accountability – Double Aspect

Shapes and Sizes

Public lawyers (and public law students) should think about government size―and shape

I am currently in the process of making slides for the early lectures in the constitutional law course I am due to deliver in the next month or so. One of them, for a lecture on the basic concepts of the UK constitution, looks like this:

Slide explaining government size in the United Kingdom

With this slide, I want to make three points that I thought are worth sharing here too. One is obvious, but not sufficiently thought of in public law. One was actually something of a revelation to me. And one is connected to my recent post on the “good government trilemma” ― the unpleasant trade-offs between democracy, government size, and accountability.

The obvious point is that government is very, very big. In the UK, it spent just over 40% of GDP in pre-pandemic years. The figure is substantially higher now. Another way to understand its size and complexity is the number of ministers, though in fairness the UK is something of an outlier here: it has as many ministers as New Zealand has MPs, opposition ones included. But the Canadian cabinet has almost 40 members nowadays ― and of course it does not need people to deal with provincial issues.

Although well-known (though perhaps not to first-year law students), I think this reality is worth highlighting in the context of a public law course. For one thing, it shows just how important public law is ― it would matter less in a nightwatchman state. As I hinted at in the “trilemma” post, if you think public lawyers are taking up too much space, one solution is to shrink government. But most people who want to ― metaphorically ― fist kill all the lawyers are not itching to ― metaphorically ― kill all the ministers and civil servants.

It is well known, too, that government is much bigger now than it used to be 100, let alone 150 years ago. Taxation and government spending as percentage of GDP is one convenient way of measuring this. Before the Great War, the UK government was spending 8-10% of GDP (except during the Boer War, when it was somewhat more than that) ― and that was a time when the Royal Navy was as big as its two nearest competitors combined. One could also describe the various areas of human activity that government regulates, as illustrated by the gaggles and flocks of ministers (though perhaps the better collective noun would be a meddling). This expansion, as opposed to the sheer magnitude of the end product, is often mentioned in administrative law, because writers on the subject, at least in North America, tend to think that it justifies the existence of a more-or-less unsupervised administrative state. It could, of course, just as well be taken as evidence of the administrative state’s malignancy. My point in the lecture will not be to take sides ― that’s not a lecturer’s role ― but this blog’s readers will know which way my sympathies lie.

Less well known ― indeed, something of a surprise to, though perhaps I am simply an ignoramus ― is that fact that by some measures government is now much less active than it used to be. Specifically, I mean the much-reduced number of statutes being enacted annually. My numbers, for the UK, come from a study by Chris Watson for the UK’s House of Commons Library, and those on the slide may be understating matters: in the last few years, the number of statutes enacted each year has fallen further, from the low 30s to the low 20s. (I’ve not put this on the slide because it might still be a temporary blip; but how long can something temporary last before it isn’t temporary)? It averaged about 100 if not more before WWII. Granted, these numbers don’t tell us everything; it may be that the complexity and/or length of statutes being enacted has increased, compensating for the lower numbers. But they are nonetheless suggestive. The volume of delegated legislation, by contrast, grew enormously from 1950, and indeed 1980, to the mid-1990s and stayed at that level until, it would seem, Brexit. It then fell off a cliff, relatively speaking, though there are no data for the period before 1950 ― I suspect it would have been substantially less at least until the Great War, and perhaps later.

This means that not only the size, but also the shape, if you will, of government has changed a lot over the last century. It is a great deal more executive-dominated than before. Parliament grants the executive enormous resources and vast delegated legislative powers, but it does not act as much as before for itself ― or rather, given the executive’s control of Parliamentary agenda, isn’t allowed to act. This too isn’t exactly a shocking discovery ― it is not really a discovery of any kind ―, but I think it needs to be kept mind when we assess claims about, for example, the judiciary’s real or alleged interference with Parliament, the important of the political constitution, and so on.

And this brings me to my third point, which follows from the trilemma I have previously discussed. It is that when we discuss public law, and especially when we discuss the changes that public law has undergone since, roughly, the 1960s ― both in the UK and in Canada (and New Zealand too). The judicial role has expanded a great deal in these jurisdictions, albeit in somewhat different ways. UK courts might be more intrusive vis-à-vis the executive; Canadian courts have been granted greater powers vis-à-vis Parliament. There is no question that, by the standards of 1950, let alone 1900, courts are more influential. But this development did not take place in a vacuum. It occurs, not coincidentally I would argue, in parallel with a vast expansion of government, and therefore of the government’s capacity for messing with people’s lives. To insist that the law used to control a government of the size and shape it has in 2022 should be as minimalistic as it was in 1872 or even 1922, or that Parliament can remain the primary if not the sole forum in which government is kept accountable as the government looked as it did in Dicey’s time is either mad or disingenuous.

