Category: statutory interpretation

If It’s Broke, You’re Not the One to Fix It

The Québec Court of Appeal takes it upon itself to update obsolete election legislation. That’s not its job.

This post is co-written with Mark Mancini

One of us (Sirota) has written any number of times about Québec’s Election Act, which is remarkable by the staggering restrictions it imposes on election campaigns and by its drafting that has, on many points, not been updated this century. This combination of severity and obsolescence leads to all manner of controversy and problems in the Act’s application. A recent decision of the Québec Court of Appeal, Therrien c Directeur général des élections du Québec, 2022 QCCA 1070, illustrates this. 

At issue in Therrien was s 429 of the Act, which provides that, in the week after the writ for an election

is issued, no person, except the Chief Electoral Officer [CEO], may broadcast or cause to be broadcast by a radio or television station or by a cable distribution enterprise, publish or cause to be published in a newspaper or other periodical, or post or cause to be posted in a space leased for that purpose, publicity relating to the election.

As the Court (Justice Cournoyer writing with the agreement of Justice Dutil; Justice Fournier, who had also been on the panel, passed away before the decision was issued) recognizes, “when s 429 … was amended in 1995, social media did not exist. … The ordinary meaning of the words ‘post’ and ‘space leased’ could not envision virtual reality, be it virtual posters or virtual spaces”. [62]-[63] (We translate here and throughout.) The question was whether s 429 nonetheless applied to prohibit advertising on Facebook, such as an ad that the CAQ, for which the appellant was the social media manager, took out in the first week of the 2014 election campaign.

2014, you might think, is a long time ago. We’ll return to this below. You might also think that s 429 is unconstitutional. We are inclined to think so too. In Thomson Newspapers Co v Canada (Attorney General), [1998] 1 SCR 877, the Supreme Court struck down a publication ban on polls for part of an election campaign, and a part both more sensitive and shorter than the one at issue here, namely the last three days. It is hard to argue that a ban on some advertising in the campaign’s first week is more justified, although perhaps a court would accept that it is necessary to maintain fair electoral competition. But the issue does not seem to have been raised in Therrien, which is a pure case of statutory interpretation. The Court observes that the issue of the applicability of a provision to circumstances that were not and could not have been anticipated at the time of its enactment is “a classic in statutory interpretation, but its solution, as this case shows, is not always obvious”. [9] With this much we agree. The Court’s solution in this case is that s 429 does apply to social media advertising. This we believe is wrong, in light of the―to repeat, obsolete―drafting of the Act.

The Court begins by interpreting s 429 on its own terms. Its effect is to ban some―though not all―political advertising in the first week of an election campaign. Its purpose, inferred from what it prohibits, is “to foster fairness and equality among all political parties at the outset of an election campaign”, [54] by preventing the incumbent from getting a jump-start on its competitors. As the Court notes, fixed election dates weren’t in place when s 429 was enacted.

Inferring this purpose from the mischief sought to be remedied is an unremarkable tool of interpretation, but in this case, we fear the Court’s analysis is backwards. It may be true that the purpose of the provision is to foster fairness and equality at the outset of the campaign. But this purposive analysis must build on convincing evidence in the text and the choices reflected in that text. In this sense, the Court’s analysis is flipped. At a number of points, it puts no weight on the ordinary, accepted meaning of the text, seemingly allowing the Court’s own view of the statutory purpose to drive the analysis. 

This leads the Court down the incorrect path. Drawing on Perka v R, [1984] 2 SCR 232 and R v 974649 Ontario Inc, 2001 SCC 81, [2001] 3 SCR 575, it states that while a statute’s terms are to be given the meaning they had at the time of their enactment, they “must not necessarily be confined to their original meaning” [65] at that time. What this means is that statutory language, provided it is sufficiently general, can be applied to facts and phenomena that weren’t or couldn’t be contemplated when it was enacted. But the focus of the analysis must be on the language used in the statute, and whether it could conceivably cover the phenomenon at issue. The issue, then, is “whether the text of s 429 prevents its extent to virtual posting in a virtual space”. [67]

The Court is right to cite these authorities at the outset, for they confirm the basic rule: the original meaning of statutory terms governs. This point was expressed most recently in R v Kirkpatrick, 2022 SCC 33, in the concurring opinion of Coté, Brown, and Rowe JJ. The concurrence articulated the accepted rule, unchallenged by the majority:  “[i]t is a fundamental error to apply the ‘living tree’ methodology to the interpretation of statutes” [55]. But the Court of Appeal disregards the basic principle it cites. Rather than asking whether the words can bear the “adaptation by the courts of general concepts to these new realities” [68], it expressly concludes that the meaning of the words “post” and “space leased” “could not contemplate virtual reality” [63]. It then moves to conclude that the terms “post” and “space” “do not prevent their application to the virtual dimension specific to social networks” [67].

Here both the method and the conclusion are faulty. As we note, the accepted method asks whether the provision, in its purposive context, can accommodate the new technological developments. The Court, instead, reasons backwards: instead of asking “does this provision apply?”, it asks “why wouldn’t this provision apply?”. This is inappropriate on several grounds.  Most basically, it is always for the party alleging that a provision applies―here, the CEO―to prove that this is so, and for good reason. Legislators who vote for legislative proposals do not and cannot time travel. The reach of statutes is fundamentally limited by their wording. By failing to positively affirm that a provision applies in a given circumstance, the Court distorts the reach of the law to cover phenomena that the text simply may not support. This, as we shall see, is an unacceptable form of spurious interpretation.

There are other normative reasons to reject the Court’s interpretation. Since the provision at issue is a penal one and restricts political speech, both the rule of lenity and the principle of legality counsel against applying it to doubtful or borderline cases. And substantively, the idea of a “virtual space” isn’t just a novel application of the existing concept of a space in the way that, say, same-sex marriage is a new application of the old concept of marriage. It is a metaphor and cannot do the work the Court wants it to.

The Court’s so-called purposive approach is also left wanting on its own terms, as it fails to have proper regard to the legislative context and to show why the purpose of the provision compelled its chosen interpretation. Consider the Court’s analysis of the history of s 429. In Frank v Canada, 2019 SCC 1, [2019] SCR 3, the dissenting opinion (unchallenged on this point), noted that “[t]he state of the law as it existed prior to an impugned provision coming into force can…give insight into why the provision was enacted” [131]. This, of course, is one way to discern the meaning of text; changes in wording can indicate changes in legislative purposes (as opposed to inferences based on what a legislature did not do).  In this case, the appellant sought to draw the Court’s attention to the fact that s 429’s predecessor provisions were phrased in general terms and did not specify particular forms of advertising prohibited in the early campaign, arguing that the legislature’s choice to now ban some forms of ads and not others had to be respected. The Court simply isn’t interested: “the history of the amendments to s 429 does not matter as much as the parties think in interpreting its text”. [55] In our view, this is a mistake. As noted in the Frank dissent, the history of a provision can often illuminate the textual means by which a legislature was attempting to solve a particular mischief. If the appellant is right (and the Court does not even bother setting out the previous version of s 429, so we cannot tell), his argument deserved to be taken seriously.

The Court goes on to add that its interpretation of s 429 is in agreement with that of the CEO, which can be taken into account without being binding. It is a bit difficult to say how much this argument influenced the Court―it is probably not a major factor in the decision. But any reliance on it is, nonetheless, disturbing. A court would not take special notice of the police’s interpretation of the Criminal Code. There is no reason to treat an administrative enforcement agency with any more indulgence. (It is telling, too, that the case on which the Court relies here, Cayouette c Boulianne, 2014 QCCA 863, is at root a dispute among neighbours, which turns on the meaning of a municipal by-law. Giving some weight to the municipality’s views in that context is not nearly as problematic as doing that when the administrator is the prosecutor.)

All in all, the Court’s analysis on this point is backwards as a matter of method, but the result is also problematic. Some may ask why the original meaning rule should be followed in a case like this, where new technological problems are so evident. The answer relates to the point of statutory interpretation. The job of courts is to interpret the text through which legislatures seek particular objectives (MediaQMI v Kamel, 2021 SCC 23, [39]). The text discloses how a legislature wanted to achieve its ends. By updating the statute for the legislature, the Court assumes that the legislature (a) wants its law extended; and (b) wants the law extended in this particular manner. It deprives the legislature—the exclusive law-maker—of the opportunity of creating a new regime that balances on- and offline expression. Citizens can rightly begin to question where the law is made.

The Court also accepts an alternative argument based on the effect of Québec’s Act to establish a legal framework for information technology (IT Framework Act) on s 429. In a nutshell, this law is meant to ensure that digital documents are treated the same as their analogue counterparts for various purposes. Documents are defined as follows, in s 3 of the IT Framework Act:

Information inscribed on a medium constitutes a document. The information is delimited and structured, according to the medium used, by tangible or logical features and is intelligible in the form of words, sounds or images. The information may be rendered using any type of writing, including a system of symbols that may be transcribed into words, sounds or images or another system of symbols.

Moreover, pursuant to s 71

The concept of document, as used in this Act, is applicable to all documents referred to in legislative texts whether by the term “document” or by terms such as act, deed, record, annals, schedule, directory, order, order in council, ticket, directory, licence, bulletin, notebook, map, catalogue, certificate, charter, cheque, statement of offence, decree, leaflet, drawing, diagram, writing, electrocardiogram, audio, video or electronic recording, bill, sheet, film, form, graph, guide, illustration, printed matter, newspaper, book, booklet, computer program, manuscript, model, microfiche, microfilm, note, notice, pamphlet, parchment, papers, photograph, minute, program, prospectus, report, offence report, manual and debt security or title of indebtedness.

The Court holds that

the concept of document necessarily includes virtual posts, because the posts consist of information inscribed on a medium which has the same legal significance if it includes the same information, regardless of the medium … In this respect, “to post” or “cause to be post” includes the use of a medium on which information is inscribed, i.e. a document within the meaning of s 3.  Meanwhile … the absence of words “poster”, “post”, or “cause to post” from the list in s 71 is of no consequence. The use of the phrase “such as” to introduce the list of many types of document is clearly aimed at excluding any restrictive interpretation of the term document, as defined in s 3. [86]-[87] (Paragraph break removed)

Here too we are not persuaded. For one thing, open-ended though it may be, we do not think that the IT Framework Act’s definition of a document extends to virtual posts, or any other media of a broadcast nature. The IT Framework Act’s purpose provision, s 1, refers to “documentary communications between persons, associations, partnerships and the State”. Elsewhere, the IT Framework Act speaks of documents producing “legal effect” or having “legal value” (e.g. ss 5 and 9). A poster―or a radio or TV ad―aren’t “documents” within the IT Framework Act’s meaning any more than in ordinary language.

Section 71 supports this view, although of course the Court is right that its enumeration is not strictly speaking closed. It is, however, remarkably exhaustive (which is why we thought it worthwhile to reproduce it above). And, tellingly, while it does include audio and video “recordings”, it does not include broadcasts. Considering the exhaustiveness, the fastidiousness even, of the enumeration, we do not think the omission is accidental or that it can be gotten around by relying on the “such as” language. This might not be the proverbial elephant, but we do not think the National Assembly hid a beaver in s 71’s mousehole. At minimum, the Court had to explain in what sense a virtual post is “such as” the objects enumerated in s 71, and it does not do this.

So much for Therrien itself. But we think it is important to point out that it is not an isolated case, but rather part of a pattern of very questionable decision-making by both the Québec Court of Appeal and successive CEOs with respect to the Act, which is in dire need of reform. In effect, those in charge of administering the Act are trying to maintain or even extend its reach while avoiding, on a case-by-case basis, consequences they find intolerable.

So far as the Court of Appeal is concerned, we have in mind the decision in Métallurgistes unis d’Amérique (FTQ), section locale 7649 c Québec (Directeur général des élections), 2011 QCCA 1043, which upheld the Act’s draconian restrictions on “third party” political spending. In that case, a union was fined for criticizing a political party in communications addressed to its own members. More generally, individuals who are not candidates and unincorporated groups are limited to spending 300$ on election advertising. Corporations, including not-for-profit ones, are prohibited from spending a penny. This is difficult to reconcile with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Libman v Quebec (Attorney General), [1997] 3 SCR 569 and Harper v Canada (Attorney General), [2004] 1 SCR 827, which recognized the right of “third parties” to engage in electoral advertising even as they also accepted the principle that such advertising can be strictly limited.

As for the CEOs, they attempted to censor “third party” interventions in each of the last two election campaigns ― that of a group opposed to the then-proposed “Charter of Values” in 2014 and that of environmentalist NGO Équiterre in 2018 ― provoking a public outcry. In 2014, the then-CEO flip-flopped and ended up withdrawing his objections. The 2018 story has only concluded recently (egregious delay is also, it seems, a pattern with the CEO), as Laura Lévesque and Thomas Laberge report in Le Soleil. The CEO has “blamed” and warned Équiterre but apparently not fined it. Yet as Sirota wrote at the time, the CEO was right to find fault with the campaigners on both occasions.

As further discussed in this post on the 2014 climb-down, the then-CEO reinterpreted the relevant provisions in a way that may have been sensible in light of the social and technological change since their enactment, as well as protective of the freedom of expression, but was not tenable in light of their text. The choice of merely “blaming” Équiterre is also, at first glance, understandable on the merits but not something provided for by the Act, except presumably as an exercise of an implicit prosecutorial discretion. In effect, the CEO is deciding what the Act means and when―and his decision to go easy on fairly clear violations by NGOs while prosecuting a debatable one by a political party is worth highlighting.

All this suggests, unequivocally to our mind, that the Act needs to be reformed so as to accommodate the social and technological realities of the 21st century. As it happens, the Canadian Press’s Jocelyne Richer reports that the CEO wants the Act to be “updated”―but mainly so as to introduce even more restrictions, specifically on advertising during the “pre-campaign” period. (In fairness, he was already asking for such an “update” in 2016. So far, the National Assembly has not obliged.) Parliament has added such restrictions to the Canada Elections Act some years ago, and Ontario has used the Charter’s “notwithstanding clause” to extend its censorship regime, which now covers more than one year in every four.

