Why aren't these youngsters in school? Meeting Canada's Charter obligations to disadvantaged adolescents.

The paper seeks to highlight government's constitutional obligation in Canada to disadvantaged children and street children with regards to this group's Charter right to a complete and quality compulsory basic education up to completion of secondary school and all services needed to support their enjoying the right. The first part of the paper addresses the need for revision of the Education statutes in Canada to require compulsory secondary school attendance until graduation or until 18 with only a few categories of reasonable exception to this requirement. The second part of the paper sets out the Charter basis for the right to education as a right to completion of secondary school. The right to a basic education as including completion of secondary school is here viewed as a fundamental human right. This paper suggests that Canada's disadvantaged youth and street children are entitled to have government at the federal and provincial level meet not simply its moral obligation in ensuring their right to education, but also its constitutional obligation in this respect. In Canada, as in poorer countries, educational attainment is a determinant of labor force prospects even when one considers very basic rather than tertiary education. It is of interest that the obvious strategy of compulsory secondary schooling is a strategy that only one Canadian province, New Brunswick, has adopted to address the problem of school drop-out with its attendant high costs to the individual and the community.