Charter Rights and Charter-Lite

Audrey Macklin, University of Toronto

The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Doré signaled the apparent victory of Team Administrative Law over Team Charter: discretionary decisions engaging Charter rights — dubbed ‘Charter values’ for this purpose — would henceforth be decided according to principles of administrative law applicable to discretion rather than constitutional principles applicable to rights infringement. This meant that judges called upon to review exercises of discretion that impaired Charter rights/values would defer to the administrative decision maker’s determination, and only set it aside if it was ‘unreasonable’.  Although Dunsmuir indicated that constitutional issues would attract a stricter standard of review (correctness), Doré subordinated the constitutional dimension of a decision to its discretionary form in order to winnow down one of the few remaining bases for non-deferential review. The reassurance offered by Team Administrative Law was that judicial deference in administrative law is not so different from elements of judicial deference built into the Oakes test. According to the Court,

while a formulaic application of the Oakes test may not be workable in the context of an adjudicated decision, distilling its essence works the same justificatory muscles: balance and proportionality.

…

Though this judicial review is conducted within the administrative framework, there is nonetheless conceptual harmony between a reasonableness review and the Oakes framework, since both contemplate giving a ‘margin of appreciation’, or deference, to administrative and legislative bodies in balancing Charter values against broader objectives.^[1]

I dispute the Court’s attempt to plot administrative and constitutional review on the same axis. First, the replacement of Charter ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ with Charter ‘value’ obscures the recognition of rights and freedoms in play.  Secondly, the methodology proposed in Doré purports to marry a simplified proportionality analysis with Dunsmuir’s deferential reasonableness review. In my view, this jurisprudential mash-up respects neither the primacy nor priority of Charter rights and produces instead a Charter-lite approach to review of discretion. Curial deference toward the outcomes it produces exacerbates the dilution of rights protection. It also creates negative incentives for governance and the rule of law by making the executive less accountable for Charter breaches committed via discretion than by operation of a legal norm.

For present purposes, I will highlight the second and third defect of Doré, the proportionality analysis. The normative primacy of Charter rights means that a proportionality analysis in the context of rights adjudication is not neutral as between rights and freedoms protected by the Charter and other interests, entitlements or ‘values’.  To denominate an interest as a right is to recognize its distinctive importance. A Charter right intrinsically ‘weighs’ more (by virtue of being a right) than something called an interest, value or entitlement^[2].   Doré’s re-labelling of Charter right as Charter ‘value’ obscures this implication of rights recognition.  More significantly,  the simplified proportionality analysis commended by the Court simply requires decision makers to identify the Charter ‘value’ in play and then ‘balance’ it against competing objectives. In effect, it suppresses the normative primacy of a Charter right. This demotion is not rescued by remedial italics. Exhorting decision makers to engage in what Abella J. called  ‘a robust proportionality analysis consistent with administrative law principles’ does not assist, precisely because it does not reckon with the relevant administrative law principles.

The standard of review in Doré is reasonableness.  A failure to accord sufficient importance to a Charter right (or value) is a question of weight, and the Court’s statement of administrative law principles for over fifteen years have emphatically insisted that deferential review of discretion precludes reweighing the factors relevant to the exercise of discretion. Doré does not depart from this admonition against re-weighing. So if an administrative decision maker undervalues the importance of protecting Charter values/rights against fulfillment of the statutory objectives that are the daily preoccupation of that decision maker, deferential review will have nothing to say. (That is, if the court actually defers; claiming to apply a standard of reasonableness while actually reviewing on a standard of correctness can avoid unpalatable outcomes but only at the cost of introducing other pathologies.)

A Charter right, once established, also asserts normative priority. A rights bearing individual need not justify the exercise of a Charter right; rather, the state must justify infringing it, and the state’s burden is a heavy one.  These requirements flow from the intrinsic weightiness of rights. The stages of the test are designed to ensure that limiting a right serves important objectives, actually advances those objectives, and limits the right no more than required to achieve the objective. Only after clearing each of those hurdles does one arrive at the ultimate balancing of the last step, in which the failure to accord sufficient weight to the Charter right may yet yield the conclusion that the government has not discharged its burden.

The confounding feature of discretion, of course, is that it presupposes that the person has no right to a particular outcome (indeed, the outcome may, in this technical sense, be a ‘privilege’), but insofar as the Charter is implicated in the decision, the individual should be regarded as a rights bearer.

While Doré does instruct decision makers to assess the necessity of limiting the Charter protection in order to achieve statutory objectives, the Court provides no practical advice about how to do that. On its face, it encourages a mere balancing of the Charter as one factor among others. Perhaps the Court in Doré intends to convey the normative primacy and priority of the Charter and all that is entailed when it enjoins decision-makers to ‘remain conscious of the fundamental importance of Charter values in the analysis’^[3].   If so, it should say so more explicitly, because it would be subverting its own problematic jurisprudence on re-weighing.

Another entry point into the disjuncture between administrative and constitutional review is the judicial posture toward ministerial decisions. It exposes a fundamental tension between the democratic impulse that underwrites deference and the counter-majoritarian dimension of constitutional rights adjudication. Judges are entrusted with adjudicating the Charter not only because of their legal expertise, but also because of their independence from government. Some Charter cases engage questions of redistribution that resist straightforward classification as state infringement of individual right, but many Charter challenges do conform to type. The judiciary’s real and perceived detachment from the legislature and the executive matters to the legitimacy of rights adjudication when government actors are alleged to have breached the constitutional rights of individuals subject to their authority. Yet, standard of review jurisprudence currently justifies deference by reference to democratic delegation.  Quasi-judicial tribunals who enjoy a measure of relative independence enjoy no more or less deference than front line bureaucrats and possibly less than ministers of the crown. The independence of the administrative decision maker from government does not matter to deference.