These rules are bad and possibly unconstitutional, as Sirota argued here and here. But, quite apart from their other problems, they would hit especially hard in Québec unless the Electoral Act’s existing strictures are relaxed to some degree, and also unless it is re-drafted so as to be technologically neutral to the extent possible. In the meantime, however, it is not the role of either the CEO himself or the courts to fiddle with the Act to make it work better. The law is broke, but they are not the ones who have the tools to fix it.

Some Major Questions About Major Questions

In West Virginia v EPA, the Supreme Court of the United States, wielding the “major questions doctrine” found that the EPA did not have the statutory authority to adopt regulations implementing the Clean Power Plan, initially proposed by the Obama administration in 2015.  In this post, I describe why I think this decision was ultimately misguided, how the major questions doctrine might be recast, and why some of the dissent’s concerns are themselves misguided. In short, while I share concerns about agency opportunism, I do not think this judicial creation is the solution.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has broad authority to establish regulatory “standards of performance” in relation to certain categories of pollutants. These include the adoption of the “best system of emission reduction,” taking into account various factors, that the EPA administrator “determines has been adequately demonstrated.” Under this provision, the EPA adopted a “generation-shifting” system rather than a plant-by-plant regulation system; in other words, it decided that the “best system of emission reduction” included generation-shifting. A generation-shifting approach, as I understand it—such as cap-and-trade, or investment in alternative sources—is a different sort of regulation because it purports to operate on a system-wide basis, rather than on an individual source basis. The EPA’s regulatory choice thus cut rather broadly to attack emissions across different sectors. There is much more detail in the opinions that I am leaving out for the sake of brevity.

The majority opinion (Roberts CJ) concluded that this was a “major question,” meaning there was “every reason to hesitate” before concluding that Congress meant to confer this authority on the EPA (20, see also Brown & Williamson, at 159-160). In order to draw this conclusion, Congress would need to include special authorization, or a so-called “clear statement.” In “major questions” cases, the majority tells us that “both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent” make it reluctant to find that the EPA’s stated authority here was buried in “vague” provisions like s.111(d) (19); here we see some concern about agency opportunism and attempts to expand statutory authority. The Court tells us that it has, as a matter of course, deployed the major questions doctrine in extraordinary cases where the agency asserts broad authority of economic and political significance (17). Put simply, as the majority frames it, the major questions doctrine is like a substantive canon of construction: the Court proceeds on its own assumption that Congress would not have wanted the EPA to have this authority, absent an explicit statement otherwise.

In dissent, Kagan J attacked the majority’s use of the major questions doctrine. Chiding the doctrine as a “get-out-of-text-free card” (28), Kagan J reasoned that the statute here was broad, but not vague (8). The breadth of the statute was by design. While this was so, Kagan J noted that the grant was also constrained: in concluding what the best system of emission reduction is, the EPA must consider “costs and non-air impacts” while making sure that the best system has been “adequately demonstrated” [7].

For Kagan J, the invocation of the major questions doctrine elided this delegation of power. She reasoned that the “doctrine,” such as it is, had only been deployed as part and parcel of ordinary statutory interpretation, determining the scope of delegated power conferred on an agency: “the text of a broad delegation, like any other statute, should be read in context, and with a modicum of common sense” [13]. Kagan J was concerned that the use of this special rule short-circuited the Court’s duty to actually determine what the statutory provisions meant, and whether the EPA’s regulation fit within the provision. Kagan J goes on to wax poetic about the importance of expertise and the administrative state (I’ve registered my opposition to these particular, age-old arguments before, and renew them to some degree below).

That said, I see a few problems with the majority’s recast of the major questions doctrine:

  • Despite the majority’s protestations otherwise, there has been a shift in the way the major questions doctrine works. Scholars, as I read them, tend to disagree about which cases mark the turning point, but I think it is fair to say that WV v EPA is the capstone. As I understood it, the doctrine was previously attached to Chevron deference. If a question was a “major question,” it was a reason to deny deference to the agency’s asserted interpretation; not a presumptive rule against ordinary agency action in certain, ill-defined “major” areas. But now the doctrine has taken on a life of its own; gone is Chevron. The lineage of this change does not suggest that it is justified.

 In Brown & Williamson, for example, the Court conducted a normal statutory analysis as prescribed under Chevron Step 1, and concluded that “Congress has clearly precluded the FDA from asserting jurisdiction to regulate tobacco products” (Brown & Williamson, 126, 132). It was only after this exhaustive analysis that the Court additionally concluded that, given Congress’ structured and deliberate scheme for tobacco regulation, the FDA could not likely have been given the authority to regulate tobacco products (Brown & Williamson, 159-160). This was not a standalone, substantive canon of construction; it was a tool of judicial common sense, an insight drawn from the application of the tools of interpretation, to determine that a statute precluded the agency’s view. Second, in Utility Air, the majority (Scalia J) questioned whether the agency’s construction could be reasonable under Chevron Step 2, given its “claim to extravagant statutory power” (Utility Air, at 20). Here, the “major questions” concern operates as a sort of defeasible outer limit that limits the range of reasonable options at Chevron Step 2. Even in King v Burwell, the Court used the major questions exceptions as a means to an end: to conclude that it should conduct an independent assessment of the statute in that case. In all of these cases, the major questions doctrine was operating more as an “add-in,” or “tie-breaker”: see, relatedly, fn 3 of the concurring opinion of Gorsuch J.

So, quite aside from the sotto voce overturning of these, weaker versions of the major questions doctrine, the consequences of moving from a deference rule (a rule changing the intensity of review, but not changing the legislature’s delegation process) to a delegation rule (a rule denying a power to delegate straightforwardly on an ill-defined set of questions at all)  is not small, and there are two. First, because the Court only offers a set of mushy guidelines for what constitutes a “major question” on which Congress will require an explicit statement, Congress may be left wondering how and when it must make itself “clear.” Second, on principle, Congress regrettably must—according to the Court’s standards—make itself clear. This was not required under Chevron. As Kagan J notes, the major questions doctrine—as deployed by the Court in WVA v EPA—basically shortcircuited this statutory analysis. Instead, rather than determining whether the statute supported the EPA’s reading, the Court was rather results-oriented: because the issue is big, even normal statutory authorization should not count, even though the EPA’s view was plausible (and certainly not vague—as Kagan J says, the issue here is breadth). It is plausible, as the majority suggests, that Congress did authorize this power in the text of its law. But this authorization was not explored, or otherwise, was inexplicably not enough.

  • Gorsuch J, in a concurring opinion, attempted to avoid this conclusion by stating that substantive canons of construction are accepted tools of interpretation. Indeed they are. But one should evaluate the lineage and triggers for these substantive presumptions, and at any rate, all should agree they should be used with caution and rooted in consistent doctrine and principle. Otherwise, they can be manipulable “get out of text free” cards. For this reason, many of the substantive canons are rooted in clear constitutional concerns: for example, some of the presumptions concerning federalism.

What is the constitutional basis of this form of the major questions doctrine?  One candidate might be the same pool of principles that grounds the non-delegation doctrine. But I think it is hard to justify this doctrine as some extension or analogue to the non-delegation doctrine (cf Cass Sunstein) in the mould of the Benzene Case. Undoubtedly, one can conceive of some important similarities—the Court has sometimes gestured to an asserted power as being too broad to justify Chevron deference. But, again, in all the cases, the problem was simply that Congress had foreclosed such extravagant regulation. Instead, the non-delegation doctrine, as a constitutional doctrine, is primarily concerned with the scope of delegated power. Courts seek an intelligible principle to determine whether the power is adequately guided. The idea is that, absent a guiding, legislative principle, an agency is exercising legislative power unconstitutionally, in a manner contrary to Article I.

While there are powerful historical arguments against the non-delegation doctrine that I am not equipped to evaluate, I take it as a given that it is alive and well, and that it—at least in some part—aims at preserving legislative power and control over administrative decision-making. Nonetheless, the new major questions doctrine deployed by the Court in WV v EPA is not, at least primarily, concerned with the breadth of delegated power per se. As Kagan J recounts, the delegation of power to the EPA in this case is, indeed, broad, but it is not beyond the pale. The EPA does have some meaningful constraints built-in to the statute, and such constraints likely save the delegation from any challenge on non-delegation grounds. The major questions doctrine, then, isn’t so concerned with the breadth of delegated power as much as the significance of the issue at hand. But issue significance does not necessarily equal broad delegated power; in other words, we can have broad delegated power in unimportant areas, which could plausibly raise non-delegation concerns, or we can have narrow delegations in important areas, which would raise major questions concerns. These doctrines are aiming at different things. As John Manning so eloquently said: “If the point of the nondelegation doctrine is to ensure that Congress makes important statutory policy, a strategy that requires the judiciary, in effect, to rewrite the terms of a duly enacted statute cannot be said to serve the interests of that doctrine.”

In whole, the result of this doctrinal shift is a complication of the basic task of the law of judicial review, and an arguable corruption of the legislation delegating the power at issue. The law of judicial review is designed to be an adjunct branch of statutory interpretation, to determine the scope of powers granted to an administrator. Whether Chevron has one or two steps, this is the core of the thing. With this new major questions doctrine, the law of judicial review is somewhat different. Less important is the text of the laws delegating power. More important is whether the court thinks the issue over which the power is delegated is “important” or “big” enough. This abstracts away from the core question on judicial review: does the agency have this asserted power to conduct this action, no matter how big the problem  may be?

II.

With these concerns in mind, I think it might be useful to consider how Canada deals with questions of this sort, because I think the doctrine aims at some of the same concerns as the major questions doctrine while avoiding some of the potential pitfalls, as I see them.

 In Canada, our going-in presumption is reasonableness review (for an apt description of why Canada gets this backwards in relation to the United States, see Leonid Sirota). This presumption can be rebutted, in which case the court reserves to itself the right to pronounce on the legal issue without any deference. One of the circumstances in which the presumption can be rebutted is in cases involving “general questions of central importance to the legal system as a whole” (see Vavilov, at para 58 et seq). This category has much in common with the gist behind the “major questions” category, but there are important differences. First, the justification for the central questions category in Canada is not concern about delegated power; rather, it is designed to protect the role of the judiciary as the most important external check on administrative power. Issues that are considered centrally important must be answered consistently by courts, because they engage the rule of law, over which the judiciary is the primary guardian. Notably, however, in defining a central question, the courts are careful not to unduly eat away at the legislature’s right to delegate power. As the Supreme Court says, “the mere fact that a dispute is ‘of wider public concern’ is not sufficient for a question to fall into this category—nor is the fact that the question, when framed in a general or abstract sense, touches on an important issue” (Vavilov, at para 61).

And so the questions recognized by the court concern the stability of the legal system, issues that transcend an administrator’s particular statutory grant of authority. These issues have typically concerned constitutional or quasi-constitutional issues. For example, in University of Calgary, the question was whether a decision of an administrator that a statute permits solicitor-client privilege to be set aside. The Court refused to defer in this case, because solicitor client privilege has a constitutional dimension, and the “question of what statutory language is sufficient to authorize administrative tribunals to infringe solicitor-client privilege is a question that has potentially wide implications on other statutes” (University of Calgary, at para 20).

Why is this doctrine preferable, at least on these points, to the major questions doctrine, as deployed in WV v EPA? For one, the Canadian version expressly forecloses the possibility that an issue’s importance factors into the analysis. Many issues can be characterized as important; this is the challenge of the law of judicial review, to channel and sometimes restrict administrative power over these important areas of public life. Second, the benefit of a rule restricting deference is that it can be justified with reference to fundamental tenets of the law of judicial review. There are good rule of law reasons, pertaining to the judicial duty to pronounce the law, to carve away deference in cases where an agency attempts to exert power in a way that may transcend its own statute, or engage quasi-constitutional norms. Legislatures should not be impliedly granted the power to, by delegation, carve away the core powers of judicial review. And so,  uniformity of the administrative justice system requires not percolation, but correct answers. This approach also answers for the problem of agency opportunism: an agency that seeks to manipulate its own powers in order to affect these broader areas of legal importance should be met with a resolute judiciary. Nonetheless, the category is pared down not to every conceivable important issue, but to core concerns of the judiciary that implicate the rule of law. With these more narrow justifications, I would venture that the Canadian law of judicial review—only on this score—may be more stable than the American.

III.

In the meantime, I do not expect nor suggest that American courts should look to Canada for guidance. Even still, I do not think that the US situation is as dire as the dissent and some commentators suggest. As Kristin Hickman notes, Congress can rectify the ruling in WV v EPA tomorrow (even if it should not have to): it can simply legislate a clear statement. To be clear, this is an additional, probably unjustified hurdle. But the ball is in Congress’ court.  And, as I have argued before, non-delegation limits on administration will not hobble administration, and may actually incentivize better deliberation and guidance.  Further, administrative government is vast, and few regulations are challenged such that this case will make a difference on a wider scale. These are the practical realities that limit this new major questions doctrine, but I admit there may be more I am simply missing or misunderstanding

Nonetheless, as far as it goes, the new major questions doctrine that matured in WV v EPA is unwelcome from my perspective. Unlike the non-delegation doctrine, it cannot easily be traced to the same constitutional concerns, and it is isn’t immediately clear to me that “clear statements” will really provoke much deliberation. The doctrine appears to be a wholly judicial creation; it complicates the law of judicial review, puts a hurdle up for Congress, and finds no real animating purpose, beyond nods to concerns already covered by the existing non-delegation doctrine. I stress, as I did above, that I too worry about “bureaucratic domination,” drift, etc. But these are concerns that are best kept in check by a legislature and by consistent and principled application of the law of judicial review. Creating an amorphous thumb on the scale, in this manner, is an ill-fit.

On Law and Music

What is the relationship, if any, between law and music?

As a musician myself, I notice many commonalities between law and music. As a jazz musician, improvisation is what I spend a lot of time thinking about. To improvise over a tune, it helps to know the notes in the tune, the chords underneath it, and the structure of the song. Artists can break these rules, and perhaps the best music comes when the rules are broken. But to break the rules, the cardinal idea of music—it has to sound good—cannot be lost. In other words, an artist has to implicitly justify her departure from the structure of the tune with the most convincing reasoning of all—the fact that the music, nonetheless, still sounds good.