This argument, by the way, does not in any way depend on thinking that government expansion, without more, is bad. Admittedly, I think it is ― I can say so here, though that will be beside the point in my lecture. But you can very well disagree with that, but still believe that an appropriately expanded government requires the kind of accountability and supervision that the courts have increasingly come to provide (in part thanks to their own efforts and in part because they were asked to do so). That said, I do wonder whether colleagues for whom the expansion of government over the last century is a welcome phenomenon might be less inclined to reflect on its implications, simply because they see it as natural, and it is human nature to think less about what one thinks of in this way. Small-government heretics have their uses in public law academia ― but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

The Good Government Trilemma

If you like big government, be prepared to sacrifice democracy or accountability

What is the respective role of democratic and other means of holding a government to account in a well-ordered polity? In one way or another, this question is the subject of live―and lively―debates in many (perhaps all?) democratic societies. In Canada, it manifests itself especially in controversies about the use of the Charter’s “notwithstanding clause”; in the UK, about the role of judicial review (especially of ministerial decision-making) and the Human Rights Act 1998.

At the risk of generalizing, my impression is that these debates tend to present themselves as clashes between the values of, for lack of better terms, democratic government and accountable government. One side thinks that the important thing is that elected officials get to run the show as they think best, subject to eventually being booted out by the voters. The other thinks that what matters is that the government be kept in check and made to answer for its actions on an ongoing basis, through some mix of elections, judicial supervision, and other accountability mechanisms, either internal to the government (such as ombudsmen and auditors) or external (NGOs and media).

To be clear, the democracy camp does care about accountability ― especially, that provided, or at least thought to be provided, by regular elections. For its part, the accountability side doesn’t deny the value of democracy, though it might argue that it’s a mistake to think of democracy in purely electoral terms. But there is, or so people think, a tradeoff between a focus on democracy, which calls for limiting the ability of non-electoral accountability mechanisms, especially the courts, to interfere with the work of government, and that on accountability, which requires these mechanisms to get in the government’s way with some regularity.

However, I think that the debate framed in this way is incomplete. It ignores a third factor that needs to be taken into account: the size of the government in question. This tends to go unnoticed because, whatever relative values they attach to democracy and accountability, virtually all participants in the debate are committed to keeping government big, by which I mean (substantially) bigger than a classical liberal nightwatchman state, let alone a Nozickian minimal state. I’m not sure quite where the boundary of big government lies, but I am sure that all governments in democratic states in 2022 (and for all I know the non-democratic ones as well) are on the big government side of it.

I would suggest that the apparent need to trade off between democracy and accountability is in fact only special case of what I will, again for lack of a better term, call the good governance trilemma. Of democracy, accountability, and big government, you can have two ― if you do things well; many polities won’t get two, or indeed even one ― but you cannot have all three. It is possible to satisfy the trilemma by choosing fractions ― a dose of democracy, a measure of accountability, a government not quite as big as one might dream of ― but the total cannot go above two, and it will certainly never go anywhere near three. You can’t have it all.

How does the trilemma work? Let’s start, as most people do, with big government a given. A government so big it takes scores of ― or, in the UK’s case, close to a hundred ― ministers of various sorts (or, in the US, agency heads) to run itself, to say nothing of the tens or hundreds of thousands of civil servants. This, of course, is not a Kornbluthian dystopia, but our present reality. A citizen who wanted to keep track of what the government is getting up to at a rate of, say, half an hour per minister per week would have a full-time job on his or her hands. And for at least some departments (think treasury or foreign affairs, for example, but there almost certainly many many others), half an hour per week hardly seems like it would be anywhere near enough to know what’s going on. Never mind ordinary citizens: even members of Parliament would struggle mightily to keep the tabs on the administration by virtue of its sheer size, to say nothing of the partisan and career incentives weighing on backbenchers, and of government obstructionism vis-à-vis the opposition.

Realistically, voters are in no position to keep such a government accountable (a point that Ilya Somin makes in Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter). This is why taking big government as a given, as most people today do, leaves you with a necessary trade-off between democracy and accountability. If such a government it is going to be accountable for more than an infinitesimal fraction of its innumerable decisions and actions, it will have to be made accountable to, or at least through, non-democratic or indeed counter-majoritarian institutions: courts, tribunals, ombudsmen, NGOs, and journalists. Alternatively, a big government can be made answerable to voters alone, with no judicial and other interference. But then it would be foolish to expect it to answer for even fairly major screw-ups, let alone the small-scale indignities a large administration visits on those subject to it every day that ends in-y ― not because it’s necessarily evil or even especially incompetent, let alone corrupt; but because it is run by fallible human beings. And these human beings, too, are the more likely to be pressed for time or out of their depth the more tasks the administration has been given.

