Legal philosophy – Page 2

Can We Be Friends?: A Conservative Reply to Leonid Sirota’s “Refusionism”

This post is written by Thomas Falcone

I was surprised, if a little taken aback, by Leonid Sirota’s recent declaration on Double Aspect that he is opposed to co-operation with conservatives whom he deems insufficiently committed to a rigid Hayekian philosophy. The reason for my surprise lay not in Sirota’s ideology laid bare – he is commendably transparent about his public philosophy – but more to the creeping suspicion I had that I may have played a small part in inspiring his writing.

Sirota mentions “conversations” he engaged in at the recent Runnymede Society Law and Freedom Conference in Toronto as prompting his exposition of the reason why collaboration with conservatives is indefensible. Now, Sirota is a bit of a rock star at any Runnymede Society event – and rightfully so. His contributions to Canadian jurisprudential thought surely vault him into that vogue category of “thought leader.” I myself have plastered Double Aspect articles penned by him onto slides I’ve used in graduate seminars. Sirota’s leading ideas on originalism in a Canada are extremely impressive, and (as I have told him myself!) I am mostly in firm agreement with his opinions on the administrative state.

But I am compelled to respond to his call for libertarians to reject “refusionism”, which is to say his belief that we cannot be friends, let alone political allies. Perhaps he is right.

It is unfortunate that in Sirota’s attempt to describe what he calls “right-wing collectivism” he doesn’t bother to engage with any of the thinkers he finds so frightening. To be fair, however, the very nature of conservatism makes it difficult to attribute unifying policies or ideas that form a singular coherence. Oakeshott’s old adage that conservatism “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried” is helpful only insofar as it helps to explain that what a conservatism will stand for, or against, or agree to over time and after collective consideration, will vary in different places and amongst different peoples. Roger Scuton’s refrain that the task of a conservative is to assure people that their prejudices (properly understood as a person’s gut feeling) are justified is thus perhaps more helpful than Oakeshott’s old formulation.

In a Canadian context, Ben Woodfinden’s recent long essay in C2C Journal on Red Toryism is surely the closest thing we have to a contemporary “manifesto” of the sort of reform conservatism loosely associated with the broader movement Sirota wants to pre-emptively divorce himself from. But Sirota is right that conservatives ought properly to understand the goal of politics as being attached to the promotion of the highest good. This isn’t nearly as scary as he makes it out to be.

Take the institution of private property, for instance. Conservatives rightly commit themselves to the steadfast protection of this institution. But why is private property so important? Surely it cannot be a sacrosanct institution in-and-of-itself, despite idolatrous libertarian suggestions that the primacy of private property will result in an almost supernatural “spontaneous” right ordering of society. We can find a hint of why conservatism is associated with this institution in Scruton’s invaluable The Meaning of Conservatism:

“Home is the place where private property accumulates, and so overreaches itself, becoming transformed into something shared. There is no contract of distribution: sharing is simply the essence of family life. Here everything important is ‘ours’. Private property is added to, and reinforces, the primary social relation. It is for some such reason that conservatives have seen the family and private property as institutions which stand or fall together.”

Sirota’s biblical pronouncements of Hayekian “warnings” to the contrary, I would submit rather confidently that the vast majority of Canadians – and surely universally conservatives! – would agree on a general scale that the family is an immutable social good, and ought to be defended as the primary organizing unit of our society. The rather modest suggestion that I would posit to conservatives is that when we evaluate public policy proposals we adjudicate their desirability against whether or not they help or harm our shared social goods, like the family. Devin Drover has proposed publicly-funded therapy for families to combat the mental health crisis plaguing our society. US Senator Josh Hawley has proposed cash subsidies to families as emergency relief in response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

Surely another commonly held value amongst Canadians is that it is better to work than to be idle. Having a job ties us to our community, provides us with income, and fills us with a sense of purpose. The notion that the state ought to be “neutral” as to whether people choose have jobs or sit around smoking cannabis would be nonsensical to the average person on the street. But that is precisely the Hayekian proposition Sirota suggests is “the philosophically and morally right position”, whereby individuals are the sole arbiters of their own ends. It is also a position completely alien to a conservative to whom work is fundamental good.

Recognition of the importance of work – and, indeed, the primacy of production over consumption (another value Sirota rallies against in his piece) – is central to Oren Cass’ The Once and Future Worker. And yet Cass’ proposed policy response to our society’s moral devaluation of work is, characteristic for a conservative, quite modest. He proposes a direct wage subsidy to not only make work more monetarily valuable but also signal the state’s – and thus our society’s – value of work. From an excerpt of Cass’ book in The American Interest:

“The subsidy would be calculated relative to a target wage of, say, $15 per hour and make up half the difference—so someone earning a market wage of $9 per hour would receive an additional $3 per hour. Such a subsidy would have two major effects: first, a substantial raise for low-wage workers, making each hour worked more valuable and yielding more take-home pay; second, encouragement for less-skilled workers to take that initial step into the workforce and for employers to offer such jobs.”

My point here is not to provide a laundry list of bold policy ideas that combat the scourges of family decline, widespread opioid misuse, loneliness and social isolation, and widespread disengagement of young men from the workforce. My point, rather, is to suggest that these are good and fundamentally conservative ideas. They are also not the stuff of totalitarian nightmares as Sirota will have us believe.

Finally, I feel compelled to address Sirota’s concluding appeal to the Book of Hayek. Here he suggests that power itself is an evil and thus there should be no power. This is untenable and flies in the face of our contemporary political reality. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermuele has best expounded on the internal contradictions at the core of Sirota’s philosophy by coining the phrase “the liturgy of liberalism.” How is it that liberalism, supposedly so profoundly committed to principles of freedom and liberty, can so quickly turn to repress any intellectual heterodoxy? Vermuele’s work is profound and complex, but the basic problem is that a political philosophy underpinned by nothing more than the idea of “freedom” will forever look for new oppressions to dismantle.

And herein lies the crux of my departure with Sirota: while he suggests conservatism is the flip-side to the woke-ism phenomenon, it is in fact libertarianism that is a not-so-distant cousin of SJWism. Both are committed to a religious devotion of individual preference maximization and will ruthlessly supress any suggestion that time, tradition, community, or common sense may occasionally contain more wisdom than the proclivities of any one person. Power is real and always will be – and as US Attorney General Bill Barr has noted, it is currently being deployed by left-leaning liberals against conservatives. I doubt libertarians will be spared.

This all bodes poorly, perhaps, for the future of a long-term political partnership with Sirota. But it need not foreshadow the demise of any would-be friendship. To the contrary, I am confident that right-leaning politics would benefit mightily from a continued dialogue around these difficult issues – especially in these difficult times. He is also, as I mentioned, a brilliant legal thinker. The reality is also that I know libertarians in 2020 are unlikely to try to “cancel” or “deplatform” me and I would never utilize such tactics against a libertarian. The same cannot be said for progressives. This may be a thin basis for continued political co-operation but the stakes are too high to let our disagreements overwhelm us.

Thomas Falcone is an LLM candidate at the University of British Columbia Peter A. Allard School of Law. He holds a BA in philosophy and political science, an MA in political science, and an LLB from the University of London. He is co-president of the UBC Runnymede Society chapter. You can follow him on Twitter @thomas_falcone.

Immuring Dicey’s Ghost

The Senate Reform Reference and constitutional conventions

In its opinion in Reference re Senate Reform, 2014 SCC 32, [2014] 1 SCR 704, the Supreme Court notoriously relied on a metaphor that had previously popped up, but played no real role, in its jurisprudence: “constitutional architecture”. Notably, the court was of the view that moves towards an effectively elected Senate would modify the constitution’s architecture, and such modifications required formal amendment under Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982, just as much as changes to the explicit provisions of the constitution’s text. Yet the court’s explanations of just what this architecture was were short and cryptic, and haven’t been elaborated upon ― judicially ― in the intervening years.

To fill in this void, an academic cottage industry sprang up to speculate about the meaning of the architectural metaphor and about what other constitutional reforms it might block. For example, Kate Glover Berger suggested that “action taken to dismantle or undermine the administrative state could be deemed unconstitutional” because the administrative state is built into the architecture of the Canadian constitution. Lorne Neudorf invoked architecture in the service of an argument to the effect that courts can read down or indeed invalidate vague delegations of legislative power to the executive branch. Michael Pal speculated that the first-past-the-post electoral system might be entrenched as part of the constitutional architecture.

