Tag: access to justice

Right Is Wrong

What an ordinary case can tell us about the problems of Canadian administrative law

Last month, I wrote here about a decision the Federal Court of Appeal (Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FCA 157) which, although a good and faithful application of Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, actually highlighted its conceptual defects. This is another post in the same vein, focusing on the choice of the standard of review in Morningstar v WSIAT, 2021 ONSC 5576 to point out (yet again) that the Vavilov approach to jurisdiction makes no sense. I then also point to a different issue that Morningstar usefully highlights with arguments for the administrative state based on access to justice. If you are tired of my fire-breathing neo-Diceyanism, you can skip to the latter discussion.

As co-blogger Mark Mancini explains in his invaluable Sunday Evening Administrative Review newsletter (subscribe!), the applicant in Morningstar tried to argue that correctness review should apply to a decision of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal to the effect that she was not entitled to bring a civil lawsuit against a former employer and should have pursued administrative remedies instead. The idea was that the jurisdictional boundary between a tribunal and the ordinary courts should be policed in much the same way as, Vavilov said, “the jurisdictional boundaries between two or more administrative bodies”, [63] ― that is, by have the court ensure the boundary is drawn correctly. But courts are not “administrative bodies” in the sense the Vavilov majority meant this phrase, and the Divisional Court makes short work of this argument. As Mark suggests, while the reasons it gives are very questionable, the conclusion is clearly correct.

But it shouldn’t be! Ms. Morningstar’s argument was, in Mark’s words, “doomed to failure” under Vavilov, but as a matter of principle it is actually exactly right. The Vavilov majority explains, sensibly, that

the rule of law cannot tolerate conflicting orders and proceedings where they result in a true operational conflict between two administrative bodies, pulling a party in two different and incompatible directions … Members of the public must know where to turn in order to resolve a dispute. … [T]he application of the correctness standard in these cases safeguards predictability, finality and certainty in the law of administrative decision making. [64]

That’s right so far as it goes. But what exactly changes if we replace the phrase “two administrative bodies” in the first sentence with “two adjudicative bodies”, so as to encompass the courts? Are the Rule of Law’s demands for predictability, finality, and certainty suddenly less stringent because a court is involved? Need members of the public not know where to turn in order to resolve a dispute? The Rule of Law applies in exactly the same way to jurisdictional conflicts between courts and tribunals as between tribunals, and should require correctness review in both situations.

It might be objected that this argument ignores the privative clause in the statute at issue in Morningstar. Section 31 of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, 1997 provides that the Tribunal “has exclusive jurisdiction to determine”, among other things, “whether, because of this Act, the right to commence an action is taken away”, and further that “[a] decision of the … Tribunal under this section is final and is not open to question or review in a court”. The true and tart response is: who cares? In Morningstar, the Divisional Court not only questioned and reviewed, but actually quashed the Tribunal’s decision on the question of whether, because of the Act, the applicant’s right to commence an action is taken away.

This isn’t a mistake, of course. Courts already ignore privative clauses, and rightly so. Vavilov explains why. As I pointed out here, it

embraces the Rule of Law principle … clearly and, crucially, as a constraint on the legislative power. According to the Vavilov majority,

Where a court reviews the merits of an administrative decision … the standard of review it applies must reflect the legislature’s intent with respect to the role of the reviewing court, except where giving effect to that intent is precluded by the rule of law. [23; emphasis added]

The majority goes on to specify that “[t]he starting point for the analysis is a presumption that the legislature intended the standard of review to be reasonableness”, [23] but “respect for the rule of law requires courts to apply the standard of correctness for certain types of legal questions”, [53] legislative intent notwithstanding.

If a statute attempted to make anything less than correctness the standard of review for jurisdictional boundaries between two administrative tribunals, Vavilov says that it should be ignored, because the Rule of Law, with its demands of predictability, finality, and certainty, requires it. A privative clause that attempts to exclude altogether review of decisions on the jurisdictional boundary between a tribunal and the ordinary courts should similarly be ignored.

But the Vavilov majority could not bring itself to take that approach, because it would be fatal to the entire conceit of deferential review on questions of law which the Supreme Court embraced in CUPE, Local 963 v New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, [1979] 2 SCR 227, and on various forms of which it has doubled down ever since. As Justice Brown wrote in West Fraser Mills Ltd v British Columbia(Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22, [2018] 1 SCR 635, “in many cases, the distinction between matters of statutory interpretation which implicate truly jurisdictional questions and those going solely to a statutory delegate’s application of its enabling statute will be, at best, elusive”. [124] When an administrative decision-maker is resolving questions of law, notably when it is interpreting the legislation granting it its powers, it is always engaged in the drawing of the boundary between its jurisdiction and that of the courts. To admit ― as one ought to ― that the Rule of Law requires these questions to be resolved by courts would cause the entire structure of Canadian administrative law to come crashing down. And so, to preserve it, Vavilov asks the courts to pretend that things that are actually entirely alike from a Rule of Law perspective are somehow mysteriously different. It is, as I said in the post linked to at the start, an instance of post-truth jurisprudence.

Now to my other point. In a couple of ways, Morningstar reminds me of the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v TeleZone Inc, 2010 SCC 62, [2010] 3 SCR 585. The issue there was whether a litigant who sought private law damages as compensation for an allegedly unlawful act of the federal Crown had, before bringing a civil claim in a provincial superior court, to pursue an application for judicial review in the Federal Court to establish the unlawfulness. It was, in other words, a conflict between remedial regimes potentially open to alleged victims of government wrongdoing. The Federal Court of Appeal had held that such victims had to seek judicial review first; the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that they did not. The Supreme Court agreed with the latter. It noted that following the Federal Court of Appeal’s approach “would relegate the provincial superior courts in such matters to a subordinate and contingent jurisdiction”. [4] It added too that the case was “fundamentally about access to justice. People who claim to be injured by government action should have whatever redress the legal system permits through procedures that minimize unnecessary cost and complexity.” [18]  

Morningstar, like TeleZone involves a conflict between two possible venues for redress, albeit of a private wrong rather than one resulting from government action. Employees who think they have been wronged in the course or during the breakdown of their employment relationship might seek compensation from the administrative regime supervised by the Tribunal or sue the employer in the civil courts. The substantive question in Morningstar was which of these regimes was the appropriate one on the facts. The courts should be able to resolve this conflict without deferring to the views of the venue administering one of these regimes, just as the Supreme Court did not defer to the Federal Court of Appeal in TeleZone. And, to be sure, there is a difference: the Superior Court that would be one of these conflicting jurisdictions would also be the court resolving the jurisdictional conflict. (The Divisional Court is a division of the Superior Court.) But that’s how our system is set up, and it’s not a reason for deferring to the other jurisdiction involved.

But the deeper and perhaps more important similarity between TeleZone ― and, specifically, the approach the Supreme Court rejected in TeleZone ― and Morningstar has to do with the functioning of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act. Its section 31 directs employees and employers to apply to the Tribunal for a ruling on whether they are can go to court, before they can actually litigate their claims ― much like the Federal Court of Appeal in TeleZone said those who consider suing the Crown for damages must first go to the Federal Court and seek judicial review. Former employees might then find themselves in the Divisional Court (and perhaps further in the Court of Appeal) for a judicial review, before they can start litigating the merits of their dispute, if it is one that can be litigated in the Superior Court.

To repeat, in TeleZone, the Supreme Court held that the conflict between competing remedial regimes should be resolved in such a way as to maximize access to justice and minimize cost and complexity. Specifically, this meant that litigants should be able to avoid a pointless journey through the Federal Courts before launching their claims in the Superior Courts. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Act might as well have been designed to do the exact opposite ― maximize cost and complexity and undermine access to justice. Of course, that’s not what the legislature was trying to do. It wanted to preserve the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. The legislature might even say, “hey, it’s not our fault that the Tribunal’s decisions can be judicially reviewed ― we said they can’t”. But the legislature acts against a background of constitutional principles, which have long included the availability of judicial review. It knew that its privative clause is constitutionally meaningless. And still it went ahead and created this nonsensical arrangement, instead of simply allowing the jurisdiction of the Tribunal to be raised, perhaps by way of a motion for summary judgment, in any litigation in the Superior Court.

The creation of administrative mechanisms such as the Tribunal ― and their partial insulation from judicial review by the application of deferential standards of review ― is often said to promote access to justice. Perhaps it might do so in the abstract. If a dispute stays within the confines of an administrative tribunal, it will usually be handled more cheaply than in the courts. But, at the very least, such arguments for the expansion of the administrative state must take into account the reality that multiplying jurisdictions means multiplying conflicts both among them and, even more often, between them and the courts. And the resolution of these conflicts is neither cost-free nor something that can be simply wished away. It’s a reminder that, in public law as elsewhere in heaven and earth, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Morningstar is, in a sense, a rather uninteresting case, at least in the part that I have addressed here. A first-instance judicial review court applies a clear instruction from the Supreme Court and, despite some loose language in its reasons gets it right. But it is still revealing. In Canadian administrative law, courts that do things right, or roughly right, so far as their duty to apply precedent is concerned, are still doing things wrong if we judge them by first principles. This is not a good place for the law to be.

Through Which Glass, Darkly?

