The Government of Canada is encouraging the Supreme Court to, on its own motion, capture new and previously unimagined powers for itself. It proposes that the court should be able to block some uses of the notwithstanding clause because, if renewed by successive governments often enough, they might create “irreparable impairments” to the enumerated rights and freedoms suspended. (Look into your crystal balls!) The government also invites the court to allow idle “declarations of invalidity” on statutes that use the clause: it proposes, in fact, that the court should be permitted to do this for explicitly electoral purposes, because “voters and their representatives are not always necessarily in a position to determine for themselves whether a law respects Charter rights and freedoms.”