All this while, I have been working on my own contribution to this genre, called “Immuring Dicey’s Ghost: The Senate Reform Reference and Constitutional Conventions”, which is finally going to be published by the Ottawa Law Review later this year. In a nutshell, I argue that “architecture” is really just code for “conventions” ― those supposedly non-legal but fundamentally important constitutional rules, arising out of political practice and morality, which courts have long said they could not possibly enforce. And I argue, further, that the Supreme Court should have squarely addressed the fact that it was relying on conventions, instead of playing confusing rhetorical games.

A draft is now available, for your reading pleasure. Here is the abstract:

Although the metaphor of “constitutional architecture” had appeared in some previous opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada, it took on a new importance in Reference re Senate Reform, where the Court held that amendments to constitutional architecture had to comply with the requirements of Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982. However, the Court provided very little guidance as to the scope of this entrenched “architecture”. As a result, the metaphor’s meaning and implications have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate.

This article contributes to this debate by arguing that “constitutional architecture” incorporates (some) constitutional conventions. It further takes the position that, instead of relying on this confusing metaphor, the Court should have candidly admitted that conventions were central to its decision by acknowledging that the text of the Canadian constitution cannot be fully understood without reference to conventions.

Part I reviews, first, the Supreme Court’s opinions in which the notion of constitutional “architecture” has been mentioned, focusing on this concept’s place in the Senate Reform Reference, and then some of the scholarly commentary that has endeavoured to make sense of it. Part II sets out my own view that constitutional “architecture”, as this concept is used by the Supreme Court, is concerned primarily if not exclusively with constitutional conventions. Part III considers whether it is possible to determine precisely which conventions are encompassed by the notion of constitutional architecture, examining the conventions’ importance, and their relationship to the constitutional text as possible criteria, and concluding that neither allows precise determinations. Part IV sets out what would in my view have been a less confusing way of addressing the significance of conventions to the questions the Court was facing in the Senate Reform Reference: frankly recognizing that conventions were relevant to the interpretation of the applicable constitutional texts. Part V examines two objections to the incorporation of conventions (via “architecture” or through interpretation) into the realm of constitutional law, arguing that this incorporation is not illegitimate, and that it will not stultify the constitution’s development. Part VI concludes with an appeal for greater transparency on the part of the Supreme Court.

The last thing I mention here is that this paper begins the project of bringing together two subjects on which I had mostly been writing separately: constitutional conventions on the one hand, and originalism on the other. As explained here, Canadian originalism has to grapple with the fact that some of our most important constitutional rules are unwritten. This paper, although it doesn’t make a case for originalism, begins to outline what that an originalist approach to conventions will look like.

The Road to Serfdom at 75: Part II

Hayek’s proposals for resisting collectivism

In the last 10 days, I gave two talks ― one to the Runnymede Society chapter at the University of Victoria and one at the Université de Sherbrooke ― on Friedrich Hakey’s The Road to Serfdom. In yesterday’s post and in this one, I reproduce my notes for these talks. Yesterday’s post covered the context in which The Road to Serfdom was written and presented Hayek’s criticism of collectivism. This one reviews some of his proposed solutions. The page numbers refer to the 50th Anniversary Edition, which is the one I have in my possession.

What, then, is the alternative to collectivism? It is, naturally, individualism. Individualism, Hayek insists, is not selfishness. It is, rather, the “recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions”. (66) The sovereignty of individual belief over individual action is, indeed, a burden as much as a right. Hayek reminds us “[t]hat life and health, beauty and virtue, honor and peace of mind, can often be preserved only at considerable material cost”, and “that we all are sometimes not prepared to make the material sacrifices necessary to protect those higher values”. (107) Individualism insists on “the right of choice, [which] inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right”. (112) But the alternative to making choices, however unpleasant, for ourselves is that others will make them for us.

Note that, from the insistence on the primacy of the individual follows naturally what Hayek calls “[t]he fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion”. (21) Hayek is especially well known for his insistence on the importance of this principle in the economic realm, but it applies much more broadly, as we shall see. Between collectivism and individualism as fundamental organizing principles of society, between “the order governed by the impersonal discipline of the market or that directed by the will of a few individuals”, (219) Hayek sees no middle ground, no possibility of compromise. The methods of collectivism are such that individual liberty cannot be preserved once they are being thoroughly applied, regardless of the purpose to which they are put. From that, it follows “[t]hat democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences”. (36) It is the ruthless, rather than the sincere democrats, who are able and willing to impose their values on the rest of society.

So what is to be done to secure this fundamental principle, and the supremacy of the individual on which it rests? I will focus on Hayek’s suggestions in three areas: the law, not only because this is my area of expertise, but also because Hayek’s first degree was, in fact, in law, and he deserves to be much better appreciated than he is as a legal philosopher; the economy, because after all Hayek is usually thought of as an economist (though he was much more than that), and a Nobel Memorial Prize winning one at that; and the relationship between the individual and society, because, I think that this, if anything, even more important both to Hayek himself, and especially to us as readers in an age where the preoccupations of collectivism are, ostensibly, not only or even primarily, economic.

Let me begin, then, with the law. Hayek sees its function as that of “creating conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals are given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully”. (40; emphasis Hayek’s.) A sound legal framework is what enables competition and markets to serve “as a means of co-ordinating human efforts” (41) and so to provide for the needs and wants of individuals. Hayek is no anarchist; he is not, like Thoreau, saying that that government is best which governs not at all. (Indeed, he claims, in The Road to Serfdom, that “[i]n no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other.” (45) (In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek’s views on the design of legal frameworks change quite dramatically.)

But government, if it is to respect the ability of individuals to be masters of their own lives, must not only create and sustain a legal framework, but also bind itself by rules. In other words―in words that are of central importance to Hayek―we need the Rule of Law. As Hayek defines this phrase, it “means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand―rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of that knowledge”. (80) In this way, “the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action”. (81)

This means that the law must consist of “formal rules which do not aim at the wants and needs of particular people”, (81; emphasis Hayek’s) and are not meant to produce substantive justice, whether defined in terms of equality or of some conception of merit. An attempt to produce rules―whether laws or administrative rulings―aiming at modifying the lot of particular people means that the law “ceases to be a mere instrument to be used by the people and becomes instead an instrument used by the lawgiver upon the people and for his ends”. (85) Laws that are qualified “by reference to what is ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’”, (86) which can only be applied on a case-by-case basis, are antithetical to the Rule of Law; they result in “increasing arbitrariness and uncertainty of, and consequent disrespect for, the law and the judicature, which in these circumstances could not but become an instrument of policy”. (87)

Relatedly, “the discretion left to the executive organs wielding coercive power should be reduced as much as possible”, (81) which has the added benefit of enabling democratic control over the exercise of this coercive power. Such control, Hayek argues, is only possible when the executive works towards ends determined by a democratic process―that is, ends on which political consensus can exist, rather than being manufactured by the executive itself―and in accordance with standards compliance with which can actually be assessed. In the absence of such standards, there is no Rule of Law, even if the executive is ostensibly authorized to act by vague and broad delegations of power. (91)

It is important to note that Hayek’s rejection of the pursuit of substantive equality by means of laws targeting particular groups or authorizing discretionary administrative decision-making does not proceed from a lack of interest in rights, or indeed equality. On the contrary, he endorses a substantive conception of the Rule of Law, which incorporates “limitations of the powers of legislation [that] imply the recognition of the inalienable right of the individual”. (93) He also warns that state control of the economy will be used “to pursue a policy of ruthless discrimination against national minorities” (96) or against otherwise unpopular groups or persons.

This brings me to the realm of economics. The Road to Serfdom emphasizes the importance of competition between producers―including both firms and workers. Competition is preferable to allocation of resources according to some pre-defined plan, or to the views of government decision-maker, “not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority”. (41) The world is so complex that no planner, whether an individual or a government agency, can embrace the whole picture of the resources available to a society, the needs and desires of individuals, the ideas they are generating.

Being left to pursue their interests and opportunities within a general framework of rules, individuals and firms will create more, not only in terms of material wealth, but also of innovation and opportunity, than if they worked at the direction of government. A bureaucracy attempting to direct them simply could not anticipate what possibilities might arise, and what prospects its orders might foreclose. It is worth pointing out that Hayek sees a role for regulation, whether to protect the rights of workers or even the environment. At least in The Road to Serfdom―his views on this become more uncompromising later―Hayek claims that “preservation of competition [is not] incompatible with an extensive system of social services―so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields”, (43) and they are, instead “provided for all outside of and supplementary to the market system”. (133)

On the other side―as consumers―a competitive economy leaves us choices that regulation or government control would take away. Hayek explains that “[o]ur freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable.” (102) While the market does not always provide us with as many opportunities as we would like, it at least leave us the choice of how to direct our limited resources, instead of leaving us dependent on others’ views “of what we ought to like or dislike” (103) or how we ought to value the different aims that we would like to pursue. (99) The market does not distribute wealth and resources “according to some absolute and universal standard of right”―which in any case does not exist―, but nor does it make distribution subject to “the will of a few persons”. (112) In a market economy, “who is to get what … depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances”. (112-113)

I turn, finally, to the question of the relationship of the free individual to a free polity. The commitment to individualism imposes significant burdens on both―or rather, on both the individual as a private agent and on the same individual as a citizen and member of a political community.