Introducing a new article on the Rule of Law in two decisions of the supreme courts of Canada and the United Kingdom

I followed the challenge to the “hearing fees” that British Columbia imposed on litigants who wanted to have their day in court ― or at least their days, since an initial period was free of charge ― from its beginning as Vilardell v Dunham, 2012 BCSC 748 and to its resolution by the Supreme Court of Canada as Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v British Columbia (Attorney General), 2014 SCC 59, [2014] 3 SCR 31, writing almost a dozen posts in the process. And then the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom decided a case that was remarkably similar to Trial Lawyers, R (Unison) v Lord Chancellor, [2017] UKSC 51, [2017] 4 All ER 903, which involved a challenge to fees charged for access to employment law tribunals. I blogged about that decision too.

The two supreme courts came to similar conclusions: the fees were invalidated in both cases, out of a concern that they prevented ordinary litigants who could not afford them from accessing the forum where their rights would be ascertained. In Trial Lawyers this was said to be a violation of section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867; in Unison, of a common law right of access to court. Yet there was a striking contrast between the two decisions, and specifically between the ways in which they treated the Rule of Law. Trial Lawyers discusses this constitutional principle, but as something of an embarrassment, in the face of a scathing dissent by Justice Rothstein, who argues that it should not have discussed the Rule of Law at all. (He still does ― in his keynote address at this year’s Runnymede Conference, for example.) Unison‘s discussion of the Rule of Law, as a foundation of the right of access to court, is much more forthright, and sophisticated too.

This got me thinking. The result is an article that has been accepted for publication in the Common Law World Review, and which I have already posted on SSRN: “Through Which Glass Darkly? Constitutional Principle in Legality and Constitutionality Review“. The main idea is that what explains the difference in the depth and confidence with which the two courts treated the Rule of Law is that constitutional review, despite its power, is bound to be precarious in the absence of an on-point text, while legality review, although seemingly weak in that its outcome can be overturned by statute, actually makes compelling discussion of unwritten principle possible. Here is the abstract:

This article seeks to draw lessons from a comparison between the ways in which the Rule of Law is discussed in cases decided by the supreme courts of Canada and the United Kingdom on the issue of allegedly excessive fees levied on litigants seeking to access adjudication. After reviewing the factually quite similar cases of Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v British Columbia (Attorney General) and R (Unison) v Lord-Chancellor and it detailing these decisions’ respective constitutional settings, the article argues that, in contrast to the cursory treatment of the Rule of Law by the Supreme Court of Canada, the UK Supreme Court’s discussion is sophisticated and instructive. This suggests that legality review based on common law rights, which is not focused, and does not try to establish a connection, however tenuous, to an entrench constitutional text, may well allow for a more forthright and enlightening discussion of the principles at stake. Thus it follows that, in constitutional systems that feature strong-form judicial review based on entrenched texts, when regulations and administrative decisions are at issue, legality review should not be neglected. In those systems where strong-form judicial review is not available, legality review should not be regarded as an anomalous ersatz.

While I have argued here that Canadian courts can legitimately base their constitutional decisions on unwritten principles, rather than explicit textual provisions, in some circumstances, I do think that legality review (which, of course, Justice Cromwell favoured in Trial Lawyers) should be considered more often. Our law would be the richer for it.

One Does Not Simply

Ensuring access to justice isn’t simply a matter of the legal profession’s being more open to “experiments”

Justice Abella has published an op-ed (paywalled) in The Globe and Mail ― yes, another one. It’s being widely shared, with apparent approval, on Canadian law Twitter ― which may or may not reflect the sentiment of the profession more broadly. Justice Abella argues, in a nutshell, that the justice system is hidebound and in dire need of root-and-branch reform to be able to actually provide justice to ordinary litigants. Wanting to improve access to justice is, to be sure, a fine sentiment. However, Justice Abella’s analysis of the system’s problems ― which are real enough ― is remarkably simplistic, and she proposes no solution at all.

Justice Abella writes that the “public [has] been mad for a long, long time” about access to justice and, apparently taking the mad public’s side, wonders “why we still resolve civil disputes the way we did more than a century ago”. Her evidence for the claim that we do so is that in 1906 “Roscoe Pound criticized the civil justice system’s trials for being overly fixated on procedure, overly adversarial, too expensive, too long and too out of date”, and a claim that a an early 20th-century barrister “could, with a few hours of coaching, feel perfectly at home in today’s courtrooms. Can we say that about any other profession?”

Justice Abella attributes this situation to the fact that “the legal system … resist[s] experimenting with justice in order to find better ways to deliver it?” and keeps doing things the way it does for no other reason than “Because we’ve always done it this way”. Comprehensive reform ― not “incremental change” but “a whole new way to deliver justice to ordinary people with ordinary disputes and ordinary bank accounts” ― is necessary.

I have no courtroom experience, let alone ability to judge the public’s mood with any accuracy, so I cannot speak to the accuracy, if any, of what Justice Abella’s description of the justice system’s current state and of the popular reaction to it. I will reiterate that I do not believe that Supreme Court judges can, or should try to, channel “social values” or otherwise make themselves the purported spokespersons of the people. That’s not their job, and a good thing too, because they are supremely unqualified for it. But be that as it may, even if we grant, for argument’s sake, that Justice Abella’s descriptive claims are accurate, it is still the case that her analysis is devoid of all perspective. It considers the issue neither across time, nor in comparison with the state of affairs elsewhere in society. The resulting take is insular and unsound.

A historically informed view of the problem that Justice Abella discusses would have to acknowledge that it is very, very old. I’m no great historian, sadly, but as best I can tell access to justice and the remoteness of the courts from the common people were an issue going at least as far back as the English revolution in the 17th century. The expense and the incomprehensibility of legal proceedigns exercised Jeremy Bentham at the turn of the 19th. And then, as Justice Abella herself observes, they frustrated Roscoe pount in the early 20th, and any number of people in the 21st. People put forward various solutions too ― the puritans tried to establish courts outside London; Bentham was convinced that writing down the common law “into one great book (it need not be a very great one)” that would be “read through in churches, and put into boys’ hands, and made into exercises when they are at school” would do the trick. None of that worked.

One might of course conclude from this that the legal profession and the judiciary are, if anything, even worse than Justice Abella imagines. But isn’t the more plausible explanation for the persistence of access to justice problems that they are genuinely very difficult to solve, rather than that they are caused by laziness and obduracy? I will return to this issue shortly.

Before I do so, though, let me note that it’s simply not true that the rest of society has evolved beyond all recognition while the law has allegedly stood still. The work of academics and (perhaps even more so school teachers) looks much as it did not only 100, but 800 years ago. So does that of people in any number of other trades, if we put to one side the accumulation of technical knowledge, in the same way as Justice Abella puts to one side the evolution of substantive law. Even in medicine, to which Justice Abella appeals as an example of a forward-looking profession unafraid to “experiment with lives”, things are more complicated than she allows. The work of many specialist doctors has no doubt by transformed by all manner of gadgets. But what about that of general practitioners? Is it really so unrecognizable from a century ago?

The thing is, this is not because GPs, or chefs, or professors, are ― like lawyers ― hidebound and smug. Justice Abella simply implies that new and radically different is better, it is not clear why that should be. New can be better, but it need not be. If things are the way they are for some important reason, then ― so long as the reason is still present ― it is wise to keep them as they are, unless some weightier reason impels change.

And this brings me back to the question of why access to justice problems are genuinely difficult to solve. There is, in fact, a good ― although perhaps not a decisive ― reason for having those procedures whose existence so annoys Justice Abella. They are widely thought to promote more accurate decision-making, and they support the human dignity of the people who find themselves in front of the courts by giving them a chance to be heard and, no less importantly, to test and challenge the case that is being made against them. It is for these reasons that some or all of these procedures are required when people’s rights and obligations are being determined not by conventional courts, but by administrative decision-makers. Go back to 1906, and these tribunals often operated very differently, with no procedural safeguards to speak of. Yet this aroused criticism, and the critics prevailed; change came, partly through legislation and partly through decisions of the courts, widely celebrated now although they would have been anathema to the champions of experimentation and efficiency of the Progressive era.

In my last post I wrote about the trade-offs involved in designing administrative procedures. If procedure is good, there can be too much of a good thing. Additional procedural safeguards eventually yield little improvement in terms of more accurate or even more dignity-respecting adjudication, yet their cost, both to the taxpayer and to the parties, can become intolerable. Gerard Kennedy (whom I thank for his kind words about my post) has suggested that Justice Abella made just this point about trade-offs. But, respectfully, that’s not how I read her op-ed. There is no acknowledgment of trade-offs in Justice Abella’s argument; she does not recognize that there are reasons, beyond simple resistance to change and unwillingness to “experiment”, for the system being as it is. She blames the legal profession’s conservatism, and has no time for other considerations.

All that is not to say that there need be no reforms. My own preference, expressed since the earliest days of this blog, is for deregulating the legal profession. Justice Abella, I rather suspect, might not be on board with this particular experiment, but I would love to see it. Lack of competition is bound to make the legal system less innovative than it might be, so bringing about more of it is likely to ameliorate the problems Justice Abella is concerned about. But we should not delude ourselves about how much this, or any other, reform might accomplish. For one thing, so long as the state exists, the court system, if not the legal profession, is bound to remain a monopoly. Sure, alternative dispute resolution exists, but it is not suitable for resolving certain kinds of disputes. And, beyond that, those trade-offs, and the need for a system that provides substantive justice and procedural fairness, and not only expediency, is not going away.

Put to one side the question of whether a person who is sitting at the apex of the legal system, and has been for 16 years, who has been a judge for almost 45, who has accepted innumerable plaudits from the legal profession and academy, should really be criticizing the system as if she is not part of it. Leave it to moral philosophers. But we need not wait for their judgment to say that Justice Abella’s argument is driven by the conceit that solving the problems she identifies would be easy if only the system were less stuck in the past and more willing to try new approaches. The fact that she does not even begin to tell us what these approaches might be ― that she proposes no new idea, even one as daft as Bentham’s public readings of the not-very-great law book ― should be a hint: things aren’t as simple as she would like us to think.