It is only a small jump to move to the world of interpretation. Many have written about the aesthetics of law. In a similar vein, in a delightful article, Jerome Frank analyzes the relationship between legal interpretation and music. I preface this by saying that Frank was a noted legal realist, and I am no legal realist. Nonetheless, the intersection he explores between music and interpretation is, at the very least, interesting. For Frank, the relationship between a composer and a performer is quite similar to the relationship between a legislature and a judicial interpreter. The composer is the legislature, and it “cannot help itself” [1264]: interpretation of whatever is intended (or written, depending on one’s view of the idea of “intent”) must fall to the court—much like a piece of music, composed by someone perhaps generations ago, must fall to a performer.

Once the performer  receives the item to be interpreted, three considerations become important. First, the entire point of a performance is to perform: the performer must give due respect to the composer, because he was the one who made the song that the audience will enjoy. Sometimes in music—particularly jazz—you hear a performer that is ostensibly playing a tune but it is something completely different: he says he is playing “Autumn Leaves,” but he is improvising—almost too much—on the original tune. Sometimes this is good, but many times it isn’t, if only because the composer was the one who made the song (in this case, there is a time for soloing, but it’s important to “play the head,” as it were: “Autumn Leaves” is just fine as it is). As a general rule, I think this tracks to legislation, where the interpreter should do his best to remain true, within reason, to the law.  But, as a second consideration, there will always be an inevitable slippage between what the composer wanted (or even what the composer wrote) and what the performer does. The performer may make an inadvertent error, doing violence to the intention of the author. The composer may herself make a musical error, in which case the performer is left in the position of correcting it or leaving it as is. Finally, the interpreter may make a deliberate choice to change the composer’s creation. A jazz musician can do everything from “bending” the notes, to changing the rhythm, to even “going outside” the chord structure, creating dissonance where none was intended. The “free jazz” school, for example,  “developed in the 1960s as a rejection of conventional musical structures: things like melody, harmony, and chord progressions.”  While the free jazz school in many senses merges the role of composer and performer, creator and interpreter, it demonstrates the extreme end of the spectrum—musicians (and interpreters) can make choices given the structure of the music they are asked to perform.

As a musician, I focus much of the time on bebop, hard bop, and other “straight-ahead” styles—perhaps this explains my preference for textualism as a general interpretive method. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the choices interpreters and performers make can sometimes make the composer’s or legislature’s creation make more sense—or sound better. And if that is the goal, then  sometimes the interpreter and performer will need to make on-the-spot decisions about how a cacophony of words (or notes) should be put together into a convincing performance. As Frank notes, interpretation is a human activity, and human creativity can make sense of what, on its own, may not make sense. Law is not always coherent, because humans are not always coherent. Yet interpreters, taking a step back, can sometimes (within the context of the interpretive rules) make sense of the law.

Frank’s piece underscores the balance that must be struck in interpretation between fidelity to legislative wishes and the “human” element of interpretation that must make sense of what is in front of a court. On one hand, slavish devotion to the law can lead to absurdity; and for that reason, we have an “escape valve” available for those cases, among others (like scrivener’s error). But in most cases, there is something important about remaining relatively true to the composer’s wishes. The composer created the music for a reason. The performer is being asked to perform it. For the performer to turn the tune upside down is a drastic choice that, at least in some sense, undermines the relationship between composer and musician.

Cannonball Adderley - IMDb
Cannonball Adderley

What does this musical story tell us about interpretive methodology? Methodology cannot perfectly guarantee correspondence between law creation and law interpretation. What is important, though, is that courts make a choice to commit themselves to rules in advance: just like performers (minus the free jazz folks) commit themselves to chords, notes, rules of rhythm, etc. The choice to commit oneself to a “structured and deliberate methodology” as Justice Malcolm Rowe and Michael Collins said in a recent paper, is immensely important. It prevents rank instrumentalism by an interpreter, where a result is chosen and then justified after the fact. A structured and deliberate methodology, as Rowe and Collins note, does not tie an interpreter’s hands, just like chords and notes do not tie a performer’s; but it does structure the choices an interpreter or musician can make, for the benefit of the listeners who  generally do not want to hear dissonance all night. As above, an interpreter who breaks these rules—say, to solve an absurdity—does so because the methodology permits it. He can justify his departure under the rules, much like a musician can justify a departure from notes and chords as justified according to the reality of what sounds good to an audience. The point, as Rowe and Collins say, is that the methodology forces an implicit justification.

The analogy between music and law is imperfect, in part because different musical styles ask different things of performers. A classical musician is likely to be closer to a composer’s wishes than a jazz musician is, and this is in part defined by the rules of the particular style. Nonetheless, the relationship between composers and performers does track to legislative activity. And it shows us how, in many aspects of life outside of law, rules are important even if imperfect.

Alexion: No Blank Cheques Here

In Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FCA 157, the Federal Court of Appeal clarified the law of judicial review post-Vavilov (particularly as it applies to reasonableness review) and set out an important reminder: administrators are not a law unto themselves. In order to make sure that this is the case, particularly in situations of legislative interpretation, administrators must explain their decisions. They must do so in a way that engages with the statute under interpretation. In this way, Alexion says something important: when administrators interpret statutes, there is only so much of a margin of appreciation. They must deal with the law.

I first describe the controversy in Alexion and the Court’s holding. Then I outline why this decision is a landmark one for the post-Vavilov world.

**

Alexion is a pharmaceutical company that produces a drug called Soliris. The Patented Medicine Prices Review Board had to decide whether Alexion priced Soliris excessively under the Patent Act. The relevant section is s.85 (1), which lists a number of factors that the Board must consider to make a determination. One of the factors is “the prices at which the medicine and other medicines in the same therapeutic class have been sold in countries other than Canada” (s.85(1)(c)). Only after a consideration of these factors can the Board turn its attention (if necessary) to s.85(2), which asks the Board to also consider “the costs of making and marketing the medicine and any other factors it considers relevant.”

As the Court aptly notes, “Section 85 is the law. The Board’s analysis should start with the law. Whatever the Board does must be consistent with the law” (Alexion, at para 34). The Board, in making its excessive pricing decision, noted that it is charged with determining “the relevance and weight of each factor” in s.85 (Alexion, at para 43). The Board concluded that Soliris was priced excessively, largely because it was priced more than the lowest international price in a list of seven comparator countries (Alexion, at para 3).  Put differently, out of all the seven countries, the Board found Soliris to be priced excessively because it was not the cheapest option. This was despite the fact that the Board’s own guidelines suggested that, normally, “the highest international price” is a key comparator (Alexion, at para 57). In reaching this conclusion, the Board seemingly followed a standard of “reasonableness”: because Soliris is price higher than one of the comparator countries, the Board implicitly concluded that the price of Soliris is unreasonable (see Alexion, at para 51).

For the Court, Stratas JA concluded that the Board failed to properly justify its decision with reference to the statute at hand: Alexion, at para 64, 66. The Court made a number of important comments justifying this decision:

  1. Prior to Vavilov, “…the Supreme Court instructed us to do our best to try to sustain the outcomes reached by administrators” which included “reviewing courts [picking] up an administrator’s pen and [writing] supplemental reasons supporting the administrators’ outcomes” (Alexion, at para 8). This “ghostwriting” was, as is evident, “antithetical to the reviewing courts’ role as an independent reviewer” (Alexion, at para 8).
  2. In this sense, there is a clear relationship between reasons and outcome on judicial review (Alexion, at para 28 et seq). While Vavilov speaks of outcome and reasons as separate, there are many cases where the reasoning on a particular legal question will lead to an illegal outcome; for example, in this case, “certain words the Board used suggest that it went beyond its permissible statutory mandate by regulating the reasonableness of pricing, rather than preventing abusive pricing…” (Alexion, at para 11).  In this case, when the Board spoke of “reasonableness” rather than abusive pricing, “[i]t may be that the Board was trying to reach an outcome that on the facts and the law was not reasonably open to it” (Alexion, at para 32).
  3. The failure of explanation in this case arose on a few different fronts:
  • The Board utterly failed to deal with the most important and central restriction on its authority: s.85 of the Patent Act. We  know that in paras 120-122 of Vavilov the Court notes that “the merits of an administrative decision maker’s interpretation of a statutory provision must be consistent with the text, context and purpose of the provision,” and that the decision-maker must demonstrate that its alive to these “essential elements.” This is because “the governing statutory scheme is likely to be the most salient aspect of the legal context relevant to a particular decision” (Vavilov, at para 108). So when the Board adopted a standard of reasonableness rather than addressing the actual point of the statute—set out in s.85 and the associated case law—it transgressed its authority.
  • The Board’s failure to explain its departure from its own Guidelines was problematic from a reasonableness perspective. While Guidelines adopted by the Board cannot supercede an analysis based on s.85 itself, they can validly guide discretion. Here, the Board did not explain why it did not follow its own Guidelines, which stressed the highest price comparator country.

**

There is a lot packed into Alexion, but I think it is worth noting the various things the Court does with Vavilov, especially when it comes to the reasonableness standard.

First, the Court arguably doubles down on the statute as the most important restraint on administrative power. Many of us who read Vavilov for the first time in December 2019 fastened onto paras 108-110 (and also paras 120-122) of that decision as quite important. Those paragraphs hardened a cardinal rule of administrative interpretations of law: it is the statute that the administrator is interpreting (its text, context, and purpose) that cabin the discretion of an interpreting administrator. Now, how this happens is where the rubber meets the road. But the fact that the statement was made by the Supreme Court—and that it is adopted wholeheartedly by the Court of Appeal in this case—is promising.

There are, of course, different ways that a court can ask an administrator to abide by the terms of its statute, and these ways can be more or less interventionist. Alexion is somewhat reminiscent of another case decided post-Vavilov, Richardson. I blogged about that case here. While the comments made by Nadon JA in that case were obiter, they staked out an even more radical understanding of Vavilov’s paragraphs 108-110 and 120-122. In that case, the administrator at hand erroneously applied the “implied exclusion” rule of interpretation, which the Supreme Court has held is insufficient as the sole basis on which to understand the meaning of statutory provisions (see Green, at para 37). Imposing the Supreme Court’s method of interpretation, particularly with regards to particular canons, is one way to force an administrator to abide by a statute. Another, more general and less stringent way, is what Stratas JA did in Alexion. There the Board misapprehended its own statutory purpose and failed to actually deal with the overriding goal of s.85: excessive & abusive pricing. It also ignored many of the factors set out in s.85(1). This is just a different way of getting at paras 108-110 of Vavilov: the Board failed to address its statute under the governing approach to statutory interpretation.

The fact that the Court in Richardson and Alexion did the same thing in different ways is perhaps indicative of a challenge with Vavilov. The decision says a lot, not all of it always internally consistent. Specifically, the challenge going forward with this rather legalistic vision of reasonableness review is how it meshes with the deference that is built-in to the Vavilov framework. Vavilov makes clear at various points that administrators are not asked to engage in a formalistic interpretation exercise (para 119), and that ‘[a]dministrative justice’ will not always look like ‘judicial justice’…” (para 92). Accordingly, as Professor Daly notes, “some portions of Vavilov are liable to become battlegrounds between different factions of judges, those who favour more intrusive review on questions of law in one camp, their more deferential colleagues in the other” (at 15). One could conceive, as Professor Daly does, of Richardson as “betraying a favouritism for an interventionist standard of reasonableness review on issues of statutory interpretation” (at 14).

However, I would say that Alexion and Richardson are of the same ilk, different points on a similar spectrum. Both are directed towards subjecting administrators to legal requirements, but Alexion does so in a more general way, faulting the administrator for failing to address the relevant statutory purpose (among other things). Richardson does the same thing in a more specific way, faulting an administrator for applying a proper tool of interpretation to the exclusion of the statutory purpose. Both, in my view, are plausible views of Vavilov.

Methodologically, there are other important elements of Alexion. One element is the connection that Stratas JA draws between reasons and outcome. Vavilov speaks of reasons and outcome as separate things, but in reality, they are probably intrinsically connected in at least some cases. Alexion provides a good example. In many cases, it was simply impossible for the Court to determine whether the Board had ventured an opinion on the core legal issue at play in the case. Where the Board did offer an opinion, it cast its decision in terms of the wrong legal standards.  This led it astray, and it was led astray because its reasoning failed to glom onto the important part of the entire thing: the statute.

This leads to a final point about Alexion. Thank goodness we no longer need to worry about courts coopering up deficient decisions under the Nfld Nurses line of cases. As the Court in Alexion mentions, this decision could have gone a very different way under pre-Vavilov case law. The Court would have asked itself to supplement reasons for decision instead of supplanting them.  But as the Court notes, “[m]any of us recoiled at this” (Alexion, at para 9). Why? Because it offends the principle of legality, fundamental to the administrative law system, for a court to uphold a decision that is legally flawed. Of course, deference sometimes asks us to abridge the principle of legality in a strict sense; but there are extremes, and a court making a decision for an administrator is to my mind (and, apparently the mind of the Supreme Court) a bridge too far. As the Court in Alexion says, there are no blank cheques in the law of judicial review (Alexion, at para 44).

All told, Alexion is an important recap of developments post-Vavilov. Particularly on the application of the reasonableness standard, the Court moves the needle in important ways.

The Politics of Law

Is law truly just a function of politics? Should it be?

It is common in progressive circles (and, increasingly, in conservative circles, to some extent) to say that law=politics, or some variation thereof (law is always political, law is political, etc etc). The claim is usually offered without much in the way of qualification, and it appears to capture the many aspects of “law”; the creation of law, the implementation of law, and the interpretation of law.

In this post, I argue that this claim is either banally true or implausible because it merges law with politics in a way that our current system simply cannot support. To determine its veracity, the claim must be examined closely—in relation to the various ways that political considerations interact with law. A failure to do so infects the “law=politics” claim with a fatal imprecision.

I first outline the limited ways in which the claim is likely true. Then I shift gears to a normative argument: while the claim may be true in certain ways, it is not self-evident that it should be true across the legal system. In other words, there is good reason to accept that law may be “political” in certain ways; but it isn’t the case that it should be in all aspects of the law (its creation, implementation, and interpretation).