In politics, we must learn to recognize the reality of the constraints and limitations within which we make our choices: in particular, of economic constraints. We must accept that they are not the product of some sinister will, but of forces no less real for being impersonal. Hayek explains and warns that

[a] complex civilization like ours is necessarily based on the individual’s adjusting himself to changes whose cause and nature he cannot understand: why he should have more or less, why he should have to move to another occupation, why some things he wants should become more difficult to get than others, will always be connected with such a multitude of circumstances that no single mind will be able to grasp them; or, even worse, those affected will put all the blame on an obvious immediate and avoidable cause, while the more complex interrelationships which determine the change remain inevitably hidden from them. (223)

We must understand that while “[i]t may sound noble to say, ‘Damn economics, let us build up a decent world’”, this “is, in fact, merely irresponsible”. (230) The attempt to build up a decent world risks empowering the demagogues offering easy solutions that solve nothing, and destroy what we already have.

To resist them, we need also to accept that ends do not justify all means; that collectivist and a fortiori dictatorial instruments cannot be put in the service of the right ideals, or entrusted to the right people, without either corrupting them or being seized by the more ruthless and corrupt; that “power itself” is “the archdevil”, (159) and that power concentrated in the hands of the state “is … infinitely heightened” (159) in comparison with that wielded by private actors. Once again, the echoes of The Lord of Rings are unmistakable.

We need, moreover, to firmly reject “the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe”. (180) Perhaps most controversially for our time, Hayek cautions against a loss of “belief in Western civilization” and “a readiness to break all cultural ties with the past and to stake everything on the success of a particular experiment”. (203) (It would perhaps not be superfluous to note that Hayek would later write an essay called “Why I Am Not a Conservative”; he always considered himself a liberal―in the European, not the American, sense of the word.)

Last but not least, we ought to remember that morality is not measured by the intensity of our “indignation about the inequities of the existing social order” (230) but “by standards [of] individual conduct, and on the seriousness with which we uphold moral principles against the expediencies and exigencies of social machinery”. (231) We are acting morally, in other words, not when we are engaged in virtue-signalling or being “unselfish at someone else’s expense”, or indeed “being unselfish if we have no choice”, (231) but when we choose to put our own self-interest on the line for our principles. On this point, it is worth emphasizing that voting, in particular, is no test of individual morality, since it requires no “sacrifice of those of [those] values [one] rates lower to those [one] puts higher”. (233)

It is in our private conduct that we ought to be unselfish, concerned with equality, and generally do what we think is right. We must recall, Hayek says, that “[r]esponsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name”. (231-32) We ought also to practice actively those “individualist virtues” to which I already referred: willingness to stand up for our opinions also ability to respect for those who disagree with us; magnanimity not to punch down and courage not to kiss up; good humour and presumption of good faith. We need, in other―Abraham Lincoln’s―words, to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right”. Importantly, Hayek reminds us that “these individualist virtues are at the same time eminently social virtues”, (163) in that they make a society where they are practiced a much more pleasant place to live than one where they are forgotten.

Firmness in the right as we are given to see the right is perhaps an especially important theme for Hayek, though unlike Lincoln, he writes of individual conscience as what gives us to see the right. He insists on the importance of “readiness to do what one thinks right … at the sacrifice of one’s own desires and perhaps in the face of hostile public opinion”, (232) “to back one’s own conviction against a majority”. (233) Related to this is the imperative to hold on to the “old meaning” of the word “truth” as “something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief”, (178-79) and not whatever the authorities want us to believe for the sake of maintaining social cohesion.

As an academic, I especially want to highlight the need to stand up to the tendency to put “the disciplines dealing directly with human affairs and therefore most immediately affecting political views, such as history, law, or economics”, in the service of “the vindication of the official views” rather than a search for truth. (176) We must not allow law schools, or history departments, to be made into “factories of the official myths which the rulers use to guide the minds and wills of their subjects”. (176) As Hayek wrote all these years ago, “contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith”. (179) Runnymede is fighting the good fight in opposition to this contempt.

Let me conclude with a warning and an exhortation. The warning is that reading The Road to Serfdom will not fill you with joy. It is dispiriting to see just how much Hayek’s warnings about the dangers of collectivism are still applicable today, three quarters of a century after he wrote. It would be much easier to think of whatever problems we are facing in our time as temporary aberrations rather than as avatars of a long, perhaps a permanent, dark streak in human nature, which is what their persistence suggests they are.

But the exhortation is to pick up The Road to Serfdom regardless and, having read it, to do what you can to push back against the trends that it describes. As Hayek says, “[i]t is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving in this direction. There are no objective facts which make it inevitable.” (7) As Gandalf points out in The Lord of the Rings, “all who live to see [evil] times” wish them away, “[b]ut that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The Rule of Law All the Way Up

Introducing my recently-published chapter on the Rule of Law and Canadian constitutional law

LexisNexis Canada recently published (if I understand correctly, as a standalone book as well as a dedicated issue of the Supreme Court Law Review (2d)) Attacks on the Rule of Law from Within, a collection of essays co-edited by my friends Joanna Baron and Maxime St-Hilaire. The publisher’s blurb gives a concise summary of the project’s background and contents:

This volume is a collection of six papers developed from the Runnymede Society’s 2018 national conference by a community of legal experts in response to Supreme Court of Canada Justice Rosalie Abella’s comment that “the phrase ‘rule of law’ annoys her”.

Grounded on the intuition that the legal profession supports the rule of law, the papers examine the historical perspective on threats to the rule of law, the sufficiency of the current Canadian legal framework to support this ideal and how the principle of stare decisis as observed by the Supreme Court of Canada undermines the spirit of the rule of law. The volume also discusses how the law relating to Aboriginal title and the duty to consult fails to adhere to the Rule of Law standards … to the detriment of indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians alike.

I am honoured to have contributed to this volume, with an essay called “The Rule of Law All the Way Up”, which focuses on what I see as the lack of commitment to the Rule of constitutional Law in by scholars, judges, and politicians. Here is the abstract:

Canadian constitutional law is seldom criticised for its failure to live up to the ideal of the Rule of Law. This article argues that it should be so criticised. A number of widely accepted or uncontroversial Rule of Law requirements―the need for general, stable, and prospective rules, the congruence between the “in the books” and the law “in action, and the availability of impartial, independent courts to adjudicate legal disputes―are compromised by a number of ideas already accepted or increasingly advocated by Canadian lawyers, judges, and officials.

This article describes four of these ideas, to which it refers as “politicization techniques”, because they transform what purports to be “the supreme law of Canada” into a set of malleable political commitments. These are, first, deference to legislatures or the application of a “margin of appreciation” and the “presumption of constitutionality” in constitutional adjudication; second, constitutional “dialogue” in which courts not merely defer, but actively give way to legislative decisions; the substitution of political for legal judgment through the application of the “notwithstanding clause” of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and the rewriting of constitutional law by the courts under the banner of “living tree” constitutional interpretation.

The article concludes with an appeal to those who profess commitment to the Rule of Law in relation to the Constitution not to embrace or endorse the means by which it is subverted.

The entire chapter is available to download on SSRN. It builds on many of the themes developed on my posts here ― the rejection of judicial deference on constitutional issues, whether to legislatures or to the administrative state; the imperative to renounce the use of the Charter‘s “notwithstanding clause”; and the perils of “living constitutionalism”. Some of these, notably the issue of deference to administrative interpretations of constitutional law and constitutional interpretation, I will also be pursuing in future work. (Indeed, the first of these is the subject of the paper I will be presenting at the Journal of Commonwealth Law symposium next month.)

I am very grateful to Ms. Baron and Professor St-Hilaire for having given me the opportunity to present these thoughts, and write them up for publication. I am also grateful to Justice Bradley Miller, of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, who gave me thoughtful comments when I presented my chapter (then still very much in draft form) at the 2018 Runnymede Society conference, as well as to Kerry Sun, who was a very helpful editor. And I am looking forward to reading the other contributions in the volume, once I am done preparing the talks I am about to give in the coming weeks.