There is a word for this tactic of setting up an alleged conflict of “the public” or “the people” against some obstructionist, and probably self-interested, elites standing in the way of change; of denying the difficult trade-offs that change would require; of claiming that a transformation of society, such that trade-offs can be dispensed with altogether, is around the corner if only the resolute leaders in communion with the enlightened people were in change. It’s a word that one would not have associated with Justice Abella, but one has to, given that this rhetoric is precisely what she deploys in this op-ed. The word is, of course, “populism”. In the previous op-ed, linked to at the beginning of my post, Justice Abella, denounced populism, arguing that “[m]any countries around the world … have made Faustian bargains, selling their democratic souls in exchange for populist approval.” This was, she wrote, “unconscionable.” But that was then, I suppose, and this is now.

Just as she does with the Rule of Law, alternatively disparaging and extolling it as suits the circumstances or the taste of her audience, Justice Abella can castigate populism or engage in it. One might think this is, indeed, unconscionable. But, perhaps, things are not so bad. As I wrote in commenting on that previous op-ed,

Justice Abella thinks that she is some sort of great and wise philosopher, and as such is qualified to dispense advice, both judicially and extra-judicially, on how people should organize their affairs and even what they should believe in. Her ladyship is labouring under a sad misapprehension in this regard. She is no great thinker. She has no answer to obvious questions that her arguments raise, and no justification for her extravagant assertions of authority.

She might simply not understand what she is doing. I’m not sure about this, but she really might. Either way, July 1, 2021, when she must at last retire from the Supreme Court, cannot come soon enough.

Day 11: Asher Honickman

Standing on basic principles

Partner, Matthews Abogado LLP

As with many of the other contributors to this excellent symposium, the three dissenting judgments I have chosen share a common theme. Each articulates a basic principle of Canada’s constitutional order ― one which was true before the decision was handed down and continues to be true today, but which was ignored or marginalized in the majority decision.

These are not necessarily my “favourite” dissents. I have had the benefit of reading most of the other contributions and have consciously avoided dissents that have already been discussed. I have also cast the net wide and selected one dissent from each of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, with (coincidentally) 68 years between each one. Without further ado, here they are.

Justice Strong in Severn v The Queen (1878) 2 SCR 70: Judicial Restraint

As with many division of powers cases of the era, Severn was about alcohol. John Severn was charged with manufacturing and selling large quantities of beer without a license in what was then the Town of Yorkville, contrary to Ontario law. Severn argued that the law was unconstitutional as it came within Parliament’s exclusive authority to regulate trade and commerce under s.91(2) of the then BNA Act. A majority of the Supreme Court agreed.

The various majority judgments (Supreme Court decisions were written seriatim until the second half of the 20th century) adopted a decontextualized plain reading of the Act. Despite the fact that the impugned law concerned manufacture and sale wholly within the province, the majorities held that it nevertheless came within “trade and commerce”. The judges drew comparisons between the United States Constitution and the more centralized BNA Act. But there was very little discussion of the text and architecture of sections 91 & 92 and particularly the interplay between the provincial power to regulate “property and civil rights” on the one hand and the federal trade and commerce power on the other (the Privy Council would take up this task several years later in Citizens Insurance v Parsons, (1881) 7 App Cas 96, significantly narrowing the scope of the trade and commerce power in the process).

Justice Strong began his dissent by stating that the Court should afford the legislature the presumption that it was acting constitutionally and should seek to discover a constitutional construction of the statute. This “presumption of constitutionality”, first articulated by Strong J., would become a defining feature of constitutional interpretation by the end of the century (A.H.F. Lefroy would cite it as one of the 68 leading propositions of constitutional law) and continues to be applied to this day. Strong J. continued with a second even more central principle: “that it does not belong to Courts of Justice to interpolate constitutional restrictions; their duty being to apply the law, not to make it”.

Justice Strong agreed with the majority’s flawed interpretation of the trade and commerce power. However, he correctly noted that the language of the BNA Act limited this power to what had not been exclusively granted to the provinces – in this case, the power over licensing. The term “other licenses” in s.92(9) had to be read broadly – if it was confined to those types of licenses that had been in existence prior to Confederation as the majority preferred, then the power to impose licenses would be disparate across the provinces, which is not what the BNA Act envisages.

Severn was the first decision of the Supreme Court of Canada to interpret the division of powers, predating all of the doctrinally significant decisions of the Privy Council. And it shows. The majority judgments appear adrift in a sea of doctrinal uncertainty. Strong J.’s dissent is far from perfect, but it provided an early and important articulation of the judicial function in the realm of constitutional interpretation – apply the law and approach the task with a degree of humility and restraint.

Justice Rand in Reference to the Validity of Orders in Council in relation to Persons of Japanese Race, [1946] SCR 248: Executive Power is Constrained by Law

The Japanese Persons Reference was a low point in Canadian history. In December of 1945, the Governor in Council ordered all individuals of the “Japanese race” who had previously expressed a desire in writing to be “repatriated” to Japan to be sent there. The Order applied to Japanese nationals, naturalized Canadian citizens and natural born British subjects. A second related Order revoked the British status and Canadian citizenship of naturalized Canadians of Japanese background. These Orders were made pursuant to the War Measures Act, which remained in place notwithstanding the war had ended several months earlier. The majority held that the Orders were intra vires, a finding that was affirmed by the Privy Council. Nearly 4,000 individuals of Japanese ethnicity were sent to Japan. It is not clear how many went involuntarily, but presumably at least some (and perhaps most or all) wished to continue living in Canada once hostilities ceased and Japan came under military occupation.

Justice Rand agreed that the Governor in Council could deport Japanese nationals and naturalized Canadians of Japanese background, but he disagreed that the Order could be applied to natural born British subjects who wished to remain in Canada. The reason was twofold. Firstly, in the case of Japanese nationals and naturalized Canadians, Supreme Allied Commander General MacArthur had made a corresponding order for their “repatriation”. However, no such order existed in relation to natural born British subjects. The effect of the Order would be to banish a British subject to a country without that country’s invitation or consent in circumstances where that person would remain a British subject. This was surely beyond the scope of the War Measures Act. Secondly, since natural born British subjects remained Canadian citizens and thus had the right to return to Canada at any time after being deported, it seemed improbable that the Governor in Council had deemed the one-time removal of such a to be necessary or advisable for the peace, order and welfare of Canada, a precondition for deportation under the War Measures Act.    

Rand J. also took issue with the revocation of British subject status of naturalized citizens of Japanese origin. Any revocation had to be made in accordance with the Naturalization Act, which stated that citizenship could only be revoked where the person demonstrated “disaffection or disloyalty” to the King. The Governor in Council had made no such finding regarding these individuals, but the justices in the majority argued it was implicit as each person had made a request in writing for repatriation. It is far from clear the circumstances that prevailed when these requests were made; in any event, they came on heels of the internment of Japanese people during the war. Justice Rand noted that the Order was, in effect, a “penal provision of a drastic nature” and that he was not prepared to simply conclude by implication that the Governor in Council was satisfied in each case that the naturalized subject was disaffected or disloyal.

The Japanese Persons Reference is seldom thought of as an administrative law decision. But at its core, it is about how judges ought to review executive action. The case is a sobering reminder that if administrators are not constrained by law and are left alone to exercise their discretion, then they will invariably trample upon individual freedom.

Justice Rand could not turn to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to invalidate the Orders; but he appealed to the foundational rule of law principle that any exercise of state power must find its source in a legal rule. His dissent illustrates that liberty does not begin or end with enumerated rights, and that a government constrained by law is a necessary condition for any free society.

Justice Rothstein in Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v. British Columbia (Attorney General), 2014 SCC 59, [2014] 3 SCR 31: The Primacy of Constitutional Text

As I argued in my post for last year’s symposium, B.C. Trial Lawyers Association is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in modern history. In grounding a novel constitutional right of access to justice in section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867, the Court ignored the text, context, and purpose of the provision, along with settled doctrine.

Justice Rothstein’s lone dissent is powerful throughout, but particularly in its criticism of the majority’s reliance upon the rule of law as a basis to invalidate legislation. There is no doubt that the rule of law is a foundational principle of the Canadian state. But it means particular things in particular contexts (for example, as noted above, that state action must be grounded in a legal rule). The majority employed the term in a far more nebulous manner, and relied upon it to elevate another amorphous concept – access to justice – to constitutional status. By contrast, Justice Rothstein emphasized the “primacy of the written constitutional text”, and that the rule of law requires courts to give effect to legislation that conforms to that text. As such, “the rule of law does not demand that this Court invalidate the [law] — if anything, it demands that we uphold it”.

This is the salient point of the dissent. Judges exercise public power that is both granted and limited by the text of the Constitution. Justice Rothstein acknowledged that the courts may, on occasion, turn to unwritten principles to fill in “gaps” in the constitutional text; but he cautioned that “gaps do not exist simply because the courts believe that the text should say something that it does not”.  Where a court changes the meaning of a constitutional provision, it has, in effect, amended the Constitution by judicial fiat and, in doing so, has endangered the rule of law and the very basis upon which the judiciary is empowered to review legislation.  