If, however, one were willing to sacrifice government size, one could at least hope for a government held accountable primarily through electoral means. For one thing, as the government does less, there is simply less for courts and other non-democratic accountability mechanisms to sink their teeth into. (I have written about this here: if, for instance, government didn’t take it upon itself to regulate who can enter the country, we wouldn’t be debating the merits of judicial review of immigration decisions, which are a big annoyance to the UK government in particular.) But, less cynically, if government only does a few things, it is easier for citizens to keep track of those few things, and the odds of their using their vote to reward things done well and punish things done badly improve. Admittedly, I personally would not be all that optimistic about the degree of the improvement; but there ought to be some. By trading away government size, one could get more accountability and democracy, because democracy would be (more) sufficient to ensure accountability.

At the risk of making this post even more off-the-wall, I will add that a (very) small government system would make it possible to improve the quality of democracy and accountability further in another way. As Bastiat points out in The Law, so long as the government sticks to protecting people’s natural rights instead of being an expedient through which everyone hopes to live at the expense of everyone else, it doesn’t matter all that much whether suffrage is universal or equal: “If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?” Some form of epistocracy, or at least a minimal test of political knowledge, could be applied without causing the same problems it must under a big government. And a more knowledgeable electorate would likely be better at holding the government to account.

Of course, I don’t expect many people to share my interest in radically smaller government. Fair enough. But I think that it would be good if they recognized the reality of the trilemma I’ve outlined in this post. Its cause ― the difficulty for voters and even their representatives to keep track of a large administration ― should not be a matter of partisan controversy. It’s a reality that needs to be acknoweldged and responded to, whatever values will inform each person’s response.

And, as I said above, the possible solutions to the trilemma are not all-or-nothing matters. Government size, obviously, is not a binary choice. A government that withdraws from some areas of activity, or abjures some forms of regulation, could be more amenable to political accountability and less in need of non-democratic accountability at least to that extent. Conversely, a government that expands in some new direction may require the creation of entirely new accountability mechanisms to address this specific development. All this should be borne in mind even if the boot of big government as I have (sort of) defined it here remains firmly planted on our faces, and other body parts, forever.

A Tale of Two Scandals

Partisanship is undermining political accountability and constitutional checks and balances

This post is co-written with Mark Mancini

Here some harsh—yet entirely justified—words about unconstitutional actions of the executive branch of government:

[N]ot only were there no clear means of constitutional restraint, there was obvious intent to accomplish the scheme well outside the public eye. The scheme was blocked by the unlikely combination of whistleblowing and informal political pressure. Even worse, a defiant [executive] refuses to admit to any wrongdoing at all—even calling the key piece of evidence … a “perfect” call. It was essentially our good fortune (through the courage of the whistleblower) that the [voters] have access to partial information about the scandal so they can factor it into their electoral calculus. What’s the constitutional check for misconduct of that kind? Citizens can’t run to court to block this particular abuse of … power. We can’t even count on public knowledge for public accountability. The [executive] is still actively holding back material evidence. (Paragraph break omitted)

And here’s a trick question: what scandal is being described here? Is it Donald Trump’s attempt to use aid granted by Congress to suborn a Ukrainian announcement of an investigation into a political rival? Or is it Justin Trudeau’s attempt to have a prosecution of a corrupt engineering company stopped from going to trial to avoid financial difficulties for that company―and political embarrassment in Québec? The answer is, technically, that it’s former. The quotation is from the January 22 instalment of “French Press”, the thoughtful newsletter written by David French for The Dispatch. (While we’re at it, may we recommend Advisory Opinions, an equally thoughtful podcast Mr. French co-hosts with Sarah Isgur?) But, by our lights, Mr. French might as well have been writing about l’Affaire SNC Lavalin.

There too the effective head of the executive branch and his political henchmen sought to pervert the course of the execution of the law in their partisan interest. There too, they were discomfited by the unlikely decision of an official to blow the whistle instead of doing their bidding, and the resulting political pressure. There too, this political pressure was enough to arrest the illicit scheme itself, but not to bring about any real acknowledgement of wrongdoing; on the contrary, the master of the executive branch made a great show of having acted in the public interest. There too only partial information was allowed to filter out into the public domain through the medium of legislative hearings, and claims of executive privilege were raised to prevent key witnesses from speaking, or at least speaking fully. There too the courts would have been of no avail in any attempt to get to the bottom of what happened. The similarities between the two scandals are striking.

There are also some meaningful differences, to be sure. For one thing, the person who stood of in the way of the Trudeau government’s scheme to save SNC Lavalin was none other than the Attorney-General. No such high-ranking official has stood up to the Trump administration’s plans. For another, some heads have rolled as a consequence of l’Affaire SNC Lavalin: those of the Prime Minister’s principal secretary (albeit that he made a comeback only months later) and of the head of the civil service. Whether even such imperfect accountability is visited on the Trump administration is, at present, very doubtful. Another difference: obstructive as they have been, the members of Mr. Trudeau’s party in Parliament didn’t stonewall the investigation into his government’s misbehaviour to anything like the same degree as the members of Mr. Trump’s in Congress.

