Flipping around the channels last night after the Red Sox creamed the Indians, I saw an item on Syracuse channel 5 news that was fairly shocking: City workers were fired for living outside of City limits. Here is the story in the Post-Standard:
Eight of the 12 Syracuse city workers who were suspended Wednesday on suspicion that they were violating the city’s residency requirement were fired today after they failed to persuade city officials that they lived in within Syracuse’s borders. Three of the 12 retired, according to city Director of Personnel Donald Thompson. The 12th worker convinced the city that he did live in Syracuse. He will return to work Monday, Thompson said. A 13th worker, Eric Weber, who had been the director of the Lakefront Development Corp., was fired Wednesday. Unlike the other workers, Weber was not entitled to a hearing on his residency because he is a mayoral appointment, according to the city.
I can’t claim in any way to understand why residency is required in Syracuse. What is startling to me is how this is something that has been determined to be unconstitutional in Canada…and unconstitutional based on the “liberty” right in our Charter of Rights, a protection that has often been described as the poorer cousin to the liberty available under the constitution of the United States.
It goes back to our old pal autonomous decision making. Canada’s Supreme Court has held a number of times in a number of contexts that the right to liberty enshrined in s. 7 of the Charter protects within its ambit the right to an irreducible sphere of personal autonomy wherein individuals may make inherently private choices free from state interference. OK, I quoted that. But notice some of those words: “irreducible”, “inherently”, “free”. Good words and words that show there are bits of life that the government simply cannot govern. Within these few areas, the individual is sovereign. One of the most important statements in forming this aspect of the liberty Canadians enjoy was the 1997 Godbout ruling about where city workers near Montreal could live. In that ruling, Justice LaForest stated at paragraphs 66 and 67:
…I took the view in B. (R.) that parental decisions respecting the medical care provided to their children fall within this narrow class of inherently personal matters. In my view, choosing where to establish one’s home is, likewise, a quintessentially private decision going to the very heart of personal or individual autonomy.
The soundness of this position can be appreciated most readily, I think, by reflecting upon some of the intensely personal considerations that often inform an individual’s decision as to where to live. Some people choose to establish their home in a particular area because of its nearness to their place of work, while others might prefer a different neighbourhood because it is closer to the countryside, to the commercial district, to a particular religious institution with which they are affiliated, or to a medical centre whose services they require. Similarly, some people may, for reasons dearly important to them, value the historical significance or cultural make-up of a given locale, others again may want to ensure that they are physically proximate to family or to close friends, while others still might decide to reside in a particular place in order to minimize their cost of living, to care for an ailing relative or, as in the case at bar, to maintain a personal relationship. In my opinion, factors such as these vividly reflect the idea that choosing where to live is a fundamentally personal endeavour, implicating the very essence of what each individual values in ordering his or her private affairs; that is, the kinds of considerations I have mentioned here serve to highlight the inherently private character of deciding where to maintain one’s home. In my view, the state ought not to be permitted to interfere in this private decision-making process, absent compelling reasons for doing so.
So, since Godbout, it has been clear that the wholesale rounding up of auslanders from the suburbs is something beyond the jurisdiction and capacity of our municipalities and other levels of government. It appears that the land of the free has yet to catch up to us in this aspect of our relative liberty.