Note: Mr. Honickman stepped in, almost without notice, to replace one of the contributors, who had to withdraw for reasons beyond her (let alone our) control. Co-blogger Mark Mancini and I are most grateful to him for helping us out! – LS

L’ordre et le rêve

Le contrôle judiciaire après Dunsmuir

The Hon. Louis LeBel CC

Le texte n’appartient plus à son auteur; ce lieu commun de la critique littéraire s’applique particulièrement bien à l’œuvre judiciaire. Une fois déposé, le jugement s’incorpore dans un patrimoine commun, le droit ou le système juridique d’un état ou d’une communauté politique. Il tombera souvent dans le silence.

Parfois il connaîtra une notoriété, peut-être temporaire. Loué ou critiqué, il aura connu le sort que Voltaire au 18e siècle souhaitait à son œuvre, « que l’on en parle en bien, que l’on en parle en mal, pourvu qu’on en parle! » La lecture des contributions communiquées sur les blogues des professeurs Daly et Sirota confirme que tel a été le sort de l’arrêt Dunsmuir depuis 10 ans.

Cependant, puisque cet arrêt n’appartient plus à ceux qui l’ont rendu, il ne me semblerait pas approprié de m’engager dans une défense et illustration de ses mérites. Toutefois, je n’entends pas, même en ces temps de carême, me vêtir d’un sac de toile, répandre des cendres sur ma tête et commencer d’amères pénitences pour obtenir le pardon de la communauté juridique canadienne.

À l’occasion de ces 10 ans, je préfère partager quelques réflexions sur le contrôle judiciaire tel qu’on le connaît au Canada et sur la conception que l’on s’en fait. Le sujet m’a intéressé, bon gré mal gré, au cours de ma vie professionnelle comme avocat puis comme juge. Je pense d’ailleurs avoir plaidé mon premier dossier de contrôle judiciaire en 1964. Jusqu’à ce que je devienne juge, les affaires de contrôle judiciaire sont demeurées constamment une partie de mon horizon intellectuel. Il m’est arrivé aussi de donner quelques cours sur le sujet.

Puis comme juge à la Cour d’appel du Québec puis à la Cour suprême du Canada, les problèmes de contrôle judiciaire ont constitué une part substantielle de mon activité. Si ma mémoire est fidèle, vers 1996, les affaires de contrôle judiciaire représentaient environ 20 % du rôle civil de la division d’appel de Montréal. Cependant, si j’ai aimé le droit administratif, je n’ai jamais salivé à l’idée de plaider ou d’entendre une affaire de contrôle judiciaire. Je ne me souviens pas d’être parti entendre Dunsmuir en clamant le matin mon bonheur à mon épouse.

J’admets le fait de la popularité et l’abondance des activités de contrôle judiciaire. Je les ai considérées souvent comme des problèmes intéressants de procédure civile et de droit administratif. Elles représentaient une part complexe des tentatives d’aménagement du droit administratif ainsi que l’organisation des rapports entre les composantes d’un état démocratique moderne et des relations entre les groupes de toute nature qui forment la société civile.

J’ai donc vécu comme praticien et comme juge plusieurs systèmes de contrôle judiciaire et l’émergence de paradigmes divers gouvernant ceux-ci. Rien ne fut parfait et l’expérimentation s’est continuée. Après d’autres, j’ai apporté une contribution dont la nature fait elle-même l’objet de commentaires à l’occasion de cet anniversaire.

Il m’est arrivé de percevoir dans le fonctionnement du système de contrôle judiciaire un obstacle de l’accès à la justice ou à son efficacité dans les domaines relevant du droit administratif. Que l’on revienne à la case zéro après 15 ou 20 ans de débats judiciaires ne m’est jamais apparu comme une solution admissible, comme je reconnais volontiers l’avoir dit au cours d’une audience de la Cour Suprême, ainsi que le soulignait Me Gall dans sa contribution. Je demeure aussi inconfortable devant des systèmes qui, superposant des procédures de contrôle judiciaires à des régimes d’appel administratif créent une demi douzaine de paliers de juridiction. En réalité, mon intérêt pour le contrôle judiciaire correspond sans doute à celui du chirurgien devant un cancer du pancréas complexe.

Néanmoins, la question du contrôle judiciaire demeure présente et doit être traitée dans un système juridique comme celui d’un pays comme le Canada. Celui-ci reste soumis à la règle de droit comme la Cour suprême le rappelait dans le Renvoi sur la sécession de Québec[1]. Les structures constitutionnelles mises en place par la Constitution de 1867, notamment quant au rôle des Cours supérieures, rendent la question incontournable. Dans ce contexte, le contrôle judiciaire représente un mécanisme nécessaire pour assurer le respect d’un ordonnancement juridique fondamental. Cependant, il doit s’insérer dans la vie d’un état démocratique moderne dont les fonctions de réglementation sociales et économiques ont connu une forte expansion, bien que celle-ci n’ait jamais fait l’unanimité. Il s’inscrit dans les mécanismes d’un droit public, constitutionnel et administratif qui pénètre profondément toute la vie de la société canadienne.

Cette forme de contrôle de l’activité administrative implique nécessairement des conceptions diverses du rôle des tribunaux supérieurs et des mécanismes de formation du droit dans la société contemporaine. Il soulève aussi des interrogations fondamentales sur la nature du droit et des processus de sa formation de celui-ci, y compris au sujet de la nature et de la mise en œuvre des méthodes d’interprétation.

Des commentaires recueillis sur les blogues des professeurs Daly et Sirota, ressortent deux tendances fondamentales. L’une voit dans le contrôle judiciaire une méthode destinée à assurer l’ordre dans le système juridique canadien particulièrement à l’égard des questions de droit. Pour elle, le contrôle judiciaire, à la limite, ne se distinguerait guère de l’appel. Il laisserait sans doute la décision sur le fait au décideur administratif mais exigerait que la plupart des questions de droit soient réglées selon un test d’exactitude défini par les tribunaux supérieurs. Aussi, de fortes réserves se manifestent à l’égard d’une approche déférente qui permettrait aux tribunaux administratifs de définir leur conception de la conformité aux normes fondamentales comme la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés ou, au Québec, la Charte des droits et liberté de la personne[2].

Au fond, cette première tendance vise à l’unification des règles de droit et de leur mise en œuvre par le choix d’une norme d’intervention fondamentalement similaire à celle de l’appel civil ou pénal.

L’autre tendance découle d’une opinion toujours essentielle dans l’aménagement du système de contrôle judiciaire canadien, celle du juge Dickson, plus tard juge en chef dans l’arrêt Syndicat canadien de la Fonction publique, section locale 963 c. Société des alcools du Nouveau‑Brunswick[3]. Comme le note fort à propos la professeure Valois dans sa contribution à ce groupe d’études, elle étend clairement le droit du contrôle judiciaire au mérite de la décision administrative en la soumettant à une norme de rationalité au lieu de limiter l’intervention du tribunal supérieur à la définition de sa compétence et à l’examen des conditions dans lesquelles la décision a été rendue.

Cependant, cette extension s’accompagnait de la reconnaissance d’une forme de déférence en faveur du décideur administratif, même sur un grand nombre de questions de droit. Elle acceptait qu’il existe des dossiers où les choix interprétatifs de décideur administratif primeraient en dépit de désaccords potentiels avec l’opinion de la cour de contrôle. En ce sens, cette orientation qui s’est retrouvée dans des formes diverses d’aménagement du contrôle judiciaire depuis ce jugement, comporte une reconnaissance implicite qu’un système de droit laisse place à une marge de pluralisme juridique. Le droit n’est pas nécessairement univoque et une des fonctions d’un organisme administratif peut consister dans le développement de ses propres orientations juridiques. Un jugement, l’arrêt Domtar[4] admettait d’ailleurs cette possibilité en rejetant même les inconsistances des décisions d’un tribunal administratif comme justification à elle seule d’un exercice du pouvoir de contrôle judiciaire.

L’aménagement du contrôle judiciaire dans cette seconde tendance s’est réalisé, comme on le sait, sous des formes très diverses. La construction de l’œuvre se continuera inévitablement. Cependant, elle a reconnu l’existence d’une autonomie partielle des tribunaux administratifs, certainement sur le fait, mais aussi sur le droit au cours de tous les débats sur les méthodes de contrôle judiciaire.

Le débat incessant sur les normes de contrôle judicaire a d’ailleurs occulté en partie le développement du droit administratif comme tel. La focalisation sur les normes de contrôle et les problèmes d’accès à celui-ci a conduit parfois à négliger que le droit administratif se développait au niveau des juridictions inférieures qui régissent largement la vie quotidienne des membres de la société[5]. On oublierait parfois, à lire notamment une partie de la doctrine de droit administratif, que celui-ci ne se limite pas au contrôle judiciaire. Pourtant, l’examen d’une œuvre récente comme la 7e édition du traité de droit administratif du professeur Patrice Garant[6], confirme la diversité et l’ampleur du droit administratif. Cependant, le contrôle judiciaire tend à absorber toute l’attention. Parfois, sa conception exprime le rêve de la formation d’un ordre stable et de règles d’application quasi-automatiques, dispensant de l’exercice d’un jugement prudentiel. Cette approche oublie les exigences de la vie d’une société et l’importance de l’expérimentation juridique. Elle néglige aussi la nature du droit de l’interprétation juridique qui opère parfois comme mécanisme de création et non seulement, comme une technique mécanique de dégagement d’un sens caché d’un texte.