***

Before jumping in, I should acknowledge some imprecision in terms here. The law=politics claim is often made bluntly, without defining what is meant by “politics” or “political.”  It could mean, for example, that law is inevitably wrapped up in partisan politics. It could mean that law is not necessarily co-extensive with partisanship, but is correlated with political ideology more broadly. Or it could mean something very simple: law is “political” in the sense that people are “political,” meaning that law mediates disputes in a society where political disagreement is inevitable.  It could also mean a combination of all three of these things, or more.

All of these claims could be descriptively true in various ways, in relation to different aspects of law-making, implementation, and interpretation. But a failure to distinguish between these various definitions of “politics” and “political” presents an immediate hurdle for those who claim, without qualification, that law is always political. As I will note throughout, these various claims to the political nature of law may be more or less true given the institutional context. It does not follow that every political consideration is always relevant to the law.

***

Starting with the descriptive claim, it is clearly true that law can be political. The creation of law in the legislature is itself a political act. Laws are created to achieve certain aims; these aims can clearly be motivated by ideologies; and the content of law is not “neutral” as between political aims. Political parties make up the legislatures, and they vie for power in elections. In this case, and quite obviously, law is the product of political machinations. It follows that the creation of law itself can be motivated by wholly ideological reasons, quite aside from any claims to public reason or ideological neutrality. As I will note below, the notwithstanding clause is a good example of a situation where a legal power can be exercised for solely political reasons.

As well, the implementation of law by administrators, state officials, police, and others will not always be perfectly consistent with what the law says. Officials could operate on personal whim or policy preferences that are inconsistent with the policy preferences specified in the law. After all, state officials routinely fall below the standards set by the law and the Constitution—one only need to look at the number of constitutional challenges against state action that are successful in Canadian courts (though, of course, this may be due to stringent constitutional standards rather than routine malfeasance by state officials). Whether this is due to cognitive biases, outright hostility to legal norms, or mistaken application, laws can best be seen as ideals that state officials will sometimes fall below. This illustrates that state officials—at best—can only approximate legal norms. In administrative law, for example, the law of judicial review could be understood as an attempt to police the gap between the law on the books and the law as applied; to inch state officials towards following the law on the books, as much as possible.

Similarly, as a descriptive matter, the interpretation of law could be “political” or perhaps more aptly, “ideological.” Law is fundamentally a human business, and interpretation cannot be a perfect science, a simple application of axioms to words. Human beings have cognitive biases and judges are simply human beings. Notwithstanding the fact that judges sometimes speak as if they are neutral protectors of constitutional values, it is simply impossible to guarantee that law will always be interpreted authentically. To be clear, this tendency is likely true across the political spectrum—results-oriented interpretation can be common on the left or the right, and in each case, it is unavoidable that there will be results-oriented interpretation.

That said, we simply do not know the extent to which any of the above is even true in Canada. While it is plausible to suggest that judges and officials may have their judgments infected by ideology extraneous to the legal instrument under interpretation, this should not be overstated. Empirical research would be helpful in determining the extent of this phenomenon. For the most part, though, Canadian judges likely do their best to apply the law according to its terms. (NB: see Emmett Macfarlane’s work here, which tackles some of these issues. I’ve ordered the text).

***

As a normative matter, let us assume that it is true that implementation and interpretation of law can be “political” or “ideological” or something of the sort.   There are two options: we create rules, standards, and principles to limit the gap between the law as adopted and the law as applied; or we do not.  The form of these rules, standards, and principles is unimportant for our purposes. For now, it is enough to say that there is a fork in the road. Either we choose to limit the political/ideological discretion of state actors—including judges—or we do not. The point here is that while there can never be perfectly “neutral” or “impartial” creation, implementation, and interpretation of law as a matter of fact, it is desirable—as a normative matter—to limit the role of pure ideology in certain areas of law, to the extent we can.

This is obviously not true in the context of law-creation. The public understandably, and quite likely, wants our laws to be the product of a democratically-elected legislature (to the extent our electoral system leads to fair democratic outcomes in the abstract). In this sense, people vote for representatives that share their priors or who they wish to see in the legislature. Those legislatures, composed as they are by political parties, will pass laws that reflect the majority will (again, to the extent the “majority will” is represented in our electoral system). Ideally, in legislative debates, we want all the cards on the table. We want our representatives to fully and frankly air their ideological differences, and we want the public to be able to judge which program of government is best. In this sense, it is undesirable as a normative matter to (somehow) limit the politics of law in the realm of legislation.

However, as a normative matter, the story changes dramatically when it comes to law implementation and interpretation. Our Supreme Court endorses the proposition, for example, that interpretation must be conducted in order to “discern meaning and legislative intent, not to ‘reverse-engineer’ a desired outcome” (Vavilov, at para 121). Administrative decision-makers implementing law have only limited reserve to bring professional expertise to bear (Vavilov, at para 31); otherwise, they are creatures of statute, and are cabined by the terms of their statutes (Chrysler, at 410). Put differently, administrative actors implementing law have no independent reserve to make free-standing ideological determinations that are not incorporated into the law itself. A different way to put it: law is political in the legislatures, but when it is being interpreted or implemented, courts must discover the political choices embedded in the law itself.

  The Court also endorses a law and politics distinction, as a constitutional matter, when it comes to judicial independence. It says that judicial independence is “the lifeblood of constitutionalism in democratic societies” (Ell, at para 45), which “flows as a consequence of the separation of powers” (Provincial Judges Reference, at para 130). Judges should not, at least as a positive matter, render decisions that are infected by ideology—because it is the legislature’s job to make judgment calls based on political considerations, economic tradeoffs, or otherwise.

I could go on with examples of how our Court—and our system—endorses a separation between law and politics. For what it’s worth, and no matter the descriptive reality, I believe there is wisdom in articulating limits to the free-standing ideological whims of administrators and judges. Of course, these limits will not be perfect, and they will not reverse the reality that implementation and interpretation will sometimes be driven by results. But the use of rules, standards, and principles to cabin these free-standing policy preferences can be useful in ensuring that state actors and judges justify their decisions according to certain, universal standards.

Two examples could be offered. First, in statutory interpretation, we have semantic canons, presumptions, and tools to try to determine the authentic meaning of law. These “off-the-rack” tools and presumptions are far from perfect, as Karl Llewelyn once pointed out. They can be contradictory, and they are not axiomatic laws of nature that lead inexorably to certain results. But we have these rules for a reason. We use them because we have made an ex ante judgment, over the years, that they will help interpreters reach the authentic meaning of legislation (or, if one is an intentionalist, the authentic intention of legislatures). We do not expect judges to distribute palm-tree justice when faced with a law. Instead, we expect judges to justify their interpretive result through the prism of these canons and presumptions, because they are semantically and substantively useful. We do this because there is a law and politics distinction between legislative work and judicial work, endemic to our Constitution.

Of course, there is a recognition that legal principles may themselves have a certain political valence. Presumptions of liberty, substantive equality, strict construction of taxation laws–all of these rules could be said to contain certain “political” suppositions. As I have written before, I am generally not supportive of certain substantive presumptions of interpretation that put a thumb on the scale. But as Leonid Sirota writes, some of these presumptions are plausibly connected to the legal system–in this sense, they are political, but they represent values that are endemic to the legal system as it stands. Substantive equality is similar. It can, at least plausibly, be traced to the text and purpose of s.15 of the Charter. These are principles that have some connection to our legal system; they are not representative of the whims of the particular interpreter in a particular case. At any rate, forcing interpreters to justify their decisions is useful in itself.

Secondly, Doug Ford’s recent decision to invoke the notwithstanding clause presents a good difference between the ways in which law can be political, and the ways in which it should not be. When a government invokes the notwithstanding clause, it is not necessarily an exercise of reason. It could be a blunt assertion of legislative power. Now, that assertion of power can be justified by any number of considerations. If some detractors are correct, for example, Ford’s use of the clause in this case could simply be designed to punish his opponents. Less likely, it could be a good-faith attempt by a legislature to come to a different definition of a rights-balance. Whatever it is, the use of the notwithstanding clause is an exercise of power that could be motivated by distinctly political aims. In this way, legislation is quite clearly political.

However, and even if naked political judgments are not justiciable once invoked under cover of the notwithstanding clause, the public may wish to articulate a different justificatory standard for the use of power that is legalistic in nature. As Geoff Sigalet & I wrote here, the public may wish to subject politicians who invoke the notwithstanding clause to a standard of justification—the politicians should offer legitimate, objective reasons for the invocation of the clause. Again, this is not a legal requirement. But as a matter of custom, it is a requirement that the public may wish to impose on politicians as a check on rank political judgments. By imposing such a standard, the public can disincentivize uses of the clause that are not backed by solid, legal reasons.

None of this is new. Indeed, Dicey argued that for the Rule of Law to flourish in any society, the society must contain a “spirit of legality” that is separate and apart from any limits imposed on power by  courts themselves. This spirit of legality presupposes that there are some areas where the public should expect better than rank political and ideological judgments. Of course, the law & politics distinction is a matter of some controversy, and I cannot address every aspect of the distinction here. Suffice it to say: broad claims that “law is always political” cannot hold. Law is descriptively political in some ways. It does not follow that it should be in all cases. Quite the opposite, sometimes it is best for rules, standards, and principles to cabin the ideological capture of courts and others, as best they can. This will not be perfect, it will not always work, and it is not a mechanical process. But it’s worth trying.

Interpretation and the Value of Law II

This post is written by Leonid Sirota and Mark Mancini.

We read with interest Stéphane Sérafin, Kerry Sun, and Xavier Foccroulle Ménard’s reply to our earlier post on legal interpretation. In a nutshell, we argued that those who interpret legal texts such as constitutions or statutes should apply established legal techniques without regard for the political valence of outcomes. Only in this way can law function as a common reference and guide in a pluralistic, democratic society in which, as Madison eloquently argued in Federalist No. 10, disagreement about fundamental values and the policies required to implement them is pervasive and bound to remain so “[a]s long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it”.

Our interlocutors claim that our argument leads legal interpretation into “insipid literalism” and, ultimately, sees law as nothing more than a form given to the outcome of power struggles, rather than as the product of reason striving to advance the common good. We remain unconvinced. Our interlocutors seem to wish to escape the more controversial uses to which the “common good” term has been put, but rely on ambiguous claims in doing so. We write today to address some of these claims.

The bottom line is this: if our interlocutors wish to fundamentally change the way we understand texts by sotto voce urging interpreters to adopt a “substantively conservative” position at the outset of the interpretive task, we must dissent. If they wish to simply “tune-up” the way we use purpose and context to enrich our understanding of bare texts, then that is a worthy contribution to the ongoing effort in which many of us are engaged: trying to make Canadian interpretation more workable, less results-oriented, and more focused on the text itself, understood in light of its legislative context in real, practical cases.

Our response is divided into two parts. First, we describe how our interlocutors misunderstand the relationship between, as Jeremy Waldron put it, “The Concept and the Rule of Law”. Second, we catalogue the ways in which our interlocutors’ position is muddled.

  1. The Rule of Law and the Concept of Law, Again

For our interlocutors, “it is clear” that when we say that interpretation must strive for neutrality in order to enable law to guide the members of a pluralistic society, we are “operating within a positivist legal framework”. At the same time, they suspect us of wanting to smuggle a substantive agenda of expanding pluralism into our interpretive views. Respectfully, they are simply mistaken about this. To be sure, as they suggest, the idea of law as a guide for citizens, and hence of the importance of the law’s compliance with the requirements of Rule of Law that make its guidance effective, is an important feature in the work of some positivists, such as Joseph Raz. But its not the positivists’ exclusive preserve.

Consider Professor Waldron’s argument that we need “to overcome casual positivism―to keep faith with a richer and more discriminating notion of law” (19) ― and further, that “[i]t is a mistake to think that a system of rule could be a legal system if there is no publicly accessible way of identifying the general norms that are supposed to govern people’s behavior” (26). Guiding behaviour, including by enabling and encouraging self-application of publicly available rules by those subject to them, and so upholding human dignity, is a key feature of the Rule of Law discourse, but also, Professor Waldron urges, of the very concept of law. This argument was as much on our minds as Professor Raz’s.

And if Professor Waldron might still be regarded as a positivist, trying to merely formulate a better version of that school’s doctrine, Lon Fuller is, alongside John Finnis and Ronald Dworkin, the epitome of Anglo-American non-positivism. And the idea of law as a guide is perhaps best represented in his famous parable of King Rex, the hapless legislator who repeatedly failed to make laws that his subjects could follow. For Fuller too, the requirement that law be framed so as to outline the state’s expectations of its citizens is a matter of respecting human dignity. It is also a matter of what he describes as reciprocity between those in power and those subject to their decisions. The former can expect compliance if, and only if, they frame their demands in such a way that the latter can make sense of them.

The real issue between our interlocutors and us, we suspect, is not a conflict between positivism and natural law, to which one of us (Sirota) is rather sympathetic. Nor is it our commitment to some nihilistic form of neutrality or, conversely, pluralism. As to the former, substantive legislation is of course not neutral―it embodies the commitments of its makers. The task of an interpreter is to ascertain and give effect to these commitments. To do so well, the interpreter must try to bring both established semantic, contextual, and substantive interpretive tools, and (most importantly) an equanimous disposition to his work―precisely to give effect to the commitments made by those with the authority to enact legislation and avoid imposing his own. A judge interpreting the law will never be perfectly neutral in fact, but an interpreter has no business abusing his position to advance pluralism in law, anymore than he is free to make the law more conservative, more progressive, or anything in between (this point was put eloquently by Justice Stratas in Kattenburg, at para 45). 

Lastly, the issue between our interlocutors and us is not a disagreement about whether law should be infused with reason rather than being a matter of raw power. What we disagree about is how reason matters. For us, as for Fuller, what matters is “the inner morality of law”, or its “artificial reason” as Coke put it ― the morality or reason of legal craft and technique, which ensures that law is intelligible to all those subject to it, simply because they are thinking, reasoning human beings, and which is inherent in the enterprise of governing through law, properly understood, rather than emanating from some benevolent ruler whom the  “[s]ubjects will come to thank”. Our interlocutors’ focus is less on form and more on the content of the law; the reason they appeal to is more substantive than the one on which we focus. We turn now to the substance of their argument.