On the Origin of Rights

Are religious justifications for rights and equality inadmissible in Canadian politics?

Why have we got the fundamental rights we think we have? This is a somewhat embarrassing question for secular liberals, such as yours truly. We don’t have a very satisfactory answer to it. Our religious fellow-citizens, by contrast, have one, which is that rights come from God, in whose image (at least the Judeo-Christian tradition) human beings have been created. As it turns out, however, not everyone is okay with this answer being publicly aired, at least by a politician. This is puzzling to me, and worth a response.

The minor Twitter dustup of the week so far was triggered by the Conservative Party’s leader, Andrew Scheer, who wanted us all to know that he “believe[s] that we are all children of God and there is equal and infinite value in all of us”, from which it follows that no one is superior or inferior to anyone else on the basis of “race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation”. Pretty anodyne stuff, I should have thought. But not according to, well, a number of people ― one can never tell how many with these Twitter dustups. Emmett Macfarlane demanded that Mr. Scheer “[k]eep his imaginary shit out of [his] public policy”, eventually adding that”[i]t’s actually highly disagreeable to imply … that the equality of people is rooted in our status as ‘children of God'”. And I’ve seen other comments along these lines too. Perhaps, as Jonathan Kay suggested, “Canada has run out of real things to fight about”. But I take it that to Professor Macfarlane, and to others who think like him, this is a serious thing.

So here are some hopefully serious thoughts on this, from the perspective of one who does not share Mr. Scheer’s belief that human beings are children of God. To begin with, it’s necessary to recall that something like Mr. Scheer’s view was, historically, the foundation of the argument for the normative equality of human beings and the existence of fundamental rights inviolable by a political community. It was John Locke’s argument and Thomas Jefferson’s, for instance. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, as “self-evident” “truths”, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Lord Acton would later wrote that “the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in the fulfillment of duty to God … is the secret essence of the Rights of Man”.

A Twitter interlocutor told me that this was of no import in Canada. Stuff and nonsense. Canada is very much an heir to the liberal tradition of which both Locke and Jefferson were among the founders, and Acton one of the great exponents. (The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in particular, embodies this tradition ― and, in permitting individual rights to be set up as limits on public power, does so in a manner that is more Jeffersonian than the defenders of Canadian exceptionalism care to acknowledge.) Others have pointed out that Locke’s egalitarianism did not extend to the Aboriginal peoples of the New World. They might have added that Jefferson was, notoriously, a slave-owner who fathered children with an enslaved woman. Acton, almost as notoriously, supported the slave-owners in the American Civil War in a shockingly misguided and embarrassing defence of federalism. But I don’t think this matters here. Locke, Jefferson, and Acton fell short of their principles ― as human beings often do ― and this is to their individual discredit, but not to that of the principles which, had they followed these principles fully, would have prevented them from discrediting themselves.

More modern, secular statements about the origin of rights, meanwhile, are full of elisions and circumlocution. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” This is, up to a point, an echo of Jefferson’s words, but notice what’s missing here: any indication of why human beings are born free and equal, or how we know this, or who endowed them with reason and conscience. Section 1 of the Canadian Bill of Rights “recognized and declared that in Canada there have existed and shall continue to exist … [certain] human rights and fundamental freedoms”. This (like similar, if more laconic, language in section 2 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990) is a recognition of the pre-political nature of rights, which are not created by whatever positive law implements them. But again, it is not clear how these pre-political rights came into being. The preamble to the Canadian Bill of Rights declares that “the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions”. The preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also refers to “principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”. But the connection between these principles and the rights these instruments protect is left studiously undefined.

I am not saying that this is a bad thing. It’s probably more important to agree on our having rights than on the causes of our having rights. I share A.V. Dicey’s belief that it is more important to provide legal remedies for the violations of rights than to declare grand principles of rights-protection. Jefferson could consider the divine origin of rights self-evident, but in contemporary society neither his view nor any alternative can make such claims, and it is fortunate that we have gotten on with the practical business of providing legal remedies against the breaches of at least some important rights instead of debating the precise metaphysical reasons why we should do so.

It would be a long debate. We secularists cannot claim to know, collectively, where rights or equality come from. To be sure, some of us, individually, have hypotheses. There is Kant’s work on human dignity of course (arguably as mysterious as many a religious dogma). Jeremy Waldron (no secularist, actually, as will soon be apparent), sets out a multifaceted justification for equality in his book One Another’s Equals. Another line of thought that I personally find appealing is based (non-religious) natural law, developed along the lines Randy Barnett sketches out. In a nutshell, this argument holds that, given certain facts about human nature ― perhaps especially our general tendency, all too well attested by history, to disregard the interests of those whom we do not consider to be (at least) our equals ― if we want to live peacefully and prosperously with one another, we really ought to consider each other as equals and as holders of certain rights. Intriguingly, the preamble of the Universal Declaration actually makes an argument of more or less this sort: “[w]hereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”. In other words, if we don’t commit to ideas like equality and some other fundamental rights, we can be pretty sure that things will turn out badly.

But none of that is, to use Jefferson’s words, self-evident. One can plausibly be a Kantian, a secular Waldronian, a latter-day natural lawyer, but one cannot plausibly insist that these explanations, let alone any one of them, are the only admissible ones. Nor can one specifically exclude religious explanations for equality or fundamental rights from the realm of admissibility. (That’s not to say one has to find them persuasive.) Professor Waldron himself writes that it “seem[s] obvious to [him]” that

an adequate conception of human dignity and of the equality that is predicated on that dignity is rooted in an understanding of the relation of the human person to God or in aspects of human nature that matter to God or matter for our relation to God[;] that human worth and human dignity are going to have to be rooted in something like a theological anthropology, a religiously loaded account of human nature. (177)

Professor Waldron acknowledges that these things are not obvious ― to put it mildly ― to many others; that “[m]any philosophers” ― or political scientists, like Professor Macfarlane, or others ― “are inclined to dismiss religious accounts of human equality as superstitious nonsense”. (178) He specifically addresses the concerns of those who would rather that religious arguments on such issues not be offered to the public. As read him, Professor Waldron speaks mostly to the position of the philosopher (not necessarily a professional one, but perhaps simply a philosophically-minded citizen), not that of the aspiring office-holder. But I think that his conclusion that “everybody calling it as they see it and giving the fullest and most honest account they can is superior to … embarrassed self-censorship about a matter this important” (213) is applicable to people in Mr. Scheer’s position, as well as in Professor Waldron’s. This is partly a matter of honesty both personal and intellectual, and partly also a consequence of the fact that, as noted above, for politics and law, our agreement on the existence of rights and the value of equality matters rather more than the reasons we might have for subscribing to this agreement. If some people want to sign on for religious reasons, we should welcome them and be glad of their company even if we do not find their reasons convincing.

So, despite not being religious, I would not purge the religious accounts of equality and fundamental rights from the realm of intellectually respectable ideas, and still less from the public square. Indeed, I will end on a on wistful and worried note. Professor Waldron suggests that “perhaps some of the foundations” of our morality “have [a] nonnegotiable character;” (188) they must be obeyed and are not subject to revision in light of our other commitments. These foundations “may include the basic equality of all human beings, and I wonder whether a religious grounding might not be a good way of characterizing this particularly strenuous form of objective resilience”. (188) Perhaps the same might be said about liberty, or its more specific instantiations, such as the freedom of conscience and the freedom of speech.

And so, like Professor Waldron, I wonder whether a world, call it Jefferson’s world if you like, in which there was certainty about the origin of rights ― and about their divine origin, and hence transcendant importance, too ― was not one in which rights could be more secure than in our world of pluralist doubt. Against that, we must count the reality of, on the whole, much greater respect for rights today than in Jefferson’s own time and in his own life. Still, it is difficult not to worry that our lack of confidence about the origin of rights leaves them vulnerable to the rhetoric of those who see rights (and other legal and constitutional limitations) as dispensable luxuries or outright obstacles in their pursuit of plans for remodelling human beings, society, and the world in the name of this or that ideal.

The “Return” of “Textualism” at the SCC[?]

Under the so-called “modern approach” to statutory interpretation, courts are instructed to take into account the text, context, and purpose of a statute. But perhaps because the “text, context, and purpose” recital is so commonplace, other difficult interpretive questions are masked under its patina. For example, which takes priority—text or purpose? The Supreme Court has said that clear text is dominant in the interpretive process (see Placer Dome, at para 21; Canada Trustco, at para 10), but at the same time, the Court has often adverted to the role of purpose in interpretation, to the extent that purpose or policy considerations could override clear text (see the opinion of then-Chief Justice McLachlin in West Fraser Mills, at paras 40, 43). And, even if one could work out what the proper relationship is between text and purpose ,there is no guidance from the Court about what purpose, at what level of abstraction, should be relevant in the analysis. I have written about these issues before.