Still, this would be thin gruel for customary Canadian self-congratulation. In response to arguments to the effect that, since the executive’s shady plans were not allowed to come to pass, our constitutional system is working more or less as it should, we expressed here the

worry is that our constitutional set-up fails to adequately establish this connection; that it does not guarantee that ambition will counteract instead of abetting ambition; and it relies too much on human character being, if not angelic, then unusually virtuous.

Our constitutional system, we suggested, lacks the checks and balances that would ensure, or at least make it sufficiently likely, that a lawless executive could not get away with it. In particular, we were skeptical about the ability of the rules and conventions surrounding the accountability of the executive to Parliament to do this work.

Although we did not say much about this in that post, an important reason for this is partisanship, particularly the strong form of party discipline that characterizes the Canadian system. A majority party lines up behind the government formed by its leader, and has every incentive to close ranks, even at the cost of public-serving accountability. This is the inherent flaw of responsible government, which means that the ministry must have the support of a parliamentary majority (or at least an unchallenged plurality). In theory, this subordinates the executive to Parliament. In practice, the power dynamic is more often than not precisely the opposite. Of course, the obverse of this flaw is the executive’s ability to govern effectively and to implement its legislative agenda. All constitutional arrangements come with trade-offs. The question is not whether we can avoid trade-offs altogether, but whether we have made the right ones.

What is disheartening is that in the United States, whose constitutional framers made different trade-offs from ours, and where a different ― and seemingly more robust ― set of checks and balances was put in place to contain the executive, the same problem seems to have nullified those checks and balances. Mr. French writes that “[w]hen presidents work in secret to substitute their personal priorities for the public good … impeachment is the difference between punishment and permission when a president abuses his power while conducting affairs of state”. Yet if the president’s partisan allies refuse to even recognize the legitimacy of this procedure, they make him (or eventually her) just as unaccountable as a Canadian Prime Minister able to command a Parliamentary majority.

This is not necessarily to disparage anything and everything about political partisanship. A case can be made for the proposition that Mr. Trump’s election to the presidency is the consequence of weak parties as much as of strong partisanship. But it should be clear by now that adjusting our constitutional systems to strong, and perhaps hypertrophied, partisanship is a challenge that a variety of democratic polities must face, and quickly. Our political scandals sound similar because our constitutional weaknesses are.

Moving Dunsmuir past Dunsmuir

Democratic accountability for privative clauses, and its consequences for the standard of review analysis

Martin Olszynski, University of Calgary

Near the end of last year, and spurred on by yet another judgment challenging adherence to the Dunsmuir framework (Garneau Community League v Edmonton (City), 2017 ABCA 374 (CanLII), I posted a blog on the University of Calgary Faculty of Law’s ABlawg proposing a reversal of Dunsmuir’s presumption of reasonableness with respect to questions of law. Building on the constitutionalization of judicial review (Crevier v Attorney General of Quebec 1981 CanLII 30 (SCC); Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick 2008 SCC 9 at paras 27 – 32), I suggested that any presumptions ought to reflect the courts’ core competency of interpreting and applying law, which is to say a presumption of correctness review. In a nod to functionalists, however, I also suggested that this presumption should be rebuttable by the presence of a privative clause – nothing more, nothing less:

Simply put, the starting point should be that the courts, by virtue of their training, independence, and impartiality, have the upper hand in the interpretation of the law. Recognizing the realities of the modern administrative state, however, this presumption can and should be rebuttable for certain questions of law by virtue of explicit legislative provisions (i.e. privative clauses and restrictive rights of appeal). Importantly, just as the Supreme Court in Crevier held that legislatures could not oust judicial review entirely, so too certain questions of law will always be subject to correctness review – these would be the current Dunsmuir correctness categories… For all other questions of law, however, the presence of a privative clause would trigger deferential review.

Without repeating the entire argument here, one of the main concerns driving my suggested approach is that the concept of “implied expertise” as a basis for deference is simply too contradictory to be sustainable in the long run. Instead, courts should defer out of respect for the explicit decisions made by legislatures in the form of privative clauses or restrictive rights of appeal, decisions for which legislatures may subsequently be held accountable. Privative clauses, I argued, are a big deal – or at least they could be, depending on the context. Using the examples of labour and employment law on the one hand and environmental law on the other, I suggested that the need for some kind of privative clause in the former context seemed fairly obvious (with its tripartite boards and relatively heavy hearing loads) but less so in the case of the latter, where it was governments’ poor record of taking environmental considerations into account that was the impetus for such laws in the first place.