But in Charter litigation, proximity to the political branch of government pulls in the opposite direction – decisions by elected officials (legislators) are distrusted precisely because they might be inclined to trade off individual rights for political gain through appealing to majoritarian interests. In other words, democratic legitimacy, political acumen and access to expert staff may incline courts to display particular deference to Ministers in judicial review of discretion, but this translates awkwardly into a rationale for deference where the Charter is at issue. The fact that an administrative decision maker is also high-ranking elected official is not a reason to defer to the balance he or she strikes between protection of individual rights and advancement of other public objectives (statutory or otherwise). It may even be a reason not to defer.

The foregoing does not suggest that decision makers with authority to interpret law should not consider the Charter when exercising discretion.  Their valuable ‘field expertise’ may enhance the fact finding process, the elaboration of the statutory scheme  and the richness of the evidentiary foundation. Some individual decision makers may also produce legally sophisticated and cogent Charter analyses. Many will not, either for lack of ability, time, resources or independence, or some combination thereof. There is simply no basis for a presumption that a decision maker’s ‘field expertise’, which may contribute constructively to some aspects of a Charter analysis, equips the decision maker to manage all aspects of a Charter analysis. On judicial review, judges should certainly pay respectful attention to the reasons given by decision makers exercising Charter-impacting discretion. Sometimes the reasons may be persuasive, and a judge should be as open to benefiting from a rigorous and compelling set of reasons in the same way he or she is open to persuasion from high quality submissions by counsel, analyses by law clerks, or opinions of fellow judges.

In other words, the arguments in favour of Charter jurisdiction do not explain why deference is owed to their Charter outcomes. Nor do arguments about why courts should defer to the exercise of discretion on non-Charter matters automatically extend to those aspects of discretion that implicate the Charter. Yet Doré commits both of these errors.  The slippage is exacerbated by the fact that Court in Doré equips administrative decision makers with a Charter-lite methodology that is approximate, vague and incomplete, starting with its problematic invocation of Charter values, to its account of proportionality.

Lower courts and various Supreme Court judges have already revealed diffidence toward Doré, either by subjecting it to critique or effectively ignoring it. Going forward, I propose that a constructive approach to review of discretion engaging Charter rights should contain the following elements: First, a Charter right is a Charter right, regardless of whether it is infringed by operation of law or discretion; conclusory labelling it a ‘value’ obscures rather than clarifies.

Secondly, a Charter right weighs more than other interests, and the graver the impact of the violation, the more it weighs. Thirdly, the independence of the decision maker from political influence matters. Proximity between the decision-maker and the legislator provides no reason to defer to a balancing of individual Charter rights against majoritarian interests.

Fourthly, where no or inadequate reasons are provided for the exercise of discretion that infringes a Charter right, curial deference neither requires nor authorizes retrofitting reasons to support the result reached by the administrative decision-maker.

Finally, the extent to which the discretion in structured and guided through constitutionally valid legislation, regulation or ‘soft law’ matters. Where the exercise of discretion will routinely and predictably limit Charter rights (e.g. in civil or criminal commitment, parole, immigration detention, child apprehension, extradition, etc.), legislators can and should stipulate the purposes for which the discretion is granted, and identify the factors relevant to the exercise of discretion.  If these provisions withstand an ordinary Charter challenge (including the Oakes test), then the individual exercise of discretion within those demarcated constitutional boundaries should benefit from greater deference than exercises of broad, general and unstructured discretion.  Legislators and administrative agencies should be encouraged to structure discretion.  It advances the rule of law goal of publicity. But if the legislator declines to structure the discretion, courts should not reward opacity by undertaking to generate the best optimal justification for the outcome, just as they should not reward the absence of [adequate] reasons by generating better ones.^[4]

Whether these considerations travel under the rubric of reasonableness, correctness, proportionality or Oakes, or some other label matters less than that they receive proper and explicit attention. After Multani, David Mullan correctly (and reasonably) concluded that there is ‘room for deference to the discretionary judgments of statutory authorities exercising powers that have the potential to affect Charter  rights and  freedoms’, but in order to prevent devaluation of those rights and freedoms ‘there should be recognition  that the framework within which deference operates will often, perhaps invariably need  to be different than in the case of judicial  review of administrative action that does not affect Charter rights and  freedoms’.^[5] Justice McLachlin (as she then was) correctly observed that many more people have their rights determined by administrative decision makers than by courts. The quality of Charter protection they receive should not depend on who makes the determination.

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[1] Doré, at paras. 56, 57.

[2] Lord Bingham recognized this in the UK context: R (Daly) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, [2001] UKHL 26.

[3] Doré, at para 54.

[4] Ideally, this should incentivize legislators to be more transparent in structuring and defining the scope of discretion in legislation.  For a thoughtful elaboration of this idea, see Paul Daly, “Prescribing Greater Protection for Rights: Administrative Law and Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (2014) 65 Supreme Court Law Review (2d) 247.

[5] “Administrative Tribunals and.Judicial Review of Charter Issues After Multani” (2006–07) 21 N.J.C.L. 127 at 149.