Luckily, the Supreme Court has provided some guidance to answering these questions in Telus Communications v Wellman, 2019 SCC 19. While the approach advanced in the case is not strictly textualist, it does represent the important idea that text dominates in the interpretive process, and that overall policy goals should not be permitted to override that text. While the Supreme Court is a laggard to these important conclusions (see the opinions of Stratas JA in Williams, Cheema, and Hillier), they come better late than never.

Facts

The case involved an important question of statutory interpretation under Ontario’s Arbitration Act and Consumer Protection Act. Wellman filed a class action against Telus, consisting of both “consumers and non-consumers” [2]. The action alleged that Telus “engaged in an undisclosed practice of ‘rounding up’ calls to the next minute such that customers were overcharged…” [2]. All of the contracts binding the class provided that any claims “arising out of or in relation to the contract, apart from the collection of accounts by Telus, shall be determined through mediation, and failing that, arbitration” [3].

The problem for Wellman et al, though, was that not all of the members of the class were “consumers.” Under the Consumer Protection Act, the arbitration clauses in the contracts are invalid, because “it would otherwise prevent class members who qualify as ‘consumers’ from commencing or joining a class action of the kind commenced by Mr. Wellman” [4]. The Consumer Protection Act “shields consumers from a stay of proceedings under the Arbitration Act” [4]. Telus conceded this point as regards the consumers. But there were non-consumer, business customers included in the class. The core question was whether they could escape the effect of a stay sought by Telus.

Wellman said that, under the Arbitration Act, s.7(5), the court had discretion to refuse Telus’ request for a stay against the business customers, so that the business customers could continue in the class. Section 7(5) says the following:

7 (5) The court may stay the proceeding with respect to the matters dealt with in the arbitration agreement and allow it to continue with respect to other matters if it finds that,

(a) the agreement deals with only some of the matters in respect of which the proceeding was commenced; and

(b) it is reasonable to separate the matters dealt with in the agreement from the other matters.

Telus, though, fundamentally disputed this claim, arguing that under other provisions of the Arbitration Act, exceptions are set out that are exhaustive of all the legislative exceptions in the Arbitration Act scheme. Accordingly, to Telus, the Consumer Protection Act does not apply to the business consumers, and instead, the business claims should be stayed under the Arbitration Act [7].

Analysis in the Case

Moldaver J wrote for the majority, accepting Telus’ argument. After citing the general modern approach to statutory interpretation of text, context, and purpose, he first grounded his view of the statute in its purpose. One of the principles of the Arbitration Act, appearing in the legislative history, was the need to ensure that parties “abide by their agreements,” and that the law was designed to enshrine this idea [50]. Subsequent cases in courts across the country, to Moldaver J, accepted this idea [54].

Turning to the text, specifically s.7(1) of the Arbitration Act, Moldaver J wrote that it established a general rule: “where a party to an arbitration agreement commences a proceeding in respect of a matter dealt with in the agreement….the court “shall,” on the motion of another party to the agreement, stay the court proceeding in favour of arbitration” [63]. This is, obviously, a mandatory statutory rule. Wellman, though, argued that s.7(5) excerpted above is an “independent, standalone” exception to s.7(1) [74]. This provision, which permits a “partial stay”—meaning that the court has a discretion to stay some of the claims for arbitration—is available if certain statutory preconditions are met and if the court exercises its discretion in favour of the stay. Wellman argued that s.7(5) could be read so that the court “may refuse to stay” the business customers’ claims. But Moldaver J rejected this proposition, focusing on the text of s.7(5) in its statutory context. The text of s.7(5) says nothing about a court “refusing to grant a stay,” and to him: “…where the legislature intended to authorize the court to refuse a stay, it did so through the words ‘may refuse to stay’” [73]. Those words did not appear in s.7(5). And, with this text and context in mind, Moldaver J turned to purpose: allowing Wellman’s argument would “reduce the degree of certainty and predictability associated with arbitration agreements,” permitting the business customers to escape the effect of a stay [76].

Wellman also relied on certain policy considerations to support his preferred interpretation of the text [77]. One of these was a general principle of “access to justice,” which “[removes] barriers to seeking relief in court” [77]. But there were two problems with importing this idea as a decisive principle for the case: (1) a rarefied idea of access to justice should not “be permitted to distort the actual words of the statute, read harmoniously with the scheme of the statute, its object, and the intention of the legislature, so as to make the provision say something it does not…the responsibility for setting policy in a parliamentary democracy rests with the legislature, not the courts…[i]t is not the role of this Court to re-write legislation [79]; and (2) the Ontario regime pursues access to justice by “shielding consumers from potentially harsh results of enforcing arbitration agreements…” by exempting consumers “and only consumers” from “otherwise freely negotiated agreements” [80]. This is in conjunction with the Arbitration Act’s pursuit of the overall principle that parties should abide by their agreements. Access to justice, as a general idea, should not “be permitted to overwhelm the other important objectives pursued by the Arbitration Act…” [83].

While I do not have space to recount the minority opinion of Abella and Karakatsanis JJ, I want to note a particularly fiery charge that they chose to level at Moldaver J: “The majority’s approach, with respect, in effect represents the return of textualism. The words have been permitted to dominate and extinguish the contextual policy objectives of both the Arbitration Act and the Class Proceedings Act [citations omitted]…” [109]. To the minority, the “overall purpose” of the Arbitration Act “was to promote access to justice” [137].

Evaluation

I want to say three things about this case. First, the minority’s charge of “textualism” against Moldaver J is inaccurate and sloppy; (2) Moldaver J’s approach, while not textualism, represents a defensible “textually constrained purposivism,” that guards against a court aggrandizing to itself the power to “read-in” language to a statute; (3) both of the opinions show why relying on legislative history is such a fraught enterprise.

Consider first the minority’s textualism charge. I can only imagine that Abella and Karakatsanis JJ were trying to make a rhetorical point, because I cannot believe that they—learned judges of our Supreme Court—could so misunderstand an entire school of interpretive thought. Textualism is directly opposite to “purposivism,” which is primarily concerned with the ends a statute pursues. To the textualist, purpose is encompassed in the means the statute pursues. It is not concerned with an overall statement of purpose, per se: consider Scalia J’s opinion in MCI and WVUH v Casey, and also Judge Easterbrook’s article, “Statutes’ Domains.”

But Moldaver J’s opinion does not just focus on means. It considers the ends of the Arbitration Act, including the overall “purpose” of respecting the agreement reached by parties in their contracts. Moldaver J’s approach is much more realistic than the minority’s approach, which chooses the “access to justice” purpose as the “overall purpose”—with no justification other than, apparently, judicial fiat. Moldaver J’s approach recognizes that there are other purposes of the statute at play. This is not textualism.

That said, Moldaver J’s approach does recognize that purposes do not exist in the abstract. They must be tied to statutory means. What is relevant is not the court’s appreciation of what access to justice means, but what the legislature thinks it means, and the words the legislature used to represent that idea. And that legislative instantiation is existent in the Arbitration Act and Consumer Protection Act, working in pari materia. As Moldaver J noted, the Ontario regime is focused on permitting access to justice for “consumers,” by allowing them to pursue claims in court. When we are talking about business customers, though, the legislation does not speak in abstract terms about access to justice writ large–the Arbitration Act has defined means to grant a partial stay, not means to refuse to grant a stay. It pursues the goal with limited means, in conjunction with other fairly discernible statutory purposes. Abella and Karakatsanis JJ—poets, apparently—say that “a provision must be assessed in all its textures — language, purpose, effect — to prevent the suffocation of its meaning by a technical literal reading of the words” [130]. But here, poetry suffocated prose, because the language of the statute works in symbiosis with purpose. Purpose does not override text. And in this respect, to my knowledge, it is not hornbook law that the Canadian approach is “intentionalist,” as Abella and Karakatsanis JJ say [107], understood in the sense that intentions should override text. Intentionalism would mean taking a psychologist’s armchair and determining what a legislator meant to say; not what was said.

This makes sense from a democratic perspective. Legislators, in their heads, may think of purposes when they enact laws. These purposes may range from “the public good,” on one hand, to minute, technical considerations on the other. Because a court cannot discern which purpose ended up becoming law, we have to think about what the best evidence of the law could be in the circumstances. Usually, text is that best evidence. While it is not always definitive and clear—because language is not always definitive and clear—it is better than unexpressed intentions or abstract, tangential purposes.