Le droit ne s’accomplit jamais définitivement. Des problèmes continuent à se poser. Je pense, par exemple, à l’intégration des questions d’équité procédurale dans le système de contrôle judiciaire. On peut aussi s’interroger sur la question des limites du système actuel de contrôle judiciaire et de sa capacité de s’adapter aux fonctions administratives autres que celles d’adjudication. Comment fixer les limites de ce contrôle et ses modes d’exercices particulièrement à l’égard de l’application des normes fondamentales par exemple dans le cas des fonctions de décision individuelle et de réglementation de l’administration publique.

L’essence du contrôle judiciaire correspond à des objectifs simples à définir : maintenir un ordre juridique stable sur des questions de droit fondamentales et assurer le respect d’un processus décisionnel rationnel et juste dans l’administration publique. La réalisation de ces objectifs demeure difficile surtout lorsque le contrôle judiciaire est trop souvent employé pour prolonger des débats devant la justice ou obtenir une seconde chance de modifier une décision prise en réalité dans les marges de la raison et de l’équité procédurale.

L’une des beautés du droit se retrouve dans la nécessité de faire appel à l’imagination au-delà des tentatives ou des espoirs de s’endormir dans un cadre formel immuable. Le présent débat sur les normes de contrôle témoigne de cette tentation et de ce défi. Il s’agit d’apprendre à contrôler le contrôle judiciaire.


[1] Renvoi relatif à la sécession de Québec, [1998] 2 R.C.S. 217.

[2] RLRQ, c. C-12.

[3] S.C.F.P. c. Société des Alcools du N.-B., [1979] 2 R.C.S. 227.

[4] Domtar Inc. c. Québec Commission d’appel en matière de lesion professionnelles, [1993] 2 R.C.S. 786.

[5] Voir: par exemple, P. Noreau, F. Houle, M. Valois, P. Issalys, La justice administrative : entre indépendance et responsabilité – Jalons pour la création d’un régime commun des décideurs administratifs indépendants, Éditions Yvon Blais, Cowansville 2014.

[6] P. Garant, Droit administratif, 7e édition, Éditions Yvon Blais, Cowansville 2018.

Did Dunsmuir Simplify the Standard of Review?

An empirical assessment

Robert Danay, Justice Canada and UBC

(The author’s views do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Canada or the Government of Canada)

While the Supreme Court issued three sets of reasons in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick,[i] all members of the Court agreed that the system governing the standard of review in administrative law had become too complex and was in need of simplification. Mr. Justice Binnie offered perhaps the most compelling reason to support this reform: access to justice.

The existing system, Binnie J argued, inflated the time and legal resources required to adjudicate what is supposed to be a quick and inexpensive way of challenging governmental decisions. As he persuasively put it (at para. 133) “[e]very hour of a lawyer’s preparation and court time devoted to unproductive ‘lawyer’s talk’ poses a significant cost to the applicant.…A small business denied a licence or a professional person who wants to challenge disciplinary action should be able to seek judicial review without betting the store or the house on the outcome.” As a decade has now passed since these words were penned, it behooves us to ask: did the Court in Dunsmuir succeed in reducing the legal resources devoted by litigants to debating the standard of review? As readers of Paul Daly’s Administrative Law Matters blog may already know, my preferred approach to answering such questions is through empirical analysis.[ii] This case is no exception.

As described in greater detail below, after reviewing a sample of 120 factums filed by litigants before and after Dunsmuir was decided, it would appear that the Supreme Court may not have been successful in reducing the legal resources devoted by parties to mooting the standard of review. This suggests that – as Madam Justice Abella recently argued in Wilson v. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.[iii] – significant new doctrinal changes may be needed in order to fully realize the goal of simplifying the standard of review for litigants and lower courts.

Methodology

Using WestlawNext Canada’s database of factums extracted from court files,[iv] I collected factums from judicial review applications and statutory appeals in the Ontario Divisional Court and the Federal Courts. With each jurisdiction, I collected the 30 factums in the database that were filed in the period immediately preceding the release of Dunsmuir (going back as far as July of 2006) as well as the most recent 30 factums found in the database (these span the period from September of 2013 to December of 2016).

As a rough measure of the extent to which parties spent legal resources on mooting the standard of review, I tabulated the number of paragraphs in each factum devoted to that issue as well as the proportion of the total paragraphs in each factum on the standard of review. Comparing the average of both figures from before and after Dunsmuir affords a crude assessment of whether the goal of simplifying the standard of review for litigants was successful.

With regard to the Ontario Divisional Court, the 60 factums that I examined concerned judicial review applications or statutory appeals of a variety of different administrative decision-makers, the most common being the Director of the Financial Services Commission of Ontario, a municipality, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario or the Environmental Review Tribunal. The 60 factums in the dataset that were filed in the Federal Courts primarily concerned a variety of intellectual property-related decision-makers such as the Registrar of Trade-marks and the Commissioner of Patents as well as the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and adjudicators dealing with federal labour relations matters.

Results: No Apparent Reduction in Legal Argument on Standard of Review

The results of this empirical analysis suggest that the Court in Dunsmuir may not have been successful in reducing the legal resources that parties were required to spend in order to address the standard of review

With regard to factums filed in the Ontario Divisional Court, the average number of paragraphs dealing with the standard of review increased from 8.5 paragraphs per factum before Dunsmuir to 10.4 paragraphs more recently, representing an increase of 22%. Similarly, the average share of factums devoted to debating the standard of review increased after Dunsmuir, from 14.2% in 2006-08 to 16.5% in 2013-15, which represents an increase of 16%.

Danay1

The data from the Federal Courts exhibit a similar trend. The average number of paragraphs dealing with the standard of review increased from 2.6 paragraphs per factum before Dunsmuir to 3.4 paragraphs more recently, an almost 31% increase. On the other hand, the overall percentage of factums devoted to the standard of review in the Federal Courts remained unchanged at 6%.

Danay2

While this limited study has some obvious methodological limitations,[v] it does seem to suggest that the changes made by the Supreme Court to the standard of review in Dunsmuir have not reduced the extent to which parties must devote resources to arguing the standard of review.

Conclusion: Vindication for Madam Justice Abella?

The data reviewed above provide some support for the provocative position taken by Abella J in Wilson. In that case Abella J decried as “insupportable” the fact that a substantial portion of the parties’ factums in that case and the decisions of the lower courts were occupied with what the applicable standard of review should be. This, she suggested (at para 20), required the Court to “think about whether this obstacle course is necessary or whether there is a principled way to simplify the path to reviewing the merits.”

Madam Justice Abella’s proposed solution was to adopt a single reasonableness standard of review.[vi] While none of her colleagues were willing to endorse this proposal, Abella J conceded (at para. 19) that “[t]here are undoubtedly many models that would help simplify the standard of review labyrinth we currently find ourselves in.” If simplification in the name of access to justice remains a priority, members of the Court will need to explore and adopt such a model in the coming years. If they do, then that new model will be ripe for further empirical assessment when it is ultimately applied by litigants and lower courts.


[i] [2008] 1 SCR 190 [Dunsmuir].

[ii] See Robert Danay, “Quantifying Dunsmuir: An Empirical Analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Jurisprudence on Standard of Review” (2016) 66 UTLJ 555 [Danay, Quantifying Dunsmuir].

[iii] [2016] 1 SCR 77 [Wilson].

[iv] WestlawNext indicates on its website that this database “includes facta extracted from the court files of significant court cases in every Canadian Common Law jurisdiction.” These documents are selected from cases that fall into 12 different subject areas including “Canadian Cases on Employment Law,” “Canadian Environmental Law Reports,” “Intellectual Property Cases” and “Municipal and Planning Law Reports.”

[v] Aside from the fact that the dataset of factums is not truly random, I have not sought to control for potentially confounding factors using a multiple regression analysis. For an explanation of why I tend to reject doing so see Danay, Quantifying Dunsmuir, supra note 2 at 576.

[vi] Ibid. at paras. 28-37.

Polyphony

How different constitutional orders respond to attempts at denying citizens access to adjudication

The UK Supreme Court recently delivered a judgment that will, I think, be of interest to those Canadian readers who have not yet heard of it. That is because the case, R (Unison) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51, arises out of circumstances that are fundamentally similar to those of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v. British Columbia (Attorney General), 2014 SCC 59, [2014] 3 SCR 31. Trial Lawyers, which I summarized here, concerned a challenged to the fees that litigants had to pay for each day they argued their cases in the (trial) Supreme Court of British Columbia. Unison involved fees imposed on litigants who took their cases to tribunals charged with the resolution of employment law disputes. But the ways in which the courts addressed the legal issues highlights the differences both between the respective constitutional frameworks of Canada and the UK, and between the courts’ understandings of their roles within these frameworks.

In Trial Lawyers the majority addressed the constitutionality of hearing fees, concluding that, if they are set so high as to prevent people accessing superior courts, they would contravene section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which had previously been held to protect the “core” jurisdiction of the courts to which it refers. While the Chief Justice’s opinion, for the majority, also addressed the principle of the Rule of Law, it invoked this principle only as additional support for its conclusions ― Justice Rothstein’s accusations to the contrary notwithstanding. Only Justice Cromwell, in his concurrence, proposed deciding the case on administrative law grounds, and would have held that since the hearing fees were imposed by delegated legislate made pursuant to a statute that preserved the common law right of access to courts, they could not validly interfere with this right. Yet interfere with it they did, and they were therefore invalid for that reason.