The following week, Professor Leonid Sirota posted a thoughtful reply on his Double Aspect blog. I think its fair to say that he was sympathetic to my argument, but he also expressed some doubt as to whether legislative re-arrangements of the separation of powers could really be the stuff of democratic accountability:

… Professor Olszynski argues that accountability works by pointing to his own criticism of the application of a privative clause in an environmental law case, and contrasting it with the fact “that few labour or employment lawyers would argue against privative clauses in that context”. With respect, the possibility of academic criticism does not make for democratic accountability; nor does acceptance by a relevant expert community… How many voters have ever heard of privative clauses, never mind being able to articulate any thoughts on their desirability? To believe that legislatures can, let alone will, be held accountable for eliminating the courts’ role in legal interpretation unwisely, or even abusively, requires more optimism than I could ever muster.

Tough but mostly fair. Professor Sirota is right to point out that a singular – and self-serving – reference to my own academic commentary is a poor proxy for public concern. As it turns out, however, privative clauses have actually managed to capture both attention and opposition from time to time, as my colleague Professor Shaun Fluker recently discovered in the course of his research into statutory rights of appeals. Professor Fluker cites three reports (the 1957 Franks Report to the Parliament of Great Britain on the workings of statutory tribunals, the 1965 Clement Report to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, and the 2012 Report of the Law Reform Commission of Saskatchewan) that indicate clear skepticism – if not outright hostility – towards privative clauses. The following passage from the Clement Report is particularly relevant:

The Committee is unanimously and firmly of the view that in every case there should be a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of Alberta on a question of jurisdiction and a question of law. No legitimate reason can be put forward why a tribunal to whom the Legislature has delegated certain defined authority should be permitted with impunity to transgress the bounds of the jurisdiction that it was intended it should exercise. Similarly, there should be no excuse for a tribunal misapplying the law, or ignoring law, to which all citizens of the Province are subject, in favour of its own views as to what should be applicable to the persons that are affected by its decisions… By this stroke there would be cut away the privative clauses still remaining in some statutes whereby the Legislature seeks to protect its tribunals from the disciplines of the Rule of Law… (at 74-75).

I can’t say whether such concerns have had any measureable impact on the presence or absence of privative clauses, but I don’t know that I have to. Democratic accountability is probably rarely – if ever – a perfect mechanism; there are often numerous competing issues that affect voter behavior. Assuming – without deciding – that the foregoing reports at least render plausible the potential for democratic accountability, there are two further issues in my proposal that require sorting out.

In my original post, I suggested that the presence of a privative clause should trigger deference for certain questions of law (excluding Dunsmuir’s four correctness categories). This, however, assumes that all such clauses are the same, which of course is not the case: there are “weak” and “strong” privative clauses; there are clauses that require leave from a court subject to its discretion, and there are those that impose a test such as requiring the identification of a question of law of some importance (as was the case in Garneau, supra). I am inclined to think that such clauses should be interpreted in the normal way, with a view towards legislative intent (essentially Rothstein J.’s approach in Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Khosa, 2009 SCC 12 (CanLII) beginning at para 69). Thus, clauses that impose an “important question of law” test would most likely trigger correctness (as suggested by the concurring judgments in Garneau). Bearing in mind Dunsmuir’s concern with both the legality and rationality of decision-making, I am also inclined to suggest that there should be a limit with respect to the extent to which privative clauses can preclude any review of administrative fact-finding whatsoever, but this proposal requires further thought.

The second issue, or challenge, would be to develop a normative framework to guide discussions, whether in the House of Commons or before a Parliamentary committee, about whether and in what form a privative clause may be appropriate in a given context. The structure of the administrative decision-maker, the nature of its workload, and the presence or absence of procedural safeguards in its decision-making are some of the factors that are likely to be useful here.

In the meantime and in conclusion, I am pleased to report that the federal government did recently introduce new environmental assessment legislation and it does not contain any privative clauses.

Squaring the Public Law Circle

Canadian administrative lawyers keep trying to reconcile parliamentary sovereignty and the Rule of Law; they shouldn’t bother

Ancient Greeks wondered whether it was possible to construct a square of the same area as a given circle using only a compass and a ruler ― to square the circle. The problem occupied some great minds of that age and of the subsequent ones, even Napoleon apparently. It took well over two millennia until it was shown to be impossible to solve. Public law has its own quadrature problem, posed by A.V. Dicey (the first edition of whose Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution came out just a couple of years after the demonstration of the impossibility of squaring the circle): it consists in fitting together, albeit by means of verbal rather than geometrical contortionism, parliamentary sovereignty and the Rule of Law.

Dicey and many others since him have mostly been preoccupied by this problem in the context of fundamental individual rights, and their protection from a legislature unconstrained by a supreme law constitution. Canada eventually abandoned this attempt ― or rather cut back on it significantly, since some rights, such as that to property, remain unprotected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But, to an extent that Dicey did not imagine and that is arguably without parallel in the rest of the Commonwealth, we have re-deployed our intellectual energies merely to a different application of the same problem, this one in administrative law. We are struggling to reconcile parliamentary sovereignty, which suggests giving effect to legislative attempts to insulate administrative decision-makers from judicial review, and the Rule of Law, which, as Dicey himself suggested, requires courts of justice to apply the law. We are not succeeding.

