Our politics are usually entirely in synch, but I'm actually quite happy with this ruling.  The charter guarantees certain rights and freedoms to individuals, not corporations, and rightly so IMO.

May be you should add the link to the US Supreme Court decision last week banning signs at schools rallies that may suggest that marijuana is not a bad idea.

By the way, the essence of the Supreme Court of Canada decision was that the ban did not cross the line because it was not a complete ban only a partial ban.  But of course, banning advertising to people not already addicted to an addictive substance kind of defeats the purpose.

If I was blogging much, I would have. I think the proposal in the states is for a "and we really mean it" amendment for items such as ad spending during elections, eminent domain, various 4th amendment stuff, states rights, and of course the 1st. Many of which were disrupted during the last decade or so. I believe Roberts' (no relation, I assume) argument was that since the intention of the speech was disruptive rather than political, it is less protected. Not particularly convincing.

Mark: so it goes. However, such things act as a ratchet, and it actually might be something you like or at least think is reasonable the next time. There's lots of stuff that the elites (I'm using this in a less paranoid way than it sounds) don't like (e.g. bottled water, discount travel, trucks) and now have a handgrip to taking away.

Actually the point of my comment is just that in the United States where the Constitution notionally gives higher proptection to rights does not protect a clearly political statement (a protest against a stupid law).  The U.S. cases are very subtle and hard to read because of the historic contortions they have to go through down there and have to create fanciful arguments that certain speech is speech while other speech is not really speech.

One virtue of the Canadian system (which is not a we're better than them comment merely an observation that our Charter came almost 200 years after the Bill of Rights and we learned from experience) is that rights are not absolutely guaranteed (they are subject to such limits as are reasonably demonstrable by law in a free and democratic society) and so we can say tobacco advertising limits do breach freedom of speech but the limits are reasonable in the circumstances (given the reason, the extent, the targeting etc).

The amazing thing is I just woke up at 2:50 in the morning to have you write exactly what I thought (in the second paragraph). What is even more amazing is that I'm fairly certain that there's a difference between demonstrated and asserted, though you'd never know it from your pals on the Supreme Court. "Everyone knows" is not a demonstration.There's probably a better argument with tobacco [*], but I'm fairly certain that no one actually demonstrated (e.g.) that allowing reporting of election results meaningfully affects electoral fairness.

[*] cigarette smoking leads to increased opportunities for socialization, enhances the ability to concentrate, gets you laid, may reduce risk of Alzheimer's, tastes yummy, provides the opportunity to experience the Canadian outdoors several times a day; it's not fair just to count the negatives.