By contrast, Unison was decided on administrative law grounds ― and the principle of the Rule of Law was central to the UK Supreme Court’s reasoning. Having concluded that, as a matter of empirical fact (on which more below), the fees at issue deter substantial numbers of people from pursuing their claims, the Court asked itself whether “the text of” the statute pursuant to which the fees were imposed by the executive, “but also the constitutional principles which underlie the text, and the principles of statutory interpretation which give effect to those principles”  [65] provided authority for setting the fees at their  current level. The relevant principles included, in particular, “the constitutional right of access to justice: that is to say, access to the courts (and tribunals …)”, [65] which in turn is an aspect of the Rule of Law. They also included the idea that rights granted by a statute cannot be nullified by delegated  legislation purportedly authorized by a different statute.

The Court began with what Mark Elliott, on his excellent Public Law for Everyone blog, described as

a primer — albeit a very powerful one — on what the rule of law means … . Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Court felt it necessary to drive home some very fundamental propositions — ones that should not really need to be driven home — because the Government’s position indicated ignorance of or contempt for them.

As part of this “primer”, the Court emphasized that

Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. … In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade. That is why the courts do not merely provide a public service like any other. [65]

In the course of adjudicating disputes, courts both ascertain important legal principles and provides the assurance that “[p]eople and businesses … will be able to enforce their rights if they have to do so, and … that if they fail to meet their obligations, there is likely to be a remedy against them.” [71] For this assurance to be effective, “people and businesses” must be able to take their disputes to courts or tribunals, if need be.

Given the importance of access to courts and tribunals, “any hindrance or impediment by the executive requires clear authorisation by Parliament”, [78] and the authorization will only be taken to extend so far as the achievement of its purposes requires. As Parliament did not clear empower the executive to levy fees that would prevent litigants from accessing tribunals, and as the fees at issue had precisely that effect, they must be held not to have been authorized by the statute under whose purported authority they were imposed. In addition, they “must be regarded as rendering … nugatory” [104] the rights which the tribunals are supposed to enforce, thought in the Court’s view this point this point overlapped with the Rule of Law one.

It is tempting for people used to constitutional frameworks where legislation can be invalidated for inconsistency with the supreme law to look down on a decision based on administrative law grounds, which can be overridden by legislation. Indeed, even prof. Elliott writes that “for all that the case represents a striking and robust reaffirmation of fundamental constitutional principles, it also hints at — or least raises questions about — the limits of those principles” ― within the UK constitutional context, that is. After all, if the UK executive insists on collecting prohibitive tribunal fees, it can (try to) get Parliament to enact them into statute, or explicitly allow fees to be set at levels that will result in impeded access. If the UK Parliament does either of these things, there can probably be no challenge to its decision within the UK’s internal legal order, subject to courts taking up the occasional musings of some judges about limits to Parliamentary sovereignty ― an unlikely, and at least arguably an undesirable prospect. (Prof. Elliott, mixing metaphors somewhat, describes as a “nuclear option”, and says that “we will cross this bridge if we ever come to it, while fervently hoping that we never do”.) It is better, we might be tempted to say, for courts to have at their disposal the more powerful weapons that an entrenched constitution, like that of Canada, can provide.

But, while there is a good deal of truth to this view, it is not the whole truth. Prof. Elliott suggests that

in some constitutional orders … administrative orders incompatible with the right of access to justice would be unlawful — because the constitution would withhold the authority to legislate in breach of such a fundamental right.

But things might not be so simple. Prof. Elliott does not say what “constitutional orders” he has in mind, but at least in the Canadian constitutional order, it is by no means clear that the constitution withholds the right to legislate in breach of the right of access to justice. In commenting on Trial Lawyers here, I said that not only does the reasoning of the majority opinion in Trial Lawyers “rest on shaky foundations” whose weaknesses are brutally exposed by Justice Rothstein’s dissent, but they “leave some important questions” ― questions about the limits of the constitutional principles that it applies ― “unanswered”. In particular, it is very doubtful that the right of access to superior courts constiutionalized in Trial Lawyers extends to provincial court and to administrative tribunals  (which is to say, to the sort of decision-maker at issue in Unison!), to which section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867, on which that decision ostensibly rests, does not apply.

The legitimacy of judicial interventions to uphold fundamental constitutional principles can be questioned not only in constitutional systems that acknowledge Parliamentary sovereignty, but also in those that allow for judicial review of legislation ― if not in principle, then in (almost) any given case. The best answer to such questions is, of course, the existence of a clear constitutional provision in which the intervention at issue  can fairly be rested. In the absence of such constitutional authority, judges are apt to grasp at textual straws, and, at the risk of also mixing metaphors, we know that a house built of straw can easily be blown away. In short, the existence of an entrenched constitution does not always make for very solid decision-making.

Indeed, Unison has at least one substantial advantage over Trial Lawyers. Its discussion of the Rule of Law principle is relatively extensive and forthright. The UK Supreme Court makes no apologies about the Rule of Law being central to its decision. The majority opinion in Trial Lawyers, however, approached the Rule of Law somewhat gingerly, and insisted that it is not the main basis for its decision ― though this was not enough to mollify Justice Rothstein, who claimed that

[i]n using an unwritten principle to support expanding the ambit of s. 96 to such an extent the majority subverts the structure of the Constitution and jeopardizes the primacy of the written text. [93]

For my own part, I have argued here that Trial Lawyers should, and could, have been decided on the basis of the Rule of Law principle ― though my argument was a version of the “no making rights nugatory” one that the Unison Court only briefly addressed. Perhaps the Supreme Court of Canada did not address it only because it was not put it by the parties. (The cases on which it rests in the Canadian context are not well known, I suspect.) Perhaps it would have found this argument unconvincing in any event. But I suspect that the Trial Lawyers majority would have hesitated to enlist this argument even if it were convinced by it, due to the sort of concern to which Justice Rothstein appealed (unpersuasively in my view). As Jeremy Waldron observed in “The Core of the Case against Judicial Review”, constitutional adjudication under an entrenched text is liable to pay more attention to the text than to fundamental principle. In my view, this is not always a bad thing ― but it is, admittedly, not always a good one either.

Before concluding, let me note another point of contrast between Trial Lawyers and Unison: their respective treatment of empirical data. The majority opinion in Trial Lawyers is a fairly abstract one, in the sense that its focus is very much on the legal issues. It only briefly alludes to the personal circumstances of the original plaintiff in the case, pointing out that she was “not an ‘impoverished’ person in the ordinary sense of the word” (which made her ineligible for an exemption from the fees at issue). In Unison, meanwhile, statistics and data-based hypothetical scenarios intended to expose the effect of the fees at issue take up an important place in the judgment. The Court reviewed in considerable detail the nature of the disputes to which the fees at issue applied, with the aim of showing that most of them involved parties of limited means seeking to recover small amounts (or, in some cases, to obtain non-pecuniary remedies), as well as the financial effects of these fees on economically vulnerable litigants. The Court linked the precipitous drop in the number of disputes heard to the deterrent effect of excessive, and rarely recoverable, fees, providing the factual underpinning for its legal reasoning. Later on, it also discussed the fees’ failure to raise much revenue, concluding that “it is clear that the fees were not set at the optimal price: the price elasticity of demand was greatly underestimated”. [100] In that way, Unison is similar to cases that are part of what I have been discussing here, using Kerri Froc’s label, as the  “empirical turn” in Canadian constitutional law ― while Trial Lawyers was not.

Despite originating in fairly similar circumstances, then, Trial Lawyers and Unison are quite different decisions. Each has its own logic and responds to its own concerns. But it is also true that they are both parts in delivering a unified message: that of the common law courts’ endorsement, sometimes ringing and sometimes more muted, of the value of access by the citizens to the adjudication of rights claims. Beyond the differences of strictly legal issues and methods, there is a single theme: that, as a matter of political morality, a state that purports to respect and even to create rights must not prevent citizens from asserting them.

All about Administrative Law

Justice Stratas’ remarkable endeavour to improve our understanding of administrative law

Justice Stratas recently posted a most remarkable document on SSRN. Called “The Canadian Law of Judicial Review: Some Doctrine and Cases“, it is nothing less than a comprehensive overview of the concepts, principles, and rules of administrative law in an accessible format, for the reference of judges, lawyers, scholars, and students. While Justice Stratas cautions that it “is not meant to be complete” (1), and notes ― with perhaps just a little optimism ― that it “can be read from beginning to end in one short sitting” (7), the wealth of information it contains is really astonishing.

Here is how Justice Stratas himself describes what he is doing:

 It is hard to find a useful, up-to-date summary of the Canadian law of judicial review. This summary attempts in a scholarly way to fill that gap. It attempts to work at two levels: the level of basic concept and the level of detail. First, it describes the basic ordering concepts in the Canadian law of judicial review. Then it proceeds to the three analytical steps to determine an application for judicial review: preliminary and procedural concerns, the merits of the judicial review (review for substantive defects and procedural defects), and remedies. Finally, it examines appeals from applications for judicial review.

Along the way, key Canadian cases are referenced and discussed. A few are critiqued. The cases include major Supreme Court of Canada cases that strongly influence the law and cases from other courts that offer further instruction on that law. Many of these cases are from the Federal Court of Appeal, the intermediate appellate court that decides more administrative law cases in Canada than any other appellate court. Some cases from other jurisdictions are referenced and discussed for comparative purposes. Some academic commentaries and articles are also referenced and discussed. To facilitate study, all cases and articles are hyperlinked to online full-text versions (where available).

The reader is warned that this is only a summary and regard should be had to its date. It is no substitute for competent, specific legal research on a particular issue. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this summary will enrich readers’ understandings and stimulate them to consider, reflect upon and make their own valuable contributions to the doctrine.