It is not for lack of trying. The majority opinion in the supposedly still-leading case on judicial review of administrative action, Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190, recognized that

[j]udicial review seeks to address an underlying tension between the rule of law and the foundational democratic principle, which finds an expression in the initiatives of Parliament and legislatures to create various administrative bodies and endow them with broad powers. [27]

Dunsmuir and the subsequent cases that have ~~fucked up beyond all recognition~~ refined the framework that it laid down attempted to resolve this tension and to make sure that, as a Russian saying has it, the wolves are sated, and the sheep unharmed. Scholarly commentary has worked, I think, in the same direction.

The most recent example is a thoughtful post on ABlawg by Martin Olszynski. Professor Olszynski seeks to recover what he sees as Dunsmuir’s promise of reconciling parliamentary sovereignty and the Rule of Law. He proposes to achieve this by making

two inter-related changes to the Dunsmuir framework … The first change would be to reverse the presumption of reasonableness on questions of law to a presumption of correctness, which can then be rebutted for the large majority of such questions through the presence of a privative clause (this approach would be similar to that proposed by Justice Deschamps in Dunsmuir). The second related change would be to abandon the overly broad and fundamentally contradictory concept of “expertise” as a basis for deference and to replace it with the potential for democratic accountability, which ultimately is the basis for legislative supremacy.

Although the judiciary has the “training, independence, and impartiality” to claim “the upper hand in the interpretation of the law”, it ought to yield this upper hand to legislative statements that call for deference to administrative decision-makers. Legislatures “must be respected – because they are democratically elected and accountable”. Provided they make themselves sufficiently clear by enacting “privative clauses” (provisions that typically seek to out judicial review of administrative decisions or to strictly limit it), legislatures can be made to answer for any decision to remove legal interpretation from the purview of the courts. When the legislation includes a privative clause, a reviewing court should, therefore, defer, but not otherwise ― and especially on the pretense that an administrative decision-maker is an expert by virtue of its very existence.

I agree with Professor Olszynski’s criticism of the role that the idea of administrative expertise has come to play in Canadian administrative law (which I have not fully summarized ― you really should read it). Last year I wondered here whether “the Supreme Court is embracing that pop-psychology staple about 10,000 hours of doing something being enough to make one master it”, and I elaborate on my worries about “expertise” in a paper I recently presented at the TransJus Institute of the University of Barcelona. I also agree that courts should not be shrinking violets when it comes to legal interpretation. It’s their job, and it’s the think that they’re supposed to be good at. If legislatures decide to scrap some of the administrative bodies they have set up (a guy can dream, right?), the courts will have to apply the legislation these bodies are now responsible for. They ought to be able to do that.

But I am skeptical of Professor Olszynski’s suggestion that the presumption that questions of law must be addressed by courts should, in the name of democratic accountability, by rebutted by privative clauses. Indeed, I think that the idea of democratic accountability is not readily applicable in this context. Professor Olszynski argues that accountability works by pointing to his own criticism of the application of a privative clause in an environmental law case, and contrasting it with the fact “that few labour or employment lawyers would argue against privative clauses in that context”. With respect, the possibility of academic criticism does not make for democratic accountability; nor does acceptance by a relevant expert community (if indeed “labour and employment lawyers” are the relevant expert community in relation to labour law ― what about economists, for instance?) make for democratic legitimacy. How many voters have ever heard of privative clauses, never mind being able to articulate any thoughts on their desirability? To believe that legislatures can, let alone will, be held accountable for eliminating the courts’ role in legal interpretation unwisely, or even abusively, requires more optimism than I could ever muster.

I am inclined to think ― though my thoughts on administrative law are still tentative ― that in determining the standard of review we should not attempt to reconcile the Rule of Law and legislative supremacy. The reconciliation is never meant to be real in any case. The Rule of Law is, ultimately, the dominant value, because even those who claim that they want to respect legislative will refuse to give effect even to the clearest privative clauses. To take a statutory provision that says “no judicial review” to mean “deferential judicial review” is not to accede to the legislature’s desires, but to impose one’s own principles ― including the principle of the Rule of Law ― on it.