I want to raise a final note about the use of legislative history. Both sides of the case relied on different aspects of the legislative history to support their particular interpretation. Because various statements existing in the legislative history are not ranked by importance, it is difficult for any court or observer to put more or less weight on various statements. So, like Judge Leventhal once said, legislative history is like looking over a crowd and picking out your friends. A judge predisposed to one interpretation will use legislative history to support his own view of the matter. If we are going to allow legislative history to be a valid part of statutory interpretation, it should only be relied on with severe caution, as an afterthought, and with the idea that its probative value is exceedingly low.

Notwithstanding the quibble about legislative history, Moldaver J’s opinion is worthy of note because it finally recognizes that judges, under the guise of judicially divined “purposes,” cannot override a contextual interpretation of the text. The text is what the legislature enacted. It should govern.

The Diceyan Trope

Metaphors, labels, and particular phrases seem to be a constant theme running through Canadian law. In virtually every area of public law, the Supreme Court deploys clever labels and metaphors to convey ideas that are bundled with certain inferences or assumptions about the ideas themselves. The most famous, perhaps, is the living tree model of constitutional interpretation, which is so ingrained that it has taken academic articles to dislodge its place in the constitutional zeitgeist. Other examples abound.

On one hand, these linguistic devices are useful shorthand. Rather than explaining complex concepts, they allow the Court and others to quickly express a complicated idea in a way that lawyers and academics can understand. On the other hand, they shortcircuit critical analysis of the ideas they represent. Rather than acting as useful stand-ins for complex ideas, I fear that they have become broadside representations of certain way of viewing Canadian law; concepts that, through frequent usage, have become immovable stones that represent closely-held positions.

Perhaps this is most evident with one of the most widely-deployed tropes: the attack on one of the dark lords of administrative law, A.V. Dicey.

I confess that the inspiration for this post was Justice Abella’s recent speech in New Zealand, in which she, as usual, attacked the “Diceyan” conception of administrative law. Lest one should think this is an isolated incident, this Diceyan label also infected the Vavilov and Bell/NFL hearings at the Supreme Court, when one intervener argued that other Commonwealth jurisdictions have gotten by without a standard of review analysis, and a judge retorted that this is because they are trapped in a Diceyan mode of law. As Audrey Macklin explains respecting this exchange, “[The] insinuation behind this remark is that these benighted commonwealth judges are trapped in some nineteenth century intellectual dungeon.”

I fear that this insinuation is the one meant by Justice Abella. Bundled within the Diceyan attack is a number of presuppositions. As far as I can tell, the attack on Diceyanism is an arrow in the quiver of those judges and scholars who were inculcated in the New Deal and Keynesian era of technocracy, expertise, and social policy. Often called administrative law “functionalists,” (people like John Willis and Harry Arthurs) the functionalists worried about Diceyan administrative law as a way to fill-in conservative ideals under the rule of law rubric. To their minds, cases like CUPE [1978] best recognize the social policy aims of tribunals and their technocratic expertise.

I’ve written before about why these arguments are ill-fitted to the modern administrative state. Administrative decision-makers now no longer operate in a narrow field of social policy, but also inhabit the most repressive areas of the state: prisons and border officers, for example. Technocratic expertise is one thing, but legal expertise is quite another, and decision-makers are now tasked more than ever with deciding complex legal problems for which they are not necessarily trained. Put differently, there is no reason to believe that an expert in subject-matter A will necessarily have expertise in legal area B. Nor is there any reason to believe that the expert will be able to explain her conclusions in language that permits accountability through judicial review–this is the problem of immunization to which the Federal Court of Appeal is increasingly drawing attention. The assumptions underlying the functionalist view, if they ever existed, no longer exist as a general matter.

In fact, there is much about Dicey to be admired. The first consideration, though, is determining what Dicey actually meant. While functionalists try to paint Diceyan as a rank anti-administrativist, there is some nuance to his position. Dicey was comparing with a particular style of administrative law—“droit administratif”—which Dicey thought was alien to English legal principles. Particularly, he believed that a separate body of law governed relationships between citizens and the state, as opposed to citizens and other citizens. State actors were not subject to scrutiny by the ordinary courts, but rather special administrative courts. The concern for Dicey wasn’t the exercise of delegated power—he actually allowed for the exercise of legislative powers by delegated actors in the English context, entities like municipal bodies. Instead, it was the worry that different rules might privilege state actors. This concern still worries us today.

But administrative law as we now know it is not about granting rights and privileges to state actors (putting aside ideas of qualified immunity). State actors are subject to the ordinary jurisdiction of the courts. The only doctrine that dilutes this oversight is self-imposed: doctrines of deference that courts created themselves to grant delegated actors “policy space.” No matter, while administrative law as we know it arose subsequent to Dicey, Dicey is probably not as radical as his opponents make him out to be.

What’s more, Dicey’s fundamental principles remain relevant today. His explanation of the rule of law contained within it the seeds of a more substantive approach, one of “legality” underlying all exercises of public power. This is still a useful and important concept, particularly as we consider how best to control discretion exercised by administrative actors. There is nothing in Dicey’s principle of legality that implies a necessarily conservative orientation. All it insists is that courts have an important, perhaps exclusive, role to play in policing the boundaries of the administrative state. And unless we are willing to attack the independence of judges by insinuating that their policy preferences infect their judicial duty, maybe we should not be so worried about courts like the functionalists were.

More broadly, Dicey did attempt to wrestle with the distinction between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, as I outline here. This is a concept that continues to bedevil us today in discussions about standard of review, and the extent to which Parliament’s law should oust the ability of the courts to review decisions on a de novo basis. As Mark Walters aptly noted in his contribution to the Dunsmuir Decade symposium:

Dicey made some mistakes and the punishment for his sins seems to be that his name is forever associated with that flawed “Diceyan” understanding of public law. However, some of the most difficult and underappreciated passages in his famous book, Law of the Constitution, come in the course of an attempt to explain how judges may resolve the tension between the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty—passages which make little sense unless we assume that the “spirit of legality” that he says shapes all legal meaning is a substantive ideal that justifies and legitimates the exercise of governmental powers

This Diceyan concept—identified by Walters—is still centrally important today. But it has been forgotten, in part due to the negative inference drawn by those who label particular proposals as “Diceyan.”

This is not to say that these arguments are altogether immune from attack. For example, it is controversial to say that courts should have an exclusive role to play in the rule of law. In the modern era, a focus on courts also tends to crowd out discussion about the best controls on administrative discretion that exist: those imposed by Parliament itself. I also think that Diceyanism can be used to justify an all-out, Phillip Hamburger-style attack on the existence of the administrative state writ large. For some, this is a good thing. But for others, there may be reason to think Diceyanism is open to abuse.

My point here is not to say that Dicey was right or wrong–clearly, like most humans, he was a bit of both. Either way, to my mind, it is not a foregone conclusion that Diceyan administrative law is a wholly improper theory of the administrative state. Like most theories, Diceyan administrative law contains important principles that should animate future research directions, but it is not a cure-all. Invoking the Diceyan trope does little to further intelligent debate about what administrative law should look like in the 21^st century.

Lost Virtue

Joseph Raz revisits the subject of the virtue of the Rule of Law

Joseph Raz recently posted on SSRN a short essay call “The Law’s Own Virtue“, based on remarks he delivered on the occasion of receiving the Tang Prize. The essay revisits themes explored in Professor Raz’s famous article on “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue”, defending the same view that the Rule of Law does not mean the rule of good law, and that its requirements on the exercise of public power are formal and procedural, but not substantive. It is a view that I share, for what that’s worth. But there is an aspect of Professor Raz’s argument which is new, at least in comparison with his classic article, and which strikes me as deeply disturbing.