2. The Motte and Bailey of the Common Good Approach

As we note above, the second broad point we wish to make relates to the ambiguities, whether studied or inadvertent, in our interlocutors’ arguments. We outline three areas where our interlocutors’ positions are confusing. In each, our interlocutors could, on one hand, be advancing controversial propositions about the way texts are interpreted—propositions which could run against the need to avoid outcome-based reasoning. On the other hand, our interlocutors’ position could be wholly uncontroversial, simply relating to the relative place of various interpretive tools (like purpose). If it is the former, our interlocutors should say so clearly. If it’s the latter, our interlocutors should disclaim some of the more controversial purposes for which their arguments could be used.

(A) The Natural Law Motte-and-Bailey

Our interlocutors spend a lot of time talking about natural law. They see it as reflected in the legislative process itself—to them, the natural law tradition asks us to “construe the law itself as permeated by reason.” In a passage bound to feel rather opaque to non-aficionados of the tradition, our interlocutors argue that “[n]atural law reflects an idea of reason immanent in the positive law and lends it intelligibility; while in making its general precepts more specific, the positive law realizes and makes concrete the otherwise abstract elements of the natural law.” More specifically, our interlocutors suggest (putatively relying on Justice Miller in Walsh) that all legislation is designed for the “common good.” So, for our interlocutors, it appears that a reflection on the natural law and the “common good” is inherent in the activity of legislating itself. Even the Constitution, they claim, is influenced by the idea of the “common good.”

We question whether the “common good” can mean the same thing in all these contexts. Hand-waving towards Aquinas or a “model opinion” does not adequately answer this question. Our interlocutors seem to assume that the “common good” as a theoretical matter has been stable across time—from the Angelic Doctor to Justice Miller in 2021. This seems intuitively wrong. Even according to those who subscribe to the natural law tradition, there are debates about what the natural law prescribes.

But ultimately, what we are interested in is how this all bears on legal interpretation; how jurists have applied this idea of the “common good” in relation to real cases and current circumstances. Here, we notice that our interlocutors’ suggestion that appeals to natural law and to the common good are nothing more than reminders of the law’s rationality and pursuit of ascertainable purposes is by no means the only view. Adrian Vermeule, for his part, argues for a “substantively conservative” approach to interpretation designed to support the rulers in endeavours—as Vermeule describes it—to “legislate morality” and to support “the traditional family.” This seems to be a fundamentally different use of the term “common good” than our interlocutors propose.

These two radically different approaches are deployed in typical motte-and-bailey fashion. When outlining their own agenda, the latter-day promoters of the “common good” and natural law support Vermeule’s project to use interpretation to stop the “urban-gentry liberals” from prioritizing their own “financial and sexual” satisfactions, on the basis of external values that exist outside of constitutional and statutory texts. When pressed, however, they retreat to the seemingly innocuous claims about law’s rationality, made to appear rooted in legislation and the Constitution.

These two positions are incompatible. If our interlocutors wish to claim that the pursuit of the “common good” is inherent in the act of legislating, that is a proposition we would be prepared to entertain within the context of deciding what a particular text means, although at least some (and perhaps a good deal of) legislation is demonstrably directed at the private benefit of the law-makers or their constituents, or at entrenching outright bigotry, with appeals to the common good nothing more than a smokescreen. But if our interlocutors wish, instead, to impose an “illiberal legalism,” as Vermeule does, that does not “play defensively within the procedural rules of the liberal order,” than that is a different matter entirely. The former deals with matters of interpretation. The latter concerns itself with the culture wars of the day. Our interlocutors should either disclaim Vermeule’s use of their “common good” or accept it.

(b) The Purposivism Confusion

Our interlocutors’ position on interpretation itself is also equivocal. The language of the “common good”, as used by our interlocutors, seems to invoke one rather uncontroversial argument with which we completely agree: text cannot be understood without understanding its abstract and particular purposes. That is a proposition that textualists and non-textualists alike accept (see A. Scalia and B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, at 20), and which is hornbook law in Canada. But at the same time, that basic argument raises more questions than it does answers.

Our interlocutors claim that there is “one truth” in the idea of “purposive interpretation”—the premise that law is designed to fulfill an “end” that is “intelligible to reason.” Our interlocutors embrace a “teleological outlook on the essential nature of legislation.” This seems right so far as it goes. As Max Radin notes in his famous article “A Short Way with Statutes,” “the legislature that put the statute on the books had the constitutional right and power to set [the statute’s] purpose as a desirable one for the community” (398). We agree that texts must be read in light of their purposes if we wish to understand why a legislature used certain words in creating a particular rule ― though again we caution that the legislature’s motives may not have been at all noble or reasoned.

If this is all our interlocutors are suggesting, their use of the “common good” phraseology is benign and probably a distraction. Like Asher Honickman in his response to our interlocutors, we do not see these invocations as adding anything to current debates about understanding legal texts. But we take our interlocutors to be saying something, and so simply saying that law is a teleological enterprise is incomplete without specifying how text drives the interpretive process. What needs to be decided is how we choose what purposes are relevant to interpretation. Here, we could speak of “ulterior” purposes—à la “mischief”—or “implementational purposes”—the legal rules (such as rules, standards, or delegations) that legislatures use, in text, to enact particular ulterior purposes (see, for a discussion of these different purposes, Max Radin, “Statutory Interpretation” at 863, 876). At the highest level of abstraction, one could say that laws are designed to achieve “justice and security” or the “common good” or the “public interest.” This does not tell us much about how a legal instrument should be interpreted, because legislatures do not implement ulterior purposes at all costs or in totality, and courts err when they interpret statutes with this assumption, as one of us has argued here based on the Supreme Court’s decision in West Fraser. Interpreters must work between purposes, keeping a clear eye on the text and the way it enacts particular legal rules (see Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation, at 187).   

At times our interlocutors seem to agree with this position. They say that courts cannot “override the terms or the finitude of a statute” and that “no human law-giver can conceivably grant benediction to the common good across the whole of human affairs.” We agree. And yet, we note that an assumption that the legislature’s “reasoned choice is rendered intelligible by the idea of the common good” ignores that language may only imperfectly capture that aim.  Our interlocutors’ position is similar to the old “strong purposivist” view represented in the Hart & Sacks Legal Process materials: legislatures consist of reasonable people pursuing reasonably purposes reasonably. If one takes this view, then it is possible to claim that the idea of the “common good” contains within it substantive aims that could and should override the terms of a statute. If this is what our interlocutors argue, we must disagree, simply because the implementational means employed by legislatures will always be over- and underinclusive in relation to purposes stated at a high level of abstraction. Overriding the text of a statute in favour of a court’s appreciation of purpose risks ignoring the means the legislature chose.

Lest this discussion seem abstract, let us conclude with a reminder of what this “strong purposivist” view means in practice: the early-20th century Holy Trinity case of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Alien Contract Labor Law prohibited the immigration to the US of “foreigners and aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor or service of any kind in the United States”. It was intended to ban the immigration of Chinese workers―but did not specifically say so. The language of the statute also covered an Anglican priest engaged to work in the United States. Yet the Court held that it did not apply to him, because the United States was a “Christian nation,” and hence the law could not have been meant to exclude Christians as well as minorities. Here, we see that the court took a highly abstract background principle and used it to supplement the terms of a statute. This appears to be fine under at least one reading of the “common good” interpretive idea. And yet, this is an outrageous violation of the Rule of Law’s requirement that law be publicly stated and applied in accordance with its enacted terms. It is also, and not coincidentally, an example of intolerable partiality and bigotry.

We conclude this section by restating the point: our interlocutors’ embrace of teleology in law is interesting and welcome, but not helpful by itself. This is because it does not answer fundamental questions about the relationship between text and purpose; and, at best, a perspective focused on “the common good” adds no conceptual heft to relevant and current interpretive debates. We are left wondering whether our interlocutors simply believe in purposive interpretation, or whether they are advancing some other case.  

(C) The Political Confusion

Last but not least, it is important to emphasize that the idea of the “common good”, which our interlocutors present as having a consistent, definite meaning over time, has been put to very different uses by very different people. Our interlocutors claim, for example, that Josh Hammer’s idea of “common good originalism” is perfectly within the tradition of textualism and positivism.Our interlocutors want to reassure us that interpretation drawing on the “common good” does not pursue external policy goals, but rather seeks to determine the meaning of the law from within.

This is a valiant effort, but it flies in the face of the expressly political valence of Hammer’s essay. Hammer makes the following points about his proposed method:

I call my jurisprudential framework “common good originalism,” and I would humbly submit that it be adopted as conservatives’ new legal standard-bearer—a worthy complement to other simultaneously unfolding New Right/“new consensus” intellectual efforts.

[…]

Put more simply: The concerns of nation, community, and family alike must be prioritized over the one-way push toward ever-greater economic, sexual, and cultural liberationism. And this must be true not merely as a matter of public policy, but as a matter of legal interpretation.

Indeed, the entire first part of Hammer’s essay (and another more recent one) trades in politics. The point for Hammer seems to be the development of a certain type of conservative interpretive method that is an adjunct to a political project. One wonders why Hammer needed or wanted to include expressly political statements in a piece that is—our interlocutors tell us—wholly about interpretation. Do our interlocutors disclaim this part of Hammer’s essay, and more generally, how do they distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of the concept of the “common good”?

That the “common good conservative” movement is a political project is clear from the reaction to the US Supreme Court’s Bostock case. As one of us wrote here, in that case, Gorsuch J decided that Title VII protected against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, despite their not being expressly listed in the statute, because such discrimination necessarily and logically involves discrimination on the basis of sex. In all likelihood, the framers of Title VII did not foresee that the statute would protect sexual orientation and gender identity. Indeed, as Alito J pointed out in dissent, Congress had declined to add sexual orientation and identity to Title VII in the past.

Now, what divided the majority and the dissent in Bostock was a question of pure textual interpretation. As Tara-Leigh Grove argues, Bostock is representative of “two textualisms.” And as Asher Honickman points out, there are reasons to debate the respective roles of social context, expectations, and semantic context in Bostock. This debate has nothing to do with the political valence of one or the other interpretation.

And yet the conservative meltdown over Bostock focused squarely on the results of the case. Here we see the worry about “economic, social, and cultural liberationism.” For Hammer, Bostock was not a mistaken application of textualism, but a showcase of its fundamental faults, laying “bare the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative legal movement.” Hence Hammer’s proposal of common good originalism, designed to solve this very “failure.”

Bostock raises many questions about the aims of the “common good” movement more generally, and its relationship to interpretive method. One is hard-pressed to find how the concept of “the common good” solves any legal problems in Bostock that cannot be solved by robust debate among textualists about the role of expectations, intentions, and purpose. While one of our interlocutors seems to suggest that the result in Bostock was wrong because judges should take account of the underlying “metaphysics” of words, we view this perspective as a distraction for judges working through real cases—and this is clearly not what Hammer et al seem to be getting at. They have identified a “failure” in interpretive method—a result that they, for one reason or another, do not like. They have designed an interpretive method to solve that problem. Without Gorsuch J’s political “mistake” in Bostock, “common good originalism” was unlikely to ever enter the conversation as it has (which is all the odder since Bostock is a statutory case). As a result, we cannot endorse this fundamentally political project.

Conclusion

Those who subscribe to the “common good” in interpretation are on the horns of a dilemma. There are those who seek to use the concept for expressly political ends, through the task of interpretation as a sort of “living tree” for conservatives. And then there are our interlocutors, who appear to defend the concept as limited, well-understood, and innocuous. We hope our interlocutors can determine which of these options is theirs—and if they simply wish to change emphasis in textual interpretation, then they can join the ongoing debate on that question.

Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation III: A Way Forward and Walsh (ONCA)

About a month ago, I wrote two posts attacking the concept of “pragmatism” in Canadian statutory interpretation. So my argument goes, the seminal Rizzo case, while commonly said to herald a “purposive” approach to interpretation, is actually methodologically pragmatic This is because the famous paragraph from Rizzo, which contains a list of things an interpret must take into account, does not assign ex ante weights to these factors. That is, it is up the interpreter to choose, in the circumstances of particular cases, which factors will be most relevant. In short, while everyone in theory agrees on what the goal of interpretation is, that agreement rapidly breaks down in the context of particular cases.

In these circumstances, methodological pragmatism is attractive because it permits interpreters to use an entire array of tools as they see fit. So the story goes, this freedom leads to “flexibility.” But it can also lead to a number of pathologies in interpretation that should be avoided. In this final post of the series, I outline these pathologies, sketch a path forward, and then highlight a recent example case (Walsh) from the Ontario Court of Appeal that demonstrates why methodological pragmatism unleashes judges to an unacceptable degree. The point here is that interpretation is designed to determine what the legislature meant when it enacted words. Purpose is important in ascertaining that meaning, but ascertaining purpose is not the point of interpretation. This leads to an approach that prefers some ordering among the relevant interpretive tools (for want of a better phrase), rather than a flexible doctrinal standard motivated by methodological pragmatism.

The Pathologies of Pragmatism

By now, and as I have outlined above and in my previous posts, Canada’s approach to statutory interpretation is oddly enigmatic. On one hand, everyone (seems) to agree on the goal of the enterprise: when courts interpret statutes, they are seeking to discover what Parliament intended when it enacted a particular provision or provisions. Putting aside thorny issues of what “legislative intent” might mean (and see here Richard Ekins’ important work), in practical terms, we are seeking to discover the legal meaning and effect of language enacted by Parliament; we are, put differently, seeking to discover what change has been effected in the law (either common law or existing statute law) by Parliament’s intervention (see Justice Miller’s opinion in Walsh, at para 134).

When a law is adopted, one can speak of ends and means, and it’s this framework that guides the discussion to follow. It would be strangely anodyne to claim that Parliament speaks for no reason when it legislates. We presume, in fact, that every word enacted by Parliament means something (represented in canons like the presumption against surplusage, see also Sullivan at 187). And so it only makes sense to take account of a particular provision’s purpose when considering interpretation. Those are the ends for which Parliament strove when adopting the legislation. Selecting the proper ends of interpretation—at the proper level of abstraction, bearing on the actual text under consideration—is an integral part of interpretation. To avoid a strictly literal approach, text must be read in this context.

