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It Won’t Help
This is yet another post on the duty to vote. Here, I address arguments according to we have such a duty because if everyone votes, the quality of election campaigns and, possibly, of governance, will be better than under the current state of affairs, where some people vote, and others do not. This argument, like
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Is It Legit?
I am continuing my series of posts about the duty to vote ― or nonexistence thereof. Earlier this week, I addressed what I called information-based arguments: claims to the effect that we must vote in order to contribute our views, either about what political option is best for us, or about which of them will
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Twelve Banned Books Weeks
Once upon a time, I mused about whether Parliament could ban books as part of its regulation of election campaign spending. The specific question that interested me then was whether the exemption of “the distribution of a book, or the promotion of the sale of a book, for no less than its commercial value, if
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The Swearing Show
Niqabs at citizenship oath swearing ceremonies are a big deal. Not really a big deal, mind you, because, as Radio-Canada reports, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, there have been exactly two women since 2011 who refused to go through with the oath because of the ban on the niqab which the government had illegally
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Vote Did You Say?
I am finally beginning my promised series of posts arguing that we do not have a moral duty to vote. In this post, I address arguments in favour of such a duty based on the idea that elections are an information-gathering mechanism. When the information collected through elections is incomplete because some people did not
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Down with Hypocrisy, Again
Over at Democratic Audit UK, Mollie Gerver has an interesting post arguing that the European Union should decriminalize people smuggling ― that is, helping consenting individuals to cross borders which they lack permission to cross, in exchange for payment. (Consent is very important here: it’s what distinguishes “smuggling” from “trafficking,” the moving of people by force
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A Bad Case
As promised, here are some thoughts on the Memorandum of Fact and Law that the federal government’s lawyers have filed in response to Aniz Alani’s challenge of the Prime Minister’s policy of not appointing Senators. (I had previously canvassed what I thought ― mostly, but not entirely, correctly ― would be the main issues in
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A Cost/Benefit Analysis of Judicial Review
I want to come back to the issue of judicial review ― both of legislation and of administrative decisions ― and deference, about which I wrote earlier this week. In that post, I suggested that our views on deference in judicial review are a function of our deeper beliefs on such principles as democracy and the Rule
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Must We Vote?
There’s exactly one month to go until election day. It’s as good a moment as any to announce a series of blog posts that I will publish over the next few weeks, to argue that, contrary to what is often said, there is no moral duty to vote or, in other words, that it is
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Absence of Evidence…
Last week, the Alberta Court of Appeal delivered an interesting decision rejecting a constitutional challenge to the province’s prohibition on private health insurance brought by way of an application. In Allen v Alberta, 2015 ABCA 277, the Court held unanimously that the applicant hadn’t provided a sufficient evidentiary basis for his challenge, and that it should have been
Double Aspect 