Professor Raz now makes the intention of government actors central to his discussion of the Rule of Law. He starts from the proposition that “one, commonly agreed, aim of the [Rule of Law] is to avoid arbitrary government”. (5) This is where the focus on the reasons for government action enter the picture, as Professor Raz defines “[a]rbitrary government [as] the use of power that is indifferent to the proper reasons for which power should be used”. (5) Government power should be used “to follow and to apply the law”; (6) If it is used with this intention, the Rule of Law is being complied with. It follows that

not every failure of the government to be guided by the law is a breach of the [Rule of Law]. For the most part such failure is due to mistakes and incompetence. Even the most conscientious and qualified government is liable to fail in such ways. (6)

Intention is also relevant when assessing (from the Rule of Law standpoint) the exercise of interpretive and discretionary powers, and indeed the rule-making powers. When making or interpreting law under the Rule of Law, governments must “not … promote their own interest, but that of … the governed … includ[ing] their moral interests”. (8) Beyond that, however, “[d]etermining what ends to pursue in the exercise of discretionary powers, or in the interpretation of the law, is the stuff of ordinary politics, and the [Rule of Law] does not review the success of politics”. (6)

Professor Raz sums up his argument as follows:

Based in the main on only two premises, that governments may act only in the interests of the governed, and that honest mistakes about what that is, and what it entails are the stuff of ordinary politics, and honest mistakes about this do not violate the rule of law, I concluded that the virtue of the rule of law lies in tending to secure that the government acts with the manifest intention of serving the interests of the governed. (15)

Professor Raz’s original view of the virtue of law was that it was indifferent to governmental purposes. Compliance with the Rule of Law, he famously wrote, is like the sharpness of a knife: a quality that can be used in the service of bad ends, as well as good ones. The test for such compliance had to do with the form of laws (notably their clarity, openness, and stability) and with respect for legal procedures (the independence of courts, the executive complying with the law that authorizes it to act, and so on). An ill-intentioned, self-serving or abusive government could comply with the Rule of Law; a well-intentioned but incompetent one, not necessarily.

This view is reversed in Professor Raz’s return to the subject and, as noted above, I do not think that his change of heart is for the better. I think it is dangerous and counter-productive to judge governments by intention, both as a general matter and specifically when it comes to assessing their compliance with the Rule of Law. Moreover, even if intention were a relevant consideration, the pursuit of the “interest of the governed” seems a particularly unhelpful standard by which to judge governments.

Generally speaking, I think we would do well to embrace Lord Acton’s distrust of “[t]hose who judge morality by the intention [and] have been less shocked at the crimes of power … than at those committed by men resisting oppression”. The time elapsed since Acton’s death should only have reinforced this attitude. And it is especially relevant to the issue of the Rule of Law. Governments themselves don’t allow people to get away with law-breaking by pleading “mistakes and incompetence”. If you are caught speeding, telling the cop that you’re just a mediocre driver and, while desirous of complying with the traffic code, sometimes forget to check how fast you are going isn’t going to get you too far, I suspect. So why should you have any patience with similar claims by a government?

Lon Fuller, in particular, emphasized the reciprocity that the Rule of Law fosters in the relationship between government and citizen: as the quid pro quo for the citizen’s law-abidingness, the government ensures that the law allows the citizen to plan his or her life. Under Professor Raz’s approach, this reciprocity can break down. The citizen is still asked to obey, but the government only to intend to do so.

Of course, Fuller, as well Professor Raz in “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue”, recognized that compliance with the Rule of Law is (usually) a matter of degree. A certain level of compliance is necessary; beyond that, the question becomes one of excellence, and perhaps even excess. But I don’t think that this is Professor Raz’s point in “The Law’s Own Virtue”. If “manifest intention” to act in the appropriate way is the relevant standard, then even fairly egregious failures, so long as they are due to good faith incompetence, perhaps even honest carelessness, will be excused, and not only a government’s inability to reach excellence.

Consider an example that I have previously discussed here as a Rule of Law failure: the Canadian law on the standard of review in administrative law. The Supreme Court changes the rules all the time, sometimes announcing that it does so and sometimes not; it often fails to follow the rules it has itself announced; its deferential approach is not impartial between the citizen and the government and allows erroneous legal interpretations arrived at by decision-makers who are not independent of the government to become the law.

For all that, I am happy to suppose that the Supreme Court judges intend to follow the law, except in those cases where they (not inappropriately) reconsider their precedents, and that to the extent they are engaged in (re-)making the law, they think they act in the best interest of Canadians. The vexing inability to come up with and follow a truly legal framework is, at least for the most part, the fruit of plentiful mistakes and abundant incompetence. But so what? That doesn’t change the fact that where citizens (not to mention other judges) ought to find law, they find muddle. The Supreme Court’s pronouncements provide no useful guidance, and thus appear arbitrary, even if they do not meet Professor Raz’s narrow definition of arbitrariness.

This example also points to another troubling claim in Professor Raz’s discussion: that legal interpretation is equivalent to an exercise of discretionary powers and must be assessed as “the stuff of ordinary politics”, not a Rule of Law issue. As not only John Marshall but also the Professor Raz of “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue” recognized, the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is. This is significant, because the courts are not engaged in “ordinary”—which I think must mean partisan and self-interested—politics when interpreting or even developing the law. Their performance in doing so cannot be judged politically, either as a normative matter (because political criteria are the wrong ones to apply to judicial decisions) or as a descriptive one (because the courts, being unelected and independent, are not subject to political judgment anyway).

Of course, a political judgment in the shape of legislation or constitutional amendment overturning a judicial decision is possible; perhaps this is what Professor Raz means. But such legislation is fairly rare, and constitutional amendment still more so. In the ordinary course of things, the only judgment that we can pass on the judiciary’s exercise of interpretive and creative powers is a moral one, and it must be based on Rule of Law-related criteria, not political ones.

Finally, in any case, I think that “the interest of the governed” is not a standard by which the actions of any institution of government can usefully be assessed. “The governed” are not a homogeneous undifferentiated mass. The are individuals, organizations, and groups. Their interests differ, and sometimes—indeed, quite often—clash. Government action that is in the interest of some will run counter to the interest of others. The more things some people get governments to do, the more toes these governments must step on to accomplish these things (whether these toes’ owners are aware of being trampled on or, as often is the case, not).

Now, perhaps the idea is that any plausible-seeming conception of the public interest will do, so long as the government is not blatantly oppressive and self-serving. Yet not only is it doubtful that even this test can eliminate controversy but, more importantly, it is quite meaningless. Protectionist legislation that blatantly favours, say, producers over consumers, or indeed government over citizens, can be dressed up in some public-spirited guise, and intelligent people will fall for this trickery, be they the judges of the Supreme Court in R v Comeau, 2018 SCC 15, or Sir William Blackstone, who wrote that

the statute of king Charles II which prescribes … a dress for the dead, who are all ordered to be buried in woollen … is a law consistent with public liberty; for it encourages the staple trade, on which in great measure depends the universal good of the nation.

The Rule of Law, I submit, is not only not the rule of good law, but also not the rule of well-intentioned law. The purposes of public institutions that create, interpret, and apply the law, or exercise discretionary powers granted by law, are not relevant to assessing their compliance with the Rule of Law. Innocent incompetence can lead to Rule of Law failures, while a self-interested government, for example one preoccupied with lining the pockets of its supporters and winning the next election, however worthy of condemnation, may well abuse its power in a manner that is consistent with the Rule of Law. Professor Raz’s classic article on the virtue of the Rule of Law remains an essential reference point for those of us who are interested in the subject. His return to the topic, sadly, will not be one.

The Supreme Court’s Unreasonable Reasons Doctrine in Admin Law

Why Newfoundland Nurses should be overturned and a recent FCA case adopted as a new starting point.

In Sharif v Canada (Attorney General), 2018 FCA 205, the Federal Court of Appeal (per Stratas JA) was faced with the herculean task of trying to do the impossible: review nothing. Indeed, that is what is asked by the Supreme Court when it says that courts should supplement the reasons of decision-makers. Sharif is the latest in a growing list of cases that demonstrate the fallacy of the Court’s approach. There are two reasons why Sharif’s reasoning demonstrates the flaws with the Court’s doctrine of supplementing reasons: supplementing reasons skewers itself on the Supreme Court’s own concept of deference; and a doctrine of supplementation creates perverse incentives for decision-makers.

First, to Sharif. The Chair of the Warkworth Institution Disciplinary Court convicted Mr. Sharif of “fight[ing] with, assault[ing] or threaten[ing] to assault” another person under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act [CCRA]. In making the decision, the Chair only made a few factual findings: (1) he attempted to keep his meal tray out of a correctional officer’s reach; (2) this conduct invited physical contact either by Mr. Sharif or by the officer [17].

Fatally, Stratas JA noted that the Chair did not analyze the provision of the CCRA under which he convicted Sharif—and that led him to obviously (but implicitly) conclude that Sharif’s action of keeping his meal tray away from the officer was “figh[ting] with, assault[ing] or threaten[ing] to assault.” But to Stratas JA, this “[fell] short of affirmative action or aggression with physical consequence” [23], the condition required under the CCRA. The Chair’s reasons did not contain a finding of aggressive conduct [25].

