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Leaving a Dragon Out
Emmett Macfarlane has a piece in Maclean’s today, in which he replies to both those who accuse the Supreme Court of being activist, and to those, like me, who argue that the accusations are misguided or unhelpful. I have repeatedly, including last week in response to Andrew Coyne, compared judicial activism to the “dragon of constitutional
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Expecting Too Much?
I have recently responded here, in some detail, to Andrew Coyne’s article claiming, in essence, that some of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions were not mere wrong, but altogether unreasonable, and therefore “activist.” Over the Policy Options blog, I briefly take on Gordon’s Gibson’s attack on the Supreme Court’s alleged activism, which I think is
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Some News
In seems that in blogging, as in real life, the more you have, the more you’re given. This blog was a start. But then Yves Faguy, the editor of the CBA National Magazine, invited me to blog for them, which I try to do on a monthly basis (I’m afraid I’ve skipped a couple of
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There Is Method In’t
To students of the Supreme Court’s “law of democracy” jurisprudence, there usually seems to be something distressingly inconsistent in the ways in which the Court approached the issue of discrimination against smaller political parties in Figueroa v. Canada (Attorney General), 2003 SCC 37,[2003] 1 S.C.R. 912, and that of the silencing of “third parties” in Harper v. Canada
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Here Be No Dragons
Andrew Coyne, with whom I am often inclined to agree, has written an angry column arguing that the current Supreme Court is “the most liberal-activist … in our history.” Mr. Coyne claims the Court’s decisions in l’Affaire Nadon, the Senate Reference, the collective-bargaining and right to strike cases, and above all Carter, the assisted suicide case, show
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Playing with Irwin Toy
Here’s something that might be obvious to people with good memories, or those immersed into the Supreme Court’s freedom of expression jurisprudence, but which, I confess, surprised me when I recently re-read two of the foundational cases of that jurisprudence, Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Quebec (Attorney General), [1989] 1 S.C.R. 927, and R. v. Keegstra, [1990]
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The Two Halves of the Glass
Much has already been written about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, which holds that, at least in some circumstances, the state cannot prohibit a person from seeking assistance in order to end his or her life. At the CBA National Magazine’s blog, Yves Faguy has up a roundup of some of
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Error-Correction
I have a new post at the CBA National Magazine’s blog, which follows up on my posts (here and here) arguing that the Suprme Court’s recent decisions constitutionalizing a right to collective bargaining and a right to strike were bad mistakes. In National Magazine post, I review the various ways in which these mistakes might be
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Check Their Privilege
In my post criticizing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 1 and Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, 2015 SCC 4, which constitutionalized rights to collective bargaining and to strike, I suggested, without elaborating, that they are inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in that they constitutionalize organized labour’s economic rights
Double Aspect 