But, importantly, this is not the end. What about means? In some ways, and as I will show through the example case, means are the real subject of debate in statutory interpretation. Parliament can achieve an objective in many different ways. In general, Parliament can enact broad, sweeping, mandatory language that covers off a whole host of conduct (within constitutional limits). It could leave it at that. Or it could enact permissive exceptions to general mandatory language. It can enact hard-and-fast rules or flexible standards. Administrative schemes can delegate power to “independent” actors to promulgate its own rules. The point here is that Parliament can decide to pursue a particular, limited purpose, through limited or broad means. This is Parliament’s choice, not the court’s.

While free-wheeling pragmatism can lead to all sorts of pathologies, I want to focus here on the relationship between ends and means, between purpose and text. Pragmatism can distort the proper ascertainment of ends and means. In some cases, the problem will be that the court, without any doctrinal guidance, chooses a purpose at an unacceptably high level of abstraction (see, for example, the debate in Telus v Wellman, and Hillier), perhaps even to achieve some pre-ordained result. The courts can do so because, if one simply follows Rizzo, there is no requirement that a judge seek textual evidence for the establishment of a purpose. Yet we know that, as a descriptive matter, it is most common that purpose is sourced in text (see Sullivan, at 193): an interpreter can usually glean the purpose of the legislation, not from legislative history, subsequent legislative enactments, or even the judge’s own imagination, but from the text itself.

This descriptive state of affairs is normatively desirable for two reasons. First, the point of interpretation is not to establish the purpose or mischief the legislature was intending to solve when it legislated (despite Heydon’s Case). The point is to discover the intent of the legislature as represented in the meaning of the words it used. The words are the law. Purpose assists us in determining the meaning of those words, but it cannot be permitted to dominate the actual goal of the enterprise. A pragmatist approach permits, at least in some cases, for that domination to exist: if purpose is better evidence of intention than text, in some cases, then it can be permitted to override text. But this undermines the point of interpretation.  

Secondly, for all we might say about legislative intentions, the best practical evidence of intention is what has been reduced to paper, read reasonably, fairly, and in context. Since statutory interpretation is not a theoretical exercise but a problem solving-one, the practicality of doctrine is central. For this reason, purpose can best assist us when it is related and grounded in text; when the text can bear the meaning that the purpose suggests the words should carry. To the extent pragmatism suggests something else, it is undesirable.

  Sometimes, however, the problem will lie in the means; while the relevant purpose may be common ground between the parties, there may be a dispute over the meaning of language used to achieve those ends. Such disputes tend to focus on, for example, the choice between ordinary and technical meanings, the role of particular canons of interpretation, and (importantly for our purposes) the relationship between the properly-scoped purpose and the language under interpretation. It is the job of the interpreter to work among these tools synthetically, while not replacing the means Parliament chose to accomplish whatever purpose it set out to accomplish. But with pragmatism, no matter the means chosen by Parliament, there is always the chance that the court can dream up different means (read: words) to accomplish an agreed-upon purpose. Often, these dreams begin with a seemingly benign observation: for example, a court might simply conclude that it cannot be the case that a posited interpretation is the meaning of the words, because it would ineffectually achieve some purpose.

These pathologies can work together in interesting ways. For example, an expansive purpose can cause distortions as the means selection stage of the analysis; a court entranced by a highly abstract purpose could similarly expand the means chosen by the legislature to achieve those means. But even in absence of a mistake at the sourcing stage, courts can simply think that Parliament messed up; that it failed to achieve the purpose it set out to achieve because the means it chose are insufficient, in the court’s eyes.

A Way Forward

When constructing doctrine, at least two considerations to keep in mind pertain to flexibility and formality, for want of better words. Flexibility is not an inherently good or bad thing. Being flexible can permit a court to use a host of different tools to resolve disputes before it, disputes that sometimes cannot be reduced to a formula. Too much flexibility, however, and the judicial reasoning process can be hidden by five-part factorial tests and general bromides. Ideally, one wants to strike a balance between formal limits on how courts must reason, with some built-in flexibility to permit courts some room to react to different interpretive challenges.

The point I have made throughout this series is that Rizzo—to the extent it is followed for what is says—is pragmatic, methodologically. Whatever the benefits of pragmatism, such a model fails to establish any real sequencing of interpretive tools; it does not describe the relationship between the interpretive tools; and leaves to the judge’s discretion the proper tools to choose. While subsequent Supreme Court cases might have hemmed in this pragmatic free-wheeling, they have not gone far enough to clarify the interpretive task.

The starting point for a way forward might begin with the argument that there must be some reasons, ex ante, why we should prefer certain interpretive tools to others. This starting point is informed by a great article written by Justice David Stratas, and his Law Clerk, David Williams. As I wrote here:

The piece offers an interesting and well-reasoned way of ordering tools of interpretation. For Stratas & Williams,  there are certain “green light” “yellow light” and “red light” tools in statutory interpretation. Green light tools include text and context, as well as purpose when it is sourced in text. Yellow light tools are ones that must be used with caution—for example, legislative history and social science evidence. Red light tools are ones that should never be used—for example, personal policy preferences.

In my view, this sort of approach balances formalism and flexibility in interpretation. For the reasons I stated above, the legislative text is really the anchor for interpretation (this is distinct from another argument, often made, that we “start with the text” in interpretation). That is, the text is the best evidence we have of intention, often because it contains within it the relevant purpose that should guide us in discovering the meaning of the text. For this reason, legislative text is a green light consideration. Purpose is also a green-light consideration, but this is because it is sourced in text; if it was not, purpose would be misused in a way that might only be recognizable to a methodological pragmatist. Other tools of interpretation, such as legislative history and social science evidence, can be probative in limited circumstances.

The key innovation here is the Stratas & Williams approach does not rule out so-called “external sources” of meaning, but it does structure the use of various tools for interpretation. For example, the approach does not raise a categorical bar to the consideration of legislative history. But it does make some ex ante prediction about the value of various tools, reasoning for example that purpose is most relevant when it is sourced in text.

This is an immediate improvement over the pragmatist methodology, at least when it comes to my core area of concern, the relationship between purpose and text. In the pragmatist model, purpose can be erroneously sourced and then used to expand the means chosen by the legislature; in other words, it can be used to override the language chosen by the legislature. Under the Stratas & Williams model, such a situation is impossible. Any purpose that is helpful and relevant to the interpretive task will be contained within the language Parliament chose, even if that language is limited, imperfect, or unclear.

An Example Case: Walsh

Much of this can be explained by a recent case, Walsh, at the Ontario Court of Appeal. While Walsh is a very interesting case for many reasons, I want to focus here on a key difference between the majority decision of Gillese JA and the dissent of Miller JA. Gillese JA seems to implicitly adopt a pragmatic approach, arguably making purpose rather than text the anchor of interpretation—presumably because the case called for it. Miller JA, instead, makes text the anchor of interpretation. The difference is subtle, but immensely important, because each opinion takes a different view of the “means” chosen by Parliament.

At issue in Walsh was s.162.1(1) and (2) of the Criminal Code. Section 162.1(1), in short, “makes it an offence for a person to knowingly disseminate an ‘intimate image’ of a person without their consent” [61]. An “intimate image” is defined by s.162.1(2), and relates to a “visual recording of a person made by any means including a photographic, film or video recording.”

Stripping the dispute down to brass tacks, the issue in this case was whether a FaceTime call that displays certain explicit content could constitute a recording. The problem, of course, is that FaceTime video calls cannot be conventionally saved and reproduced, like a photo (putting aside, for a moment, the possibility of recording a FaceTime video call). The Crown, at trial, argued that the language of the provisions are written broadly, and must be read “in the context of the harm that s.162.1 was enacted to address: sexual exploitation committed through technology, including cyberbullying and revenge porn” [23, 55]. For the Crown, the answer was found by reasoning from this general “mischief” that the statute was designed to address: the harm would still exist even despite “the recipient’s inability to further share or preserve the moment…” [23]. The defense, on the other hand reasoned from the ordinary meaning of the word “recording,” concluding that “recording” alludes to the “creation of an image that can be stored, viewed later, and reproduced” [57].

Gillese JA for the majority agreed with the Crown’s argument. She listed five reasons for her agreement, but one is particularly relevant on the issue of the relationship between text and purpose. Gillese JA writes, at paras 68 and 70:

[68] Fourth, restricting the meaning of “recording” to outdated technology—by requiring that it be capable of reproduction—would fail to respond to the ways in which modern technology permits sexual exploitation through the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. In so doing, it would undermine the objects of s.162.1 and the intention of Parliament in enacting it.

[…]

[70] …Giving “visual recording” a broad and inclusive interpretation best accords with the objects of s.162.1 and Parliament’s intention in enacting it.

As we will see, this is precisely backwards.

Miller JA’s dissent should be read in whole. It is a masterclass in statutory interpretation, and it is particularly representative of the approach I favour. But most importantly, Miller JA outlines why the majority’s approach demonstrates a means problem, as described above. For Miller JA, there is no purpose-sourcing problem here, since, as he says, there is common ground about the mischief that these provisions were designed to address [179]. However, for Miller JA, a proper application of the various tools of interpretation counselled an approach that did not rewrite the terms of the statute; the means chosen by the legislature. This approach is supported by a number of considerations. First, as Miller JA says, the term “recording” must be given its ordinary meaning. This is the going-in presumption, absent good reasons otherwise. But for Miller JA, the Crown offered no objective support for its assumption that the term “recording” must encompass the FaceTime video at issue. While dictionary meaning and ordinary meaning are two different things, dictionary meaning can shed light on ordinary meaning, and Miller JA noted that there was no instance of the term “recording” being used to describe a “visual display created by any means” [159].

This might have been enough, but the Crown offered another argument: that the term “recording” must be understood as encompassing new forms of technology [162]. Of course, because of the original meaning canon, it could not be said that any linguistic drift in the term “recording” is legally relevant in this case [166]. However, it is a common application of the original meaning rule that where words are written in a broad and dynamic manner, they could capture phenomena not known to drafters at the time of enactment. For Miller JA, however, this argument failed when it comes to the word “recording.” For him, FaceTime was clearly a phenomenon that existed at the time these provisions were drafted, and in fact, the context of the provisions indicated that Parliament had actually distinguished, in other places, recordings versus “visually observing a person…” [174-176]. The term “recording,” then must rely on the concept of reproducibility, as distinguished from other sorts of displays that cannot be saved and reproduced. This latter category of displays was known by Parliament when it crafted these provisions, but it is conspicuously absent from the provisions themselves.

Miller JA, having disposed of these arguments, then clearly contrasts his approach to Gillese JA’s:

[171] What the Crown is left with is the proposition that a reauthoring of the provision would better achieve s.162.1’s purpose….But where Parliament chooses specific means to achieve its ends, the court is not permitted to choose different means any more than it would be permitted to choose different ends. The interpretive question is not what best promotes the section’s purpose, such that courts can modify the text to best bring about that result, but rather how Parliament chose to promote its purpose

[172] …Although the Crown’s argument is framed in ascertaining the conventional, ordinary meaning of language, it is actually an argument about what meaning ought to be imposed on s.162.1, so as to best achieve the purposes of this section.

These paragraphs are remarkable because they clearly set up the difference between Gillese JA’s approach and Miller JA’s approach; the difference between a methodologically pragmatic approach, and an approach that roots ends in means, purpose in text. For Gillese JA, one of her five reasons for accepting the Crown argument pertained to the fact that the defense’s offered interpretation would fail to achieve the agreed-upon purpose of the provisions. This sort of reasoning is only possible under a pragmatic approach, which permits courts to prioritize different interpretive tools as they see fit. The result is a Holy Trinity abomination: where purpose is the anchor for interpretation, and the text is massaged to achieve that purpose, in the court’s view.

Miller JA’s approach is better, if one follows the argument in this post. His approach clearly sees text as an interpretive “tool” that is prior to all the others, in the sense that it is (1) what the legislature enacted to achieve some goal (2) it, practically, is the best evidence we have of what the purpose of the legislation is. Under this formulation, it is not up to the courts to decide whether better means exist to achieve the purpose of the legislation. If this were the case, the point of interpretation would be to identify the meaning of purpose, rather than the meaning of language as evidence of intention. Miller JA explicitly assigns more weight to the text in cabining the purposive analysis.

The Walsh case illustrates the problem that pragmatism has created. While all agree on the point of interpretation, that agreement tends to break down when we begin to apply the tools we have to determine the meaning of the text. Methodological pragmatism offers no hope for solving this problem, because it fails to take a stand on which tools are best. The Stratas & Williams approach, and the approach offered by Miller JA in Walsh, envisions some ranking of the interpretive tools, with text playing a notable role. This approach is better. It moves us away from the endless flexibility of pragmatism, while still leaving the judge as the interpreter of the law.

Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation II: Evaluating Rizzo

Part II in a 3 part Double Aspect series

Please read Part I of this series before reading this post.

In the first post of this series, I set out to explain the concept of pragmatism in statutory interpretation, as explained by Ruth Sullivan. My contention was that Rizzo, arguably Canada’s seminal statutory interpretation judgment, is a pragmatic judgment. Relatedly, I argued. that a purely pragmatic approach to statutory interpretation, while providing interpreters with maximum flexibility, also fails in two potential ways: (1) it permits judges to assign weights to interpretive tools that may run counter to the point of statutory intepretation: to discern what this particular text means; and (2) it could lead to methodological unpredicability–a problem that I will outline in Part III of this series.

In this post, I will address why Rizzo is a fundamentally pragmatic judgment. It is pragmatic because it leaves open the possibility, particularly in the use of purpose, for text to be supplanted if other interpretive tools point in another direction. In other words, it does not make a claim that some interpretive tools are more appropriate than others in the abstract. In the pragmatic approach, it is up to the judge to assign the weights; rather than the methodological doctrine guiding this selection, the judges themselves have unbridled discretion to mould statutory interpretation methods to the case in front of them, based on factual contexts, contemporary values, or otherwise. As I will note in Part III, this sounds good in theory—but in practice is less than desirable.

