by administrators, and to be overseen only as a last resort by the courts.