And there is nothing wrong with this. The Rule of Law, as the Justice Rand observed ― in the context of a lawless exercise of administrative power ― in Roncarelli v Duplessis, [1959] SCR 121 at 142, is “a fundamental postulate of our constitutional structure”. It is a constitutional principle that can, as the Supreme Court recognized in Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 SCR 217, result in “substantive limitations upon government action” ― including, relevantly to us here, in government action aiming at reducing the courts’ powers of judicial review. By contrast, as the Secession Reference also recognized, democracy ― whether direct democracy, which was at issue in that opinion, or representative democracy, and whether accountable or otherwise ― must be confined by constitutional limitations. The Court wrote “that with the adoption of the Charter, the Canadian system of government was transformed to a significant extent from a system of Parliamentary supremacy to one of constitutional supremacy”. [72] But that’s not quite right. The Charter imposed additional restrictions on legislatures, but it did not “transform” the constitutional system, which was already one of “constitutional supremacy” under the Constitution Act, 1867.

To the extent that it is required by the Rule of Law principle, judicial review of administrative action, including correctness review on questions of law, is a constitutional requirement. This extent is the question that Canadian administrative lawyers and judges should be addressing. Virtually everyone, I think, agrees that the Rule of Law requires correctness review in at least some cases. My own inclination is to say that it requires correctness review often, and perhaps always. I might be wrong about that, but if I am, this is because I misunderstand the Rule of Law, not because I fail to account for Parliamentary sovereignty and to give effect to (modified versions of) privative clauses. There is simply no need to bring parliamentary sovereignty into the standard of review equation, thereby making it unsolvable. Unlike in mathematics, the impossibility of squaring the public law circle cannot be conclusively demonstrated (though even in mathematics the demonstration apparently did not stop enthusiasts from trying). But the futility of well over a century’s worth of attempts should, I submit, be a warning to us all.

Accounts of Accountability

It’s important to keep politicians accountable. But what follows for regulation of money in politics?

Freedom of expression is necessary, among other things, to foster political accountability in a democracy. On that much we can surely all agree. But what follows from the link between the freedom of political discussion and our interest in holding our elected representatives to account? Specifically, when it comes to regulating money in politics, should a healthy concern with maintaining accountability cause us to favour more restrictions, or fewer? The answer to that question is, to say the least, not obvious, as a comparison between two judicial opinions linking democratic accountability and freedom of expression but coming to opposite conclusion shows.

In McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission, 134 S Ct 1434 (2014), the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down limits on the total amount of money an individual is allowed to donate to candidates at an election. (The limit on the amount that can be given to an individual candidate was not at issue.) In dissent, Justice Breyer drew on the value of accountability to justify the limitation of the role of money in politics. He noted that “political communication seeks to secure government action. A politically oriented ‘marketplace of ideas’ seeks to form a public opinion that can and will influence elected representatives.” (1467) The protection of the freedom of expression, he continued, “advances not only the individual’s right to engage in political speech, but also the public’s interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters.” (1467; emphasis in the original) According to Justice Breyer, the undue influence of substantial pecuniary contributions to politicians, which he characterized as

[c]orruption breaks the constitutionally necessary “chain of communication” between the people and their representatives. It derails the essential speech-to-government-action tie. Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard. Insofar as corruption cuts the link between political thought and political action, a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point. (1467)

In other words, to keep politicians accountable to the voters, it is necessary to limit the influence of money on them, and in this particular case to uphold the constitutionality of limits on donations.

Compare this with the opinion of Australian High Court’s Chief Justice Mason in the case of Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth, (1992) 177 CLR 106. At issue were provisions eliminating the ability of both political parties and candidates and of “third parties” to pay for electoral advertisements in broadcast media. (Parties represented in Parliament were given some free time for their advertisements.) Chief Justice Mason also extolled the virtues of democratic accountability and emphasized the link between the actions of the governors and the opinions of the governed:

the representatives who are members of Parliament and Ministers of State are not only chosen by the people but exercise their legislative and executive powers as representatives of the people. And in the exercise of those powers the representatives of necessity are accountable to the people for what they do and have a responsibility to take account of the views of the people on whose behalf they act. Freedom of communication as an indispensable element in representative government. [37]

Democratic accountability thus required that the freedom of expression be protected (even in the absence of an explicit guarantee in the constitutional text):

Indispensable to that accountability and that responsibility is freedom of communication, at least in relation to public affairs and political discussion. … Only by exercising that freedom can the citizen criticize government decisions and actions, seek to bring about change, call for action where none has been taken and in this way influence the elected representatives. … Absent such a freedom of communication, representative government would fail to achieve its purpose, namely, government by the people through their elected representatives; government would cease to be responsive to the needs and wishes of the people and, in that sense, would cease to be truly representative. [38]

So far, so similar to Justice Breyer. But from this, Chief Justice Mason went on to reason that the restrictions on electoral advertising at issue could not stand, because they were incompatible with the freedom of political communication, and thus undermined democratic accountability. More money in politics, not less, was the way to keep politicians accountable to the people.