(SSRN abstract; some paragraph breaks removed)

Justice Stratas’ work (I am not sure how to describe it ― it is neither an article nor a case- or textbook; in a way, it is perhaps a super-blog-post; more on that shortly) is of course an outstanding service to the legal profession writ large. But it is also, I think, a challenge to us, or indeed several challenges at once.

For one thing, as he did in his lecture on “The Decline of Legal Doctrine” last year, which I commented on here, Justice Stratas calls upon us to devote ourselves to shoring up this weakened edifice. As he notes in his introduction, in order to treat litigants fairly, judges must apply

ideas and concepts binding upon them, a body of doctrine. … If decisions are made because of an individual judge’s sense of fairness or justice, the appearance, if not the reality, is that the decision sprung from personal or political beliefs of an unelected person. (4)

Here, Justice Stratas now says, is a restatement of the ideas and concepts that structure administrative law. One challenge for us simply to help him with it: “contributions of case law, articles, comments and input will improve this document and are most welcome”. (9) But there is a broader challenge here too, especially to those of us in academia. If a sitting judge is able to produce such a statement in a notoriously tricky and unsettled area of the law, why haven’t we done something similar in others?

Now, of course there treatises and textbooks in many areas of the law, and part of what prompted Justice Stratas to put together his document, which is based on PowerPoint presentations he uses to speak on administrative law, is the dearth of “new, up-to-date texts on administrative law, perhaps reflecting its currently unsettled nature. Who dares write about a landscape that is shifting so much?” (6) But Justice Stratas challenges us on the form as much as on the substance. He forces us to think about the media we use to present legal doctrine, even we do write about it.

Justice Stratas points out that

[b]ack in the day of published law reports, knowledgeable editors, skilled in the area, could pick out the cases that matter. These days, however, most lawyers work online, not from the law reports, encounter the flood of cases and somehow have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Alas, most don’t have criteria in mind to do that. (5)

Meanwhile, loose-leaf services, though informative as to particular cases, might tend to “encourage us to think of administrative law as a bunch of particular rules that govern particular topics”, (6) without thinking about underlying concepts and their inter-relationships. (Justice Stratas’ concerns here echo those of Jeremy Waldron, whose work emphasizes the “systematicity” of law, and seeks to push back against treating it as just a collection of unrelated rules and commands.)

And then, of course, there is a concern about access to justice, or to law anyway. In an age in which, on the one hand, many litigants represent themselves, and on the other, those who take interest in Canadian administrative law are sometimes half a world away from a Canadian law library, and also in an area in which the resources even of many practising lawyers are likely to be limited (I’m thinking, for instance, of the immigration bar), it would arguably not be enough to point people to books even if very good ones existed. Justice Stratas writes that

[t]he law should be accessible to all: other judges, counsel, academics, law students, parties and self-represented litigants. Online publication and availability for free encourages this. Hence this document and the location where I have posted it. (6)

If we accept the doctrinal mission with which Justice Stratas wants to invest us, we must think about the form of our work as well as its content. I’m not sure that we must quite imitate Justice Stratas. His document has some advantages. It is relatively easy to access, concise, and convenient in its abundant use of hyperlinks. But I think that a website having the same content would be even easier to access than a document one must download from SSRN, and easier to navigate than a pdf through which one must scroll. Needless to say, I am not criticizing Justice Stratas. Again, we owe him greatly, and I, at least, would probably not have started thinking about this without his nudge. But if can improve on his first attempt in this regard, then we should.

Last year, I wrote about about a symposium at McGill about the “Responsibility of Doctrine”. Musing on the English/common law and French/civilian senses of the word doctrine/doctrine, I concluded that if these ongoing conversations about the law “are to flourish in the 21st century, they will need to remain open to new forms, and … it will not do to ignore these new forms simply because they are unfamiliar.” Justice Stratas makes a remarkable contribution to legal doctrine, in both of its senses, in an unfamiliar form. I hope that the legal community will pay all the more attention to it for this reason.

H/t: Patrick Baud

Permanent Problems

The law’s ideals and problems have not changed too much in 400 years

I have only now read Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Judicature.” Bacon seems not to enjoy anything like the reputation of his rival Coke, in the law schools anyway ― I suspect that they haven’t heard much of Coke in the science faculties, where Bacon is regarded as “the father of the scientific method.” Still, his essay is fascinating, because it shows just how little the law’s aspirations and failings have changed in the 400-odd years since it was published.

Bacon’s essay is essentially a collection of advice to judges about how to discharge their office. A good deal of it could still be repeated today. My point, in drawing attention to it, is not to say that all of this advice is good, at least in an unqualified form. It is, first and foremost, to remind the reader of the remarkable historical continuity which, for better and for worse, characterizes the law as a field of human activity.  Here are a few of Bacon’s recommendations, with some accompanying thoughts or comments of my own.

* * *

Judges ought to remember, that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? If and when there is at last a confirmation hearing for the next judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, you will hear this exhortation repeated ad nauseam; you might even hear it if there is any sort of public hearing involving the next judge of the Supreme Court of Canada. John Finnis quoted Bacon’s appeal in his very interesting recent lecture on “Judicial Power: Past, Present and Future” (whence I learned about Bacon’s essay). But the very fact that this limitation on the judicial role has for so long, and so often, been reiterated should alert us to the habitual futility of the appeal. The Supreme Court’s equivocation over  whether it discovers or makes up the legal rules which it articulates for the first time seems to the suggest that the ideal of the law-saying judge has some appeal to those already holding judicial office ― but not as much as Bacon would have liked.

[W]hen there appeareth on either side an high hand, violent prosecution, cunning advantages taken, combination, power, great counsel, then is the virtue of a judge seen, to make inequality equal; that he may plant his judgment as upon an even ground.

This is also a familiar idea in 2016. Richard Posner, to give but one ― perhaps unexpected ― example has been very vocal about the need for active judicial intervention “to make inequality equal” by correcting the disparities of resources between parties to litigation, whether in his judgments or in a recent extra-judicial indictment of “What Is Obviously Wrong with the [American] Federal Judiciary, Yet Eminently Curable” (see 190-91). There are situations, it is worth noting, where judges might be making things worse, not better. I have been arguing for a while now that this may be happening in constitutional law, as judges increasingly expect expert evidence to support Charter challenges, and thus increase the inherent disparity of resources between citizens and government. (In a recent post over at The Court, Lillianne Cadieux-Shaw seems to share this concern.)

Patience and gravity of hearing, is an essential part of justice; and an overspeaking judge is no well-tuned cymbal. It is no grace to a judge … to prevent information by questions, — though pertinent. 

There has been much discussion of this point following the recent death of Justice Scalia. He was a famously active interrogator of the lawyers who appeared before the US Supreme Court. Surviving him is his colleague Justice Stephen Breyer, whose solliloquies questions occupying entire pages in the oral argument transcript Josh Blackman lovingly (?) documents. By contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas, of the same court, had spent a decade without asking a single question until finally doing so recently. Justice Thomas, one supposes, would agree with Bacon. Those who derided him for his self-imposed silence presumably would not.

[T]hose, that engage courts in quarrels of jurisdiction, … are not truly amici curiae, but parasiti curiae, in puffing a court up beyond her bounds, for their own scraps and advantage.

Here at least, I agree with Bacon wholeheartedly. Those who, in the pursuit of their own ― these days usually political ― agenda, seek to draw the courts beyond their proper remit are not the courts’ friends, though they may present themselves as such. I have said as much in response to a call for the Supreme Court to decree, by judicial fiat, the “depoliticization” of judicial appointments. I wish I’d known the phrase parasiti curiae then, but I will make sure to use it on the next appropriate occasion.

Judges ought above all to remember the conclusion of the Roman Twelve Tables; Salus populi suprema lex.

Perhaps the most obvious example of Canadian judges applying Bacon’s prescription is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Re Manitoba Language Rights, [1985] 1 S.C.R. 721, where the Court sought to avoid “chaos” that its finding of unconstitutionality of Manitoba’s entire statute book by the expedient of suspending this finding’s effect. But beyond such exceptional situations, Bacon’s advice gets tricky fast. For one thing, the Latin salus is ambiguous. It can mean “health,” “safety,” or “welfare” ― making salus populi not one single objective, but a complicated programme. Still it is often said that judges ought to have regard for the public safety (“the Constitution is not a suicide pact”) or even welfare ― Judge Posner being a foremost advocate for the latter position. But isn’t there a tension between making public welfare into supreme law, and renouncing judicial legal innovation? Bacon says, “let no man weakly conceive, that just laws and true policy have any antipathy,” but even if true, this point doesn’t really address the issue of the judicial role. And Bacon’s concrete recommendations for achieving the salus populi ― frequent consultations between the three branches of government, and a demand that judges “be lions, but yet lions under the throne” would run afoul of our views on judicial independence, which are quite different from his.

* * *

In the essay I mention above, prof. Finnis writes that “[t]he problems about the nature and reach of judicial power, about which Bacon and Coke disagreed, are with us today in forms much shifted in occasion and location but still recognizably the same.” That is because they are “permanent problems, capable it seems of only provisional rather than permanent solutions.” (3) The relevance of Bacon’s prescriptions, and the fact that they would be contested now as they were contested when given (and again, except as specified above, I do not fully agree with them), suggests that prof. Finnis is right about that.

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 brought by way of an action and adjudicated after a full trial. This might have been the correct result, but the route the Justice Slatter, the author of the leading opinion, took to get there is in many ways disturbing. It illustrates, I think, some worrying tendencies in Canadian constitutional law generally, and also the difficulties which challenges to the government’s healthcare monopoly specifically will face.