At this point, the Supreme Court of Canada’s conclusion in Newfoundland Nurses enters the fray. The Court there confirmed Dunsmuir’s selective citation of an academic article, reasoning that judicial review courts may provide reasons that were not but “could be” offered by the decision-maker. Courts should “supplement [reasons] before [they] seek to subvert them” [12] by looking to the record; additionally, inadequacy of reasons is not a standalone basis for review [14]. To the Court (through Justice Abella), this doctrine was consistent with Dunsmuir’s requirements of “justification, transparency, and intelligibility” [13].

Justice Stratas declined to supplement the Chair’s non-existent reasons, even though he looked to the record as instructed by Newfoundland Nurses. In fact, he concluded that, looking to the record, the Chair “declined to find that Mr. Sharif’s conduct was aggressive” [27]. Applying Newfoundland Nurses, and doing anything more to determine whether the ultimate outcome was reasonable, would amount to “impersonation” of the decision-maker (Bonnybrook, at para 91 per Stratas JA in dissent—but with no quarrel from the majority). To Justice Stratas, doing so would usurp the role of the decision-maker, or otherwise speculate as to what the decision-maker thought about the relevant legal analysis. Here, the reasoning was plainly deficient. The Court could not conduct judicial review.

Having concluded this, Justice Stratas refused to take Newfoundland Nurses any further. In effect, he concluded that the lack of reasoning was a standalone basis for review. And he was right to do so. This is where Newfoundland Nurses goes wrong and Sharif should be followed. Reasons are a window into a decision. The decision-maker has been delegated power to make decisions; and the reasons offered are important for the court to determine the legality of a decision. If decision-makers are incentivized to provide inadequate reasons, but courts cannot intervene on those decisions, the administrative state is evasive of review. A court ginning up supplementary reasons only exacerbates this concern by providing cover for bad and inexpert decision-making. Sharif raises this concern on two fronts, and I would take the reasoning in the decision further to bar all supplementation.

As Justice Stratas notes in the decision, supplementing decisions can be fundamentally corrosive of the separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislature. The task on judicial review is to police the boundaries of the administrative state (Wall, at para 13), with the appropriate degree of deference indicated by the legislature. It is not giving “respectful attention” (Dunsmuir, at para 48) to the reasons the decision-maker offered if the court is, as Newfoundland Nurses instructs, permitted to recreate a decision from the record that the decision-maker did not make. The Justice Abellas of the world forget that reasonableness is a standard of review. If a decision-maker offers nothing, how can a court review—or even give deference—to something that does not exist? It is profoundly disrespectful of the (supposedly expert) delegated decision-maker to impose a court’s own reasoning, but it creates a situation where that disrespect begets insulation. By saving the administrative state from its own poor reasoning, courts will end up reviewing its own reasons, not the decision-makers. And decision-makers will use their delegated authority to make decisions that courts cannot review on the merits.

But the downstream effect of this doctrine of deference is likely also corrosive. A decision-maker under Newfoundland Nurses can provide one line of reasons knowing that courts can look to the record to supplement the decision. But this is not judicial review in any meaningful sense. The job of a judicial review court is to review a decision, not conduct documentary discovery. A bare record is a necessary but insufficient condition for meaningful review. Reasons—addressing the main legal issues and engaging with the core interpretive difficulties—are vital. When a court supplements a decision, decision-makers can relax, knowing that the margin for error is quite wide. And in cases where the decision-maker has some control over compiling the record, the doctrine incentivizes the piling of documentary evidence into the record, without having to engage with the difficult legal questions, knowing that courts could–somewhere–find a justification.

In this sense, for a lawful administrative state, it is not enough that the outcome of a decision be supported by the record. The administrative decision-maker–the merits-decider–must herself support that outcome with reasons springing from her own pen. A court on judicial review must take those reasons for what they are, not create incentives for a free-riding administrator to depend on an expert court to cover for legal mistakes. This is all the more important where important liberties are at stake.

Sharif pushes back on these perverse incentives by demanding more. It asks decision-makers to explicitly set out the basis of the decision, and justifies the revocation of the lifeline granted to them by Newfoundland Nurses. It restores a modicum of respect for Parliament’s choices. Newfoundland Nurses should be rejected. Sharif is a good start as a replacement.

Judicial Supremacy Defrocked

Justice Abella’s recent speech should remind us that courts are fallible.

In a recent speech reprinted in the Globe and Mail, Justice Abella of the Supreme Court again offered a robust defense of the judicial role and the profoundly benevolent impact of the Supreme Court in Canadian constitutional history:

Integration based on difference, equality based on inclusion despite difference and compassion based on respect and fairness: These are the principles that now form the moral core of Canadian national values…the values that make our national justice context democratically vibrant and principled…[a]ll this came from the Supreme Court.

She goes further:

A Supreme Court must be independent because it is the final adjudicator of which contested values in a society should triumph. In a polarized society, it is especially crucial to have an institution whose only mandate is to protect the rule of law.

On one hand, it is good to see that Justice Abella no longer finds the Rule of Law annoying. But on the other hand, her comments should give us pause. She presents a vision of a Supreme Court that decides what Canadian values are, and then imposes them on the society generally. We should first call this for what it is: judicial supremacy, in which rights are not recognized as much as they are created out of whole cloth at the discretion of the Supreme Court. Abella J seems to accept this in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, where she “gives benediction” to a right to strike. “Benediction” is defined as “the utterance or bestowing of a blessing, especially at the end of a religious service.” True to form, the Supreme Court is the high priest, bestowing us with rights as only a supreme institution can.

Glibness aside, I do not mean to use the term “judicial supremacy” in a bombastic way, but rather in a technical legal sense. I mean it in the sense that Justice Abella clearly views the role of the Supreme Court as having the last word on constitutional matters. But her view goes even further: she thinks that the Supreme Court is a freestanding arbiter that is institutionally capable of rending final judgments on contests between values for the society on the whole.

I’m not sure this is normatively justifiable or whether it’s even a structural or textual feature of the Canadian Constitution. The legislature still has an important role to play in vetting laws for their constitutionality and making important value judgments that may impact constitutional rights—in most cases, the legislatures are probably better at this than courts. But this is a bigger fish to fry. Assuming for my purposes that Justice Abella’s description of what courts do and should do is accurate, maybe this state of affairs could be justifiable on the basis that courts are comparatively better at making the sorts of value judgments that arise in constitutional matters. If Justice Abella’s framing is true, so the argument goes, the essence of constitutional adjudication is value judgment; courts adjudicate constitutions, and therefore courts, over time, will be expert in value judgments.

But no one has ever presented evidence that this is empirically true, and I am not sure anyone ever could. Justice Abella herself recognized this in Doré, when she developed a doctrine of deference premised on the concept that courts are worse at constitutional decision-making than administrative decision-makers. In fact, courts are not institutionally suited to balance the sort of polycentric considerations that go into difficult and resource-laden value judgments. And judges are trained in the law, which on many modern accounts, is not even the purpose of law school. There are good reasons to doubt the ability of the courts to even begin to understand the weight of the task at hand.

If we are to have judicial supremacy, and judicial supremacy is fundamentally about final value judgments, I am not sure why we solely appoint legal practitioners to the Supreme Court. I only half-joke when I say that we could populate the court with people trained in the different perspectives through which value judgments could and should be made. Economic reasoning, for example, could be extremely helpful here. As Lon Fuller said, there is a point at which we could trade-off certain values in favour of others. We should attempt to develop theories by which we can anticipate and calculate the costs of adopting one right over another; or the reliance interests associated with this precedent over that one. What’s more, philosophy could be helpful. Moral and normative reasoning about how people should live is clearly within the interest of Justice Abella when she judges cases.

I think that the Justice Abellas of the world who argue that law is simply about “balancing values” are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, if they make that argument, they should accept that law has no claim to empire over adjudication. Adjudication is not what is taught in training for lawyers; and there are people who are better qualified to assess the different tradeoffs of values and the practical impact those changes have. But if they reject this proposition, then they must accept that there is a locus of “law” somewhere to be found in adjudication. It follows that we should train lawyers and judges to first, do no harm; determine the meaning of constitutional terms according to objective standards. Values may be instantiated in the law, but one must first interpret that law to determine those values. It shouldn’t be the case that judges enter legal inquiries with an idea of the values they seek to advance.

The task of judging was supposed to be defined by “passive virtues,” with courts possessing neither force, nor will—only judgment (The Federalist, No. 81). Justice Abella evidently believes in a vision of courts that are not only supreme but confidently so. Judgment has turned into arrogant finality that decides not only the narrow constitutional issue before the court, but the larger value judgment which is settled for all time. There is no democratic recourse to the ever-expanding domain of constitutional empire if courts make abstract, political, and resource-intensive value judgments for the society on the whole. If courts are going to do this—if we have sold the legislature down the river—then they should at least be good at it.