Rizzo was a garden-variety statutory interpretation case, and I need not go deep into the facts to show what is at stake. Basically, the key question was whether employees of a now-bankrupt company could  claim termination and severance payments after bankruptcy [1]. The key problem was whether the relevant legislation permitted the benefits to accrue to the employees, even though their employment was terminated by bankruptcy rather than by normal means. The relevant provisions of the Bankruptcy Act and the Employment Standards Act, on a plain reading, seemed to prevent the employees from claiming these benefits if their employment was terminated by way of bankruptcy [23].

The Supreme Court chastised the Court of Appeal for falling into this plain meaning trap. To the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal “…did not pay attention to the scheme of the ESA, its object or the intention of the legislature; nor was the context of the words in issue appropriately recognized” [23]. The Supreme Court endorsed this now-famous passage as the proper method of interpretation in Canada:

21 Although much has been written about the interpretation of legislation (see, e.g., Ruth Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation (1997); Ruth Sullivan, Driedger on the Construction of Statutes (3rd ed. 1994) (hereinafter “Construction of Statutes”); Pierre-André Côté, The Interpretation of Legislation in Canada (2nd ed. 1991)), Elmer Driedger in Construction of Statutes (2nd ed. 1983) best encapsulates the approach upon which I prefer to rely. He recognizes that statutory interpretation cannot be founded on the wording of the legislation alone. At p. 87 he states:

Today there is only one principle or approach, namely, the words of an Act are to be read in their entire context and in their grammatical and ordinary sense harmoniously with the scheme of the Act, the object of the Act, and the intention of Parliament.

Using this approach, the Court reasoned that the provisions in questions needed to be interpreted with their objects in mind—specifically, the relevant provisions were designed to “protect employees” [25]. For example, section 40 of the Employment Standards Act, one of the provisions in question, “requires employers to give their employees reasonable notice of termination based upon length of service” [25]. Such a notice period (with termination pay where the employer does not adhere to the notice period), is designed to “provide employees with an opportunity to take preparatory measures and seek alternative employment” [25]. Ditto for the provisions governing severance pay [26].

The Court also relied on a number of other interpretive factors to reach the conclusion that the severance and termination pay provisions governed even in cases of bankruptcy.  Two are important here. First, the Court relied on the absurdity canon: where possible, interpretations of statutes that lead to “absurd results” should be avoided. Particularly, the Court, endorsing Sullivan, notes that “…a label of absurdity can be attached to interpretations which defeat the purpose of a statute or render some aspect of it pointless or futile…” [27]. In this case, the fact that an employee could be terminated a day before the bankruptcy—and receive benefits—and another employee could be terminated after bankruptcy—and not receive benefits—was an absurdity that ran counter to the purpose of the statute to provide a cushion for terminated employees [30].  The Court also focused on legislative history, which it acknowledged can play a “limited role in the interpretation of legislation” [35].

All of this to say, Rizzo is, to my mind, a pragmatic judgment for statutory interpretation. This is because, when it endorses the classic Driedger formula at paragraph 21, it does not venture further to show which of the interpretive tools it relies on are to be given the most weight in interpretation; and accordingly, Rizzo could lead to courts assigning weights to interpretive tools that could distort the process of interpretation. For example, the Rizzo Court does not say—as later Supreme Court cases do—that purpose cannot supplant text in interpretation (Placer Dome, at para 23). In other words, when courts source purpose, text is given more weight in interpretation because it is the anchor for purpose (see, for example, the Court’s analysis in Telus v Wellman, at paras 79, 82-83). This can be seen as the Court saying that text is assigned the most weight in interpretation, and that purpose is parasitic on text. When sourced in this way, then, there is no reason to assume that there will ever be a conflict between purpose and text, because purpose is merely one way to understand text. But Rizzo does not say this, instead suggesting that in some cases, purpose can supplant text.

This is the product of pragmatism. Taken on its own, Rizzo’s endorsement of Driedger permits “…each judge [to take advantage] of the full range of interpretive resources available….and deploys those resources appropriately given the particularities of the case” (see here). The possibility for highly abstract purposes to, in appropriate cases, subvert text is a function of the failure of Rizzo to assign clear weights to the interpretive tools in a way that reflects Canada’s fundamental constitutional principles, including the task of courts to discover what the text of statutes mean. I should note, though, that this is not a bug of pragmatism to its adherents; rather, it is a feature. The pragmatists conclude that text should have no special role in interpretation if other factors push against giving effect to text. As I will point out in my next post, this liberates judges to an unacceptable extent when measured in relation to the basic task of interpretation.

Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation I

The first post in a three-part Double Aspect series.

Rizzo & Rizzo, arguably Canada’s leading case on statutory interpretation, has now been cited at least 4581 times according to CanLII. Specifically, the following passage has been cited by courts at least 2000 times. This passage, to many, forms the core of Canada’s statutory interpretation method:

21                              Although much has been written about the interpretation of legislation (see, e.g., Ruth Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation (1997); Ruth Sullivan, Driedger on the Construction of Statutes (3rd ed. 1994) (hereinafter “Construction of Statutes”); Pierre-André Côté, The Interpretation of Legislation in Canada (2nd ed. 1991)), Elmer Driedger in Construction of Statutes (2nd ed. 1983) best encapsulates the approach upon which I prefer to rely.  He recognizes that statutory interpretation cannot be founded on the wording of the legislation alone.  At p. 87 he states:

Today there is only one principle or approach, namely, the words of an Act are to be read in their entire context and in their grammatical and ordinary sense harmoniously with the scheme of the Act, the object of the Act, and the intention of Parliament.

This paragraph has reached the status of scripture for Canadian academics. To many, it stands as a shining example of how Canadian law has rejected “plain meaning,” or “textualist” approaches to law (though these are not the same thing at all, scholars as eminent as Ruth Sullivan have confused them).  Most notably, as Sullivan argues, the practice of the Supreme Court of Canada under the auspices of the modern approach could be considered pragmatist. In many ways, pragmatism is considered by many in related fields to be an implicitly desirable good. Pragmatism in statutory interpretation, to its adherents, pulls the curtain back on judicial reasoning in statutory cases, asking courts to candidly weigh the factors they think are most important to reaching the proper result.

Pragmatism can be seen as a sliding scale—where one factor (such as text) is most persuasive, other factors (such as extrinsic evidence) will need to be stronger to overcome the text. In other cases, the opposite may be true. Notably, as championed by people like Richard Posner, pragmatism is focused on achieving sensible results. Therefore, the methodological approach used to achieve those results matters less than the results themselves.

While I am not sure proponents of pragmatism would classify Rizzo, particularly its leading paragraph, as a pragmatic judgment, in my view, Rizzo alone illustrates the key problem with pragmatism as an organizing and standalone theory of statutory interpretation. The Rizzo formula simply presents a laundry list of factors which should guide judicial decision-making, but fails to prescribe weights ex ante to those factors. It seems to assume that, in each case, the weights to the various factors are either (1) equal or (2) assigned by the judge in a given case. This is the key virtue of pragmatism. But it is also its vice, because “…without an advance commitment to basic interpretive principles, who can anticipate how a judiciary of Posnerian pragmatists would articulate and apply that law?” (see here, at 820). In other words, in a pragmatic approach “[e]verything is up for grabs” (820). Specifically, pure pragmatism has a number of potential issues:

  • It ignores that, in our legal system, the text of the statute (read in light of its context and purpose, sourced in text) is what governs, and for that reason, should be given the most weight in all interpretation, even if the text is open-textured. Courts must do the best they can to extract meaning from the text, read in light of its context. Call this formalism, call it textualism, call it whatever. The Supreme Court has said that the task of interpretation cannot be undertaken in order to impeach the meaning of text with extra-textual considerations (Telus v Wellman, at para 79).
  • Aside from the in-principle objection, there is a practical problem. While pragmatists claim that they are bringing the judicial reasoning process into the open, forcing judges to justify the weights they assign to various interpretive factors, in truth a fully-discretionary approach permits judges to reach any result they might wish, especially if they take into account broad “values-based” reasoning, as Sullivan advocates, or source purpose at some high level of abstraction, untethered to text.
  • Finally, the invitation to consider all factors in statutory interpretation, invited by Rizzo and the pragmatists, seems to assume that each interpretive factor will have something to say in a range of cases. But there are inherent problems with each interpretive factor, including text. The question for statutory interpretation methodology is, in the run of cases, which factors are more persuasive and controlling? By failing to provide an ex ante prediction about this question, pragmatists run close to abridging the idea that courts are supposed to develop norms—guiding principles—for statutory interpretation (see 2747-3174 Quebec Inc, at 995-996).

In order to develop these arguments, and address powerful (and some not-so-powerful) counter-arguments, I will be launching a series on Double Aspect on statutory interpretation, designed around the idea of pragmatism. The second post in the series will summarize Rizzo and why it is indicative of a pragmatist approach. The third post in the series will point out, using Rizzo itself, the flaws of pragmatism. It will also laud the Supreme Court and lower courts for, in recent years, blunting the edge of the pragmatist approach. Overall, this series will be designed to show that while text, context, and purpose are relevant interpretive factors, the task of interpretation is one that must be guided by ex ante guiding principles, not an “anything goes” approach. To this end, a recent attempt by Justice David Stratas and David Williams to assign ex ante weights to statutory interpretive factors is laudable and desirable. It should be followed.

A note of caution: the point of this series is not to advocate for a purely text-based approach, or a “plain-meaning approach.” Many have fallen into the trap of simply labelling arguments that highlight the primacy of text as being “textualism” or “plain-meaning.” Many resist the idea of text as a governing factor in interpretation because they believe it is equal to a literal reading, or because it does not take context into account. Virtually no one advocates for this line of thinking anymore. It is a strawman.

Additionally, the point of this series is not to impugn pragmatism wholesale. Instead, the point of this series is to point out that while pragmatism and flexibility have their place in interpretation, those things cannot come at the expense of an interpretive methodology that guides judges according to the core tenets of our legal system, including the separation of powers, as understood by the Supreme Court (see again Telus v Wellman, at para 79).

Stay tuned.

The Top Statutory Interpretation Cases of 2020

A banner year for interpretation

Introduction

To say that one believes in “purposive interpretation” has been the calling card of Canadian legal scholars for some time. Saying this, as some do, is radically incomplete. That is because competing schools of thought also look to purpose. Textualists, for example, look to the context in which words are used, as well as the purpose evident in those words (Scalia & Garner, at 20). To say that one is a purposivist might as well mean nothing, because everyone—even textualists—“routinely take[] purpose into account…” (Scalia & Garner, at 20).

Far from just being a lazy turn of phrase, though, the routine deployment of the term “purposivism” as a distinct school of thought blocks us from a clearer conversation about what should matter in statutory interpretation. For example, the real division between textualists and others is how purpose is sourced in statutory interpretation: textualists are wary of importing some abstract purpose to subvert a “close reading” of the text (see Scalia & Garner, at 20; see also the opinion of Côté Jin West Fraser), while others might source purpose differently. Saying that one is a “purposivist” also does not answer an important question: which purpose should count more in interpretation, since statutes often pursue multiple purposes at different levels of abstraction? (see, for an example of this, Rafilovich). These are real interpretive questions that are only now receiving any sort of sustained attention in the case law.

I should not hide my priors here. I too think that purpose is a relevant consideration in statutory interpretation, because it assists in the task of reading text to mean all it fairly encompasses. But purpose can be abused: indeed, “[t]he most destructive (and most alluring) feature of purposivism is its manipulability” (Scalia & Garner, 20). Because purposes can be stated in all sorts of ways, it is up to the judge, in many cases, to choose the most appropriate purpose to assist in interpreting the text. Sometimes, purpose can subvert text—which, of course, is problematic if the purpose is not sourced in text (McLachlin CJC’s opinion in West Fraser is a classic example of this).  Put simply: purpose informs text, it does not supplant it (Placer Dome, at para 23).

For that reason, we must come to sound and principled ways of sourcing purpose, rather than simply stating that we look to purpose. It is this theme that defined, in my view, the task for judicial interpreters in 2020. The following three cases are, to my mind, exemplars of dealing with some of these deeper questions in statutory interpretation. Rather than simply reciting the Rizzo & Rizzo formula and taking an “anything goes” approach to interpretation, these cases delve deeper and answer some knotty interpretive questions in a way that furthers a discussion about statutory interpretation in Canada—particularly with reference to the so-called “purposive” approach. Because these cases start a conversation on these issues (and because I happen to agree with the methodology employed by the judges writing the lead opinions in each case), these are the top statutory interpretation cases of 2020, in no particular order:

Michel v Graydon, 2020 SCC 24

In this case, the Supreme Court of Canada dealt with the question whether it is “possible to vary a child support order under the [Family Law Act] after the order has expired, and after the child support beneficiary ceases to be a “child” as defined in the [Family Law Act]” [2]. This seemingly technical question of family law, however, gave rise to all sorts of interpretive problems: the role of social science evidence in statutory interpretation, the problem of unbridled consequential analysis in statutory interpretation, and the problem raised when judges invoke both “liberal” and “purposive interpretation” in the same breath.

For Brown J, the answer to question in the case was found relatively confined to the legislative text and scheme. Starting from the text of the provision, Brown J concluded that the relevant text of the Family Law Act “creates an avenue for courts to retroactively change any child support order, irrespective of the beneficiary’s dependent status and irrespective of whether the order is extant at the time of the application” [20]. This was because of the placement of the relevant statutory scheme. Among other things, s.152 contained no textual restriction on the courts—for example, s.152(1) “contains no reference to the defined term ‘child’ that might serve to qualify the authority of a court to vary child support” [22]. The scheme of the Family Law Act supported this conclusion [23].

For Brown J, this textual conclusion was basically the end of the story (see also schematic considerations at paras 24, 26, 27). Importantly, though, Brown J’s textual conclusion was supported by a properly-scoped purpose. Brown J identified that one of the dominant features of the Family Law Act—given the statute it replaced—was a desire to “expan[d] on the circumstances under which a court may vary a child support order” [28]. Read in light with the text, the result was clear.