* * *

In a way, the case is a very simple, and also a very Canadian, one. The applicant had suffered a back injury playing hockey, and even as his pain was getting worse and worse, he was put on a two-year long waiting list for an operation. The pain was too much, and he finally decided to undergo surgery in the United States, at his own (very considerable) expense. And thereafter, he went to court, seeking a declaration that the provision of the Alberta Healthcare Insurance Act that barred private health insurance from covering healthcare services provided by the public insurance plan was contrary to s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The argument was that the government monopoly on health insurance resulted in people having to wait a long time for healthcare, and to suffer as a result, thus breaching the “security of the person” guarantee of s. 7. To support his claim, the applicant submitted “a number of medical reports and proof of expenses he had incurred,” [7] and relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2005 SCC 35, [2005] 1 S.C.R. 791, which declared a similar restriction on private health insurance contrary to Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

For the Court, this was not good enough. After a heartfelt paean to the Canadian healthcare system, Justice Slatter went on to discuss “the importance of using appropriate procedures, and having a proper evidentiary record, when reviewing statutes for constitutionality.” [19] Constitutional cases, in his view, are not just ordinary cases:

Cases in which the appointed judiciary override the will of the democratically elected legislatures fall into a special category. Our constitution and the parliamentary system of government recognize the “supremacy of Parliament”. The presence, however, of an entrenched constitution now provides an important exception to that principle; statutes that are clearly inconsistent with the constitution are of no force or effect. [20]

For this reason, it is important that “the proper procedural safeguards [be] observed.” [21] While the citizen must have an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of a statute, “fair[ness] to the legislature” means that the government must be able to defend it, and “fair[ness] to the court” requires that it have “a reasonable record on which to exercise this important component of its jurisdiction.” [21] The record here is not sufficient. There is a “presumption … that constitutional cases will be decided on a full evidentiary record, including, where appropriate, the evidence of expert witnesses.” [23] Evidence is especially important in constitutional cases because a declaration of unconstitutionality must, pursuant to s. 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982 determine the “extent of the inconsistency” between the impugned statute and the constitution, and “[t]he only way to know what is that “extent”, is to have a full evidentiary record with complete factual conclusions about it.” [26]

* * *

Justice Martin, in a rather terse concurrence, agrees with this reasoning, and would go no further. While Justice Slatter continues, to discuss Chaoulli and the applicant’s claim that it effectively settles the case, I will pause here and comment on this part of his reasons. As I said above, the conclusion that more evidence was required in this case may well have been correct. To be sure, it seems unlikely that the causal relationships between the prohibition on private health insurance and the existence of lengthy waiting lists established in Chaoulli are somehow not present in this case. A legislature that proceeded on the assumption that there was such a relationship would be acting rationally. But it is at least arguable that a court needs more than an assumption, no matter how plausible. It needs evidence. Allison Orr Larsen’s warnings about the dangers of “factual precedents” are apposite in the Canadian context. It may well be that a fuller record, including expert reports would have been necessary here, though I’m not sure I understand Justice Slatter’s insistence on the need for a trial to dispose of this case, as opposed to an application proceeding on a more developed record.

That said, if Justice Slatter is right, his conclusion ought to be disquieting. It confirms the worry that Sonia Lawrence expressed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72, [2013] 3 S.C.R. 1101, and that I have been dwelling on ever since, that mounting a constitutional challenge to a statute may be becoming prohibitively complex and expensive. Marni Soupcoff, of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which is mounting a challenge of its own to government healthcare monopoly, makes this case in a compelling op-ed in the National Post. Constitutional litigation is at danger of becoming the preserve of (relatively) well-funded public interest litigation outfits (such as the CCF). The Charter was supposed to be “the people’s package” of constitutional reform, but the people risk being prevented from bringing Charter cases by the requirement that such cases be supported by expert reports and proceed by way of trial rather than a less expensive procedure. Justice Slatter’s claim that there exists a “presumption” to this effect is particularly worrisome ― all the more so since he provides no indication as to how this presumption might be rebutted.

I want to comment on a couple of other points in the part of his reasons I have been discussing. The first one has to do with the nature of judicial review of legislation and the courts’ role in constitutional cases, on which Justice Slatter expounds in the excerpt of par. 20 quoted above. That passage contains a number of serious mistakes. For one thing, the constitution does not “recognize the ‘supremacy of Parliament'” ― those words appear nowhere in the Constitution Acts, and while Parliamentary sovereignty is arguably one of the constitution’s underlying principles, it is subject to the limits imposed by constitutional text and other such principles. For another, it is wrong to speak of an entrenched constitution that limits Parliamentary sovereignty as something new, something that only “now” exists. Canada has always had an entrenched constitution, and Canadian courts have always invalidated Canadian laws inconsistent with it, although the legal rationale for this practice did indeed change in 1982, from the supremacy of Imperial law to the supremacy of the (Canadian) constitution. Last but not least, Justice Slatter misrepresents the courts’ role on judicial review when he says that “statutes that are clearly inconsistent with the constitution are of no force or effect” ― there no such “clear inconsistency” requirement either in s. 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982 or in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. Constitutional cases, like all civil cases, are decided on an ordinary “balance of probabilities” standard.

The other point that I found disturbing is Justice Slatter’s unabashed celebration of the Canadian healthcare system, of which he says that it

is perceived by many as the crowning achievement of Canadian social policy. The majority of Canadians support the public funding of health care and oppose attempts to shrink or compromise the system. At the same time, many Canadians criticize the system; they would like it to be even better than it is. [14]

Justice Slatter also praises the Canadian healthcare system as “an example of co-operative federalism in action,” though the Canada Health Act, which threatens provinces with the loss of their federal healthcare transfers if they do not comply with its conditions, seems like a rather dubious example of “co-operation.” In any event, Justice Slatter is apparently oblivious to the irony of making unsupported empirical claims in an opinion that dismisses a constitutional challenge for want of evidence. But in the absence of support for these claims, it is somewhat difficult to avoid the suspicion that Justice Slatter is attributing his own views to the indistinct “majority” of which he speaks. After reading these lines, I would rather that he (and indeed his colleagues) not sit in judgment on a constitutional challenge that would, in effect, be an “attempt to … compromise the system,” to change it radically and not merely to make it “even better than it is.”

These two points together lead me to an additional observation. Justice Slatter’s approach is clearly very deferential to legislative choices. That would make him a “conservative” on the definitions that have been floating around of late, for example in some of Sean Fine’s “Tory judges” articles. But, as I’ve said before, “there is nothing inherently conservative about such an approach. It can serve to validate left- or right-leaning policies, depending on the politics of the policy-makers.” This case shows that this is indeed so. If anything, it shows that judges may be able to adopt a strategically deferential posture in order to achieve “progressive” results just as easily as to achieve “conservative” ones.

* * *

I will comment on just one passage from the remainder of Justice Slatter’s reasons. Justice Slatter observes that constitutions, including the Charter, are written in broad terms and

say nothing about the difficult social issues that come before the courts … Controlling this vague language falls to the courts, and an absence of institutional self-restraint by the judiciary makes the problem worse, not better. The Supreme Court has recast the phrase “principles of fundamental justice” with even less precise terms like overbreadth, disproportionality and arbitrariness, none of which have been comprehensively defined. It is, unfortunately, sometimes difficult to discern the difference between these concepts and a simple disagreement by the judiciary with the public policy decisions of democratically elected officials.

The text of s. 7 signals that the drafters of the Charter never intended it to be applied to the review of social and economic policies. … As Prof. [Peter] Hogg has pointed out, the intention of the framers of the Charter to restrict judicial review to procedural matters has been “totally disregarded by the Supreme Court of Canada” with dramatic consequences. [31-32]

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Canadian court reverse-benchslap the Supreme Court in this way. Justice Slatter’s attack is pretty vicious, and in my view largely uncalled for.

It is true that s. 7 was not intended to be applied in the way it does, but it is, to say the least, not obvious that “original intent” is an appropriate criterion for interpreting it. Even if, contrary to the Supreme Court of Canada, one is inclined to be originalist, an “original public meaning” interpretation might support the Supreme Court’s conclusion, in Re B.C. Motor Vehicle Act, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 486 that “fundamental justice” is not a matter of procedure only. Anyway, it seems to me that it is a bit late to re-litigate that particular issue.

Beyond that, I don’t think it’s at all fair to reproach the Supreme Court for invoking principles such as overbreadth, disproportionality and arbitrariness in applying s. 7. They are, surely, not more open-ended than the expression “principles of fundamental justice.” The Court has tried, in cases such as Bedford and Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 S.C.R. 331, to give them a relatively specific meaning, and in my view has been at least somewhat successful in this endeavour. Justice Slatter’s dismissal of this jurisprudence as “a simple disagreement by the judiciary with the public policy decisions of democratically elected officials” looks not unlike the expression of a simple disagreement by one judge with the constitutional policy decisions of his hierarchical superiors.

* * *

In a sense, this decision is just sound and fury, signifying nothing ― except, of course, that the applicant spent a significant amount of time and money on a litigation that proved fruitless. As Justice Watson rightly observes in his concurrence, “[d]ismissal of a declaration on the grounds that it was not made out in the pleadings and evidence is not the same thing as saying that an action properly pleaded, fairly proceeded with, and backed by sufficient evidence would be impossible.” [60] Perhaps the CCF will succeed in its own efforts to bring such an action. Yet the Court’s mistakes and dubious assertions about its role (about which I might have more to say separately) are cause for worrying, and the possibility that it is right about the high evidentiary threshold that a constitutional challenge must get over before even being considered on the merits is, if anything, even more distressing.