THIS CANADA DAY, we had new reason to be thankful that we're living on this side of the Canada-U.S. border.

On this side, we have a court system that's often under attack for being too lenient, particularly when it comes to dealing with the scourges of gun violence and impaired driving.

However, even the sharpest critics of our system seldom, if ever, accuse our top judges of being politically biased.

In fact, most of the criticism of the Supreme Court of Canada's recent decisions is based on the fact they have taken seriously the supremacy of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

An example just last week, the court reaffirmed the importance of the Charter's guarantee of free speech when it overturned a decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal that radio talk show host Rafe Mair defamed family values advocate Kari Simpson, who had spoken against having books depicting gay parents in B.C. schools.

In a 1999 commentary, Mr. Mair suggested she was displaying the kind of bigotry more commonly associated with Hitler or some racist governors of southern U.S. states.

Writing for a seven-judge majority, Justice Ian Binnie commented that while an individual's reputation must not be treated "as regrettable but unavoidable roadkill on the highway of public controversy," neither should an "overly solicitous regard for personal reputation be permitted to chill freewheeling debate on matters of public interest."

The decision was a clear victory for advocates of press freedom, since it changed the test for the defence of fair comment. Defence lawyers will no longer have to show that the defendant was expressing a view he or she honestly held, and it will be sufficient to show that the viewpoint in question was one that anyone might honestly hold.

Hopefully, the decision is one that will be universally applauded, as demonstrative of the fact our court is prepared to modernize libel laws that are weighted against defendants, and even permit a prime minister to claim he has been defamed by an opponent.

But while our court seems to be moving with the times, the opposite is surely the case with the United States Supreme Court, which last week gave new life to a constitutional amendment stemming from soon after the American Revolution - guaranteeing the right of the citizen to "bear arms."

Although the amendment was initially aimed at guaranteeing the right of militia members to carry firearms, the ultra-conservative Supreme Court majority found that it prevented Washington, D.C. from banning ownership of handguns.

In the first major ruling on gun rights in the court's history, a 5-4 majority said the second amendment to the constitution allows Americans to own handguns for self-defence. Although the ruling likely doom similar gun bans in Chicago and San Francisco, the court did say guns can be banned from sensitive locations such as schools, churches and government buildings and kept out of the hands of criminals.

In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said some restrictions had to be permitted to combat gun crime, including some measures regulating handguns. "But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for selfdefence in the home.".

Washington banned handguns in 1976, in an attempt to reduce the violent crime that has plagued the U.S. capital. The city also requires shotguns and rifles to be kept disassembled and unloaded unless they are in a business establishment.

The city's mayor, Adrian Fenty, who had defended the handgun ban, said he would introduce a plan to at least require residents to register their handguns. He commented that the court's verdict, which will inevitably lead to a huge increase in gun ownership, "will only lead to more handgun violence."

In contrast, President George W. Bush endorsed it as an affirmation of "the right of Americans to keep and bear arms".

Some 85 people have been murdered so far this year in Washington, which has struggled against violent crime for decades and was known during the 1990s as the murder capital of the U.S. About 10,000 people are killed in gun crimes in the US every year, some 75 per cent of them shot with handguns.

In the circumstances, it will be interesting to see whether Toronto Mayor David Miller will get to first base with his online petition for a Canada-wide handgun ban. Although such a ban will likely be supported by most Liberals and the NDP and Bloc Québecois caucuses, it stands little or no chance of support from the gun-friendly Harper Conservatives, intent as they are on dismantling the federal firearms registry.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling stands in contrast to a 2000 decision by our Supreme Court which unanimously ruled that the licensing of firearms owners and the registration of firearms are within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

Hopefully, similar insight will eventually be applied by our top court when it next revisits the issue of impaired driving.

Just how out of touch some lower-court judges are with the needs of society was demonstrated anew last week when a Barrie judge acquitted a Toronto police officer who had a blood alcohol reading of 180 mg/100 mL, more than double the legal limit, accepting his claim that he'd merely drunk about five beers that evening.