Martin J concurred in the result, but conducted a policy analysis to support her concurrence. In Martin J’s view, child support cases called for (that old standard) of a “fair, large, and liberal construction” [40]. For Martin J, this sort of construction required a “contextual and purposive reading of s.152” that looks to “its wider legislative purposes, societal implications, and actual impacts” [40] in a way that “takes into account the policies and values of contemporary Canadian society” [70]. Martin J concluded that “a jurisdictional bar preventing these cases from being heard not only rests in unsound legal foundations, it is inconsistent with the bedrock principles underlying child support and contributes to systemic inequalities” [40].

I agree with both judges that the text and context in this case supports this reading of s.152. But while both judges agreed on the ultimate result, the method they used to reach the result differs in important ways. While Brown J focuses largely on a contextual reading, Martin J incorporates other information, statistics, and an evaluation of the consequences of the interpretation to the result. As I will note, in this case, these approaches do not lead to dramatically different conclusions, because the tools all pointed to a certain result: text, social science, context, consequences. But where text and such other factors conflict, Martin J’s opinion raise a number of problems, in my view.

There are three comments to make about this case, and why it is important. First, Brown J’s opinion avoids the pitfalls that might be associated with external aids to interpretation.  Specifically, Martin J looked to various social science data related to poverty, family relationships, and marginalization. These are important topics, and in this case, the evidence supported the interpretation that Brown J undertook on the text. But the question arises: what to do when current social science evidence contradicts an analysis undertaken on the text? Put differently, if the text points in one direction, and that direction exacerbates problematic trends in social science evidence, which governs?

It is one thing to suggest that where the text is ambiguous, an interpretation which solves the supposed “mischief” the statute was aimed to solve should be preferred. One could make a case for that argument. But where the text and the evidence are directly contradictory, courts must follow the text because that is what the legislature enacted. This may sometimes lead to interpretations that do not make sense to contemporary society, or are unjust in face of empirical evidence, because the text was enacted at a particular time. But this is simply a function of the task of statutory interpretation, which is to determine what the legislature meant at the time of enactment (as I note below, this itself is a rule of interpretation). It must be remembered that external aids can be used to assist in interpreting the text. They cannot be used to subvert it. Martin J’s approach could lead to that result—though, as I note, the problem does not arise in this case because the text and evidence pointed to the same interpretive result.

Secondly, both opinions could be read as cabining the role of pure policy or consequential analysis in statutory interpretation, which could be an invitation for results-oriented reasoning. It is true that evaluating the competing consequences of interpretive options is a fair part of statutory interpretation (see Sullivan at 212 et seq; see also Atlas Tube, at para 10; Williams, at para 52). But there is a caveat: consequences cannot be used to dispense with the written text. This most arises in the context of the absurdity canon, where absurd interpretations of statutes are to be avoided. However, an overapplication of the absurdity canon can lead to many “false-positives” where consequences are labelled absurd in the judge’s opinion, even if those consequences are arguably a product of the text. This undermines the legislature’s role in specifying certain words. Instead, consequences can only be used to determine which of various “rival interpretations” are most consistent with the text, context, and purpose of the statute (see Williams, at para 10). In this way, consequences are not used to determine which interpretation is just or unjust in an abstract sense, but which interpretations are most consistent with the statute’s text, context, and purpose.

Brown J clearly used this sort of justified consequential analysis in his opinion. In connecting his preferred interpretation to the properly-scoped purpose of s.152(1), it was clear that his interpretation furthered that purpose. This is a proper use of consequences consistent with the text as the dominant driver of purpose.

On the other hand, Martin J’s opinion could be read in two ways: one undesirable, one not. First, it could be read as endorsing a wide-ranging assessment of consequences, at a high level of abstraction (for example, justifying her consequential analysis with reference to the need to abolish systemic inequalities: see paras 40, 70, 101).  This might be a very good thing in the abstract, but not all legislation is designed to achieve such lofty goals. If interpreted in such a way to reach a result the statute does not reach, statutes can be conceived as addressing or solving every societal problem, and therefore as resolving every unjust consequence—and this could lead to overextensions of the text beyond its ordinary meaning (see Max Radin, “Statutory Interpretation” 43 Harv L Rev 863, 876 (1930)).  This reading of Martin J’s opinion is not desirable, for that reason.

Another reading of Martin J’s opinion is that she roots her consequential analysis in the purpose of the statute as she sees it. For example, Martin J notes that her approach interprets s.152 with its “underlying purposes in mind” which includes the best interests of the child [76]. Martin J also notes that her interpretation favours access to justice, under-inclusivity, and socio-economic equality [72]. These factors may or may not be rooted to the statute under consideration.

If Martin J’s opinion is rooted in the recognized purpose of the best interests of the children, one can make the case that her opinion is justified as Brown J’s is. However, if read more broadly, Martin J could fairly be seen as addressing issues or consequences that may not fall within the consideration of the text. In the circumstances, I prefer to read Martin J’s opinion as consonant with Brown J’s. If that is done, there is no warrant to look to consequences that fall outside the purpose of the statute. But note: much will depend, as I note below, on how the purpose of a statutory provision is pitched.

Finally, Brown J’s opinion is tighter than Martin J’s in the sense that it does not raise conflicts between statutory interpretation principles. Martin J’s opinion arguably does so in two ways. First, it is well-known (despite the controversy of this practice in constitutional interpretation) that statutes must generally be interpreted as they would have been the day after the statute was passed (Perka, at 264-5). While there is some nuance on this point (see Sullivan, at 116-117), words cannot change legal meaning over time—but note that broad, open-textured terms can be flexibly applied to new conditions if the words can bear that meaning (see here). The key is that words can only cover off the situations that they can fairly encompass. But the injunction—repeated throughout Martin J’s opinion—that statutes must be interpreted in light of the “policies and values of contemporary Canadian society” [72] at least facially conflicts with the original meaning canon. To Martin J’s defense, she is not the first to say this in the context of family law and child support (see Chartier, at paras 19, 21). But nonetheless, the court cannot have it both ways, and Martin J’s opinion cannot be taken to mean that the legal meaning of texts must be interpreted to always be consistent with contemporary Canadian society.

At best, it might be said that Martin J’s opinion in this respect permits the taking into account of contemporary considerations where the text clearly allows for such considerations, or perhaps where the text is ambiguous and one interpretation would best fit modern circumstances in a practical sense. But these modern circumstances cannot be shoehorned into every interpretation.

Secondly, there is a conflict in Martin J’s opinion, in a theoretical sense, between her invocation of a “fair, large and liberal” interpretation (see paras 58, 71) and her invocation of a “purposive” interpretation  (see para 71). As Karl Llewellyn pointed out long ago, it is not unheard of for tools of interpretation to conflict. But as much as possible, judges should not invite such conflicts, and I fear Martin J did this in her opinion by conflating liberal interpretation with purposive interpretation. As I have written before, these things are not the same—in fact they are opposites. The Interpretation Act does instruct a “large and liberal” interpretation, but only as the objects of a statute permit. The Supreme Court continues to insist on an approach to statutory interpretation that uses text to ground the selection of purpose (see here). As such, text and purpose read synthetically governs—not some judge-made conception of what constitutes a “large and liberal interpretation.” This statement cannot be used to overshoot the purposes of a statute, properly scoped.

Perhaps in this case the purposes permit a large and liberal interpretation, in which case Martin J can use both of these tools interchangeably. As I said, the problem isn’t this case specifically, but what would happen if Martin J’s approach is used in the general run of cases. But it is far from clear that purposive and generous interpretation will always–or even often–lead to similar results. More likely, purpose will limit the ways in which text can be read—it will not liberate the judge to take into account any policy considerations she wishes.

Michel v Graydon raises all sorts of interesting issues. But taking Brown J’s opinion on its own terms, it is a clinic in how to clearly interpret a statute in light of its properly-scoped purpose. While Martin J’s opinion could also be read in this way, it could be read to permit a more free-flowing policy analysis that subverts legislative language. In this sense, Martin J’s opinion should be affixed with a “caution” label.

Entertainment Software Association, 2020 FCA 100

ESA will stand, I think, for some time as the definitive statement in the Federal Courts on how to conduct statutory interpretation, and the role of international law in that endeavour.

In this case, the facts of which I summarized here,  the Copyright Board offered an interpretation of the Copyright Modernization Act that arguably placed extraneous materials ahead of the governing text. Here is what I wrote about the Board’s conduct at the time:

The Board’s chosen materials for the interpretive exercise were stated, according to the Court, at a high level of generality (see paras 53-54). For example, the Board focused on the preamble to the Copyright Modernization Act to divine a rather abstract interpretation that supported its view on international law (paras 53-54). It also invoked government statements, but the Court rightly noted that these statements construed s.2.4(1.1) as a “narrow, limited-purpose provision” [56], not as an all-encompassing provision that permitted the collection of tariffs in both instances. The use of these materials was used by the Board to herald a different, broader interpretation than what the text and context of the provision indicated. 

The Court rebuffed the Board’s effort in this regard. By noting that the provision under interpretation was a “narrow, limited-purpose provision,” the Court rejected attempts by the Board to drive the interpretation higher than the text can bear.  This is a worthy affirmation of the importance of text in the interpretive process, and a warning about the malleability of purposive interpretation.

Why is this opinion so important? It makes a now oft-repeated point that purposive interpretation is not conducted “at large.” That is, it matters how judges state the purposes they hope to use in the interpretive task. As the Supreme Court noted in Telus v Wellman, courts cannot use abstract purposes to “distort the actual words of the statute” (see Telus, at para 79). This counts as an endorsement of the traditional separation of powers, under which “…the responsibility for setting policy in a parliamentary democracy rests with the legislature, not the courts” [79].

ESA is important because it implements what the Supreme Court has now repeated in Telus, Rafilovich, and other cases. It is now clear law that purposes cannot be used to subvert text; that text is the starting point in legislative interpretation, and that in sourcing purpose, text confines the scope of the exercise. In my view, ESA (expertly written by Justice Stratas) makes the clearest case yet for a sort of text-driven purposivism in the context of Canadian statutory interpretation.

Canada v Kattenburg, 2020 FCA 164

One underlying theme of much of what I have written thus far is a worry about results-oriented reasoning in statutory interpretation. To some, this might not be a risk at all. Or it might be a desirable feature: after all, if all law should simply be an adjunct of politics, then the policy preferences of judges are fair game. Of course, I readily admit that no legal system can reduce the risk of subjective policy-driven interpretation to 0; nor should it. But the Rule of Law, at its most basic, means that the law governs everyone—including judges. Part of the law judges must apply are the rules of statutory interpretation. Those rules are designed not to vindicate what the “just” result is in the abstract, what is “just” at international law (except where international law and domestic legislation meet in defined ways), or even what is “just” to the judge at equity or common law–except, of course, when statutes implicate common law rules. Statutory interpretation is a task that requires determining what the legislature thought was just to enact. As such, the rules of interpretation are guided towards that goal, and are necessarily designed to limit or exclude the preferences of judges or others, even if we reach that goal only imperfectly.

This important theoretical point was made in relation to the ascertainment of legislative purpose and international law in Kattenburg by Stratas JA. In Kattenburg, the underlying substantive issue was simple and narrow, as I wrote in my post on the case:

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency decided that certain wine imported to Canada from the West Bank are “products of Israel” (see the Federal Court’s decision in 2019 FC 1003 at para 3). The judicial review, among other issues, concerned whether the wine could be labelled as “products of Israel.” That’s it. Under ordinary administrative law principles, the court will assess whether the decision of the CFIA is reasonable. A typical legal task.

However, on the intervention motions in Kattenburg, Stratas JA noted that some intervenors ttempted to further bootstrap the record with “hyperlinks to find reports, opinions, news articles and informal articles to buttress their claims about the content of international law and the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank” (Kattenburg, at para 32). Stratas JA rejected such efforts.

Stratas JA’s rejection of these intervenors, and his strong words in denouncing them, raised the ire of some on law twitter. But anything worth doing won’t be easy, and Stratas JA said what needed to be said, particular when he noted that, with respect to the intervenors “[s]o much of their loose policy talk, untethered to proven facts and settled doctrine, can seep into reasons for judgment, leading to inaccuracies with real-life consequences” (Kattenburg, at para 44). 

 There’s no denying Stratas JA is pointing to an important methodological problem that is deserving of our attention. One way that purposes can be misstated, or used to subvert clear text, is by advancing broad understandings of international law to expand the purpose. As I’ve noted before, it is true that “international law can…be relevant to the interpretation of Canadian law where it is incorporated in domestic law explicitly, or where there is some ambiguity” (see here). But in many cases, international law will simply not be relevant to the interpretation of legislative texts, or the ascertainment of legislative purposes.

The attempt in Kattenburg to cast the legislative purpose to encompass some statement—any statement—on the legality of Israel’s conduct in the Middle East is a classic end-run around legislative text. While some of the intervenors may have wanted the Court to interpret the legislation in a particular way to encompass substantive policy goals encompassed in international law not only runs afoul of fundamental principle—international law only enters the task in defined, narrow ways—but it is contrary to precedent (see Vavilov, at para 121 and the litany of Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court cases on this point). Such efforts should be rejected.

Conclusion

In many ways, the three cases I have chosen as important for interpretation in 2020 are all representative of a broader theme of which lawyers should be aware. That is, there is much more happening behind the curtains in Canadian statutory interpretation than might appear at first blush. “Purposive interpretation” is not the end of the story. What matters is how we source purpose, the sources we assess to assist the interpretive task, and the role of text in grounding the interpretive process. These cases all come to defensible conclusions on these questions. The insights of these cases can be distilled into a few key propositions:

  1. Purpose must be sourced in relation to the relevant text under consideration. In this way, we are interpreting text as the legislature enacted it, and we are not using purpose to subvert that authentic reading of the text.
  2. There are reasons to be worried about consequential analysis, to the extent it could permit an expansion of legislative purposes beyond text.
  3. There are reasons to be worried about international law, to the extent it could permit the expansion of legislative purposes beyond text.

All for the better.

A Happy New Year for interpretive nerds!