Now, contrasting these two opinions in this way is oversimplifying things. The issues in McCutcheon and in Australian Capital Television were somewhat different. The former concerned the giving of money to politicians; the letter, spending both by politicians and by civil society actors. Although both come within the general category of “money in politics” concerns, it is possible to think that one but not the other can be strictly regulated. Besides, to some extent at least, both McCutcheon and Australian Capital Television were about means, not just ends. It is possible that, confronted with different regulations, both Justice Breyer and Chief Justice Mason would have reached different conclusions by reasoning from the same values.

That said, we know that the same faction of the U.S. Supreme Court that dissented in McCutcheon was also favourable to restrictions on electoral speech by (at least some) members of the civil society in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, 558 US 310 (2010). And while there might be a point at which Justice Breyer would have balked at the limitation of permissible financial contributions to politicians, it is not clear where that point lies. Conversely, although Chief Justice Mason suggested that a less restrictive set of regulations might have been compatible with the freedom of political communication, existing regulatory schemes, such as Canada’s or New Zealand’s, would likely not have made the cut, and I struggle to imagine one that would. The disagreement is not only, and I suspect not mainly, about means. It is driven to a substantial extent by conflicting interpretations of the value of accountability.

I’ll leave to another post (maybe, sometime) a discussion of who, if anyone, of Justice Breyer and Chief Justice Mason is right. My point here is rather that appeals to values, and even to generally accepted truths (such as the importance of free political expression to democratic accountability) are unlikely to settle the difficult disputes that arise in the law of democracy. The values may be shared at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, yet understood so differently as to lead those who hold them to starkly different conclusions.

Accountability Ersatz

The Court Challenges Program shows accountable government is no substitute for a small government

Over at TheCourt.ca, Nicholas Hay offers a qualified and nuanced defence of the Court Challenges Program, which recently relaunched by the federal government. I have criticized the Program here and elsewhere, as have others ― for example the National Post’s editorial board (which mentions some of my arguments). Mr. Hay responds to one of my criticisms by arguing that the Program would benefit “an expansion to include all Charter rights” ― but this only meets my concern that it plays favourites with the constitution half-way, if there, because it would still be objectionable for the government to indicate that it values the enforcement of Charter rights more than that of the federal division of powers. In any case, in this post, I will not re-argue that. Rather, I’ll make a different point, which isn’t only about the Court Challenges Program alone, but which Mr. Hay’s argument brings to mind.

Mr. Hay argues that “the very crux of the Program is government accountability”. To allow, and even to help, citizens challenge unconstitutional government action means making the government answer for its decisions. Unfortunately, Mr. Hay adds, the Program risks being implemented in a way that pays insufficient heed to concerns about accountability within its own functioning. He argues that there is a “need for an enhanced, accountable selection process that will appoint disinterested members” to the expert panels that choose the cases the Program will fund. In addition “the Program should be open to regular review by the Auditor General, and the files should be open to the public under the Access to Information Act”. And when it comes to making the actual decisions about which cases to support, “the Program needs a robust method of allocating subsidies, and tighter spending rules, to ensure support for those truly in need, regardless of what side of the issue they’re on”.

It is hard to disagree with these recommendations, if one accepts the premise of the Program’s existence. But they show, I think, an additional reason for why that premise is worth challenging. Mr. Hay’s argument is, in effect, that the Program, a necessary or at least a most useful form of government accountability, generates demands for further accountability mechanisms in order to secure its own legitimacy. The watchers must be watched. And then, those who watch the watchers must, presumably, be watched in their turn. It’s not enough for an “accountable selection process” for the Program’s expert panels to exist: someone needs to keep an eye on what results it produces. It’s not enough for the Program’s expenses to be audited: someone needs to read the reports. It’s not enough for the Program to be subject to the Access to Information Act: someone needs to put in those requests. Of course this isn’t a flaw of the Program as such, or of Mr. Hay’s proposals to improve it. The same goes for any government accountability mechanism. And, you might think, accountability all around is good; we want as much accountability as we can get, don’t we?

But there can be too much of a good thing. Who will have the time to dig into the reports on the selection of expert panels, the Auditor General’s reports, and the further reports on the selection of cases the Court Challenges Program funds? The Program is a tiny sliver of the federal government’s total spending; most people are probably unaware of its existence; even those who, like journalists, are aware of it have bigger fish to fry. More accountability mechanisms means more things to keep an eye on, more work, more resources consumed. And the time and resources of the relatively few people or organizations with the expertise to keep an eye on the Program may well be better spent on doing other things. At some point, the marginal accountability returns on additional accountability mechanisms are likely to become nil or even negative.

My point is not that we should reject Mr. Hay’s proposals for improving the accountability of the Court Challenges Program. It is, rather, that we should be skeptical of the Program itself, and of any other mechanism that creates the need for an accountability ratchet that is likely to become counterproductive if not self-destructive. Accountability mechanisms that are part of government are still part of government, and they deserve as much skepticism as any other part of government. Their multiplication, like the growth of any other sector of government operations, creates potential for abuse, and makes government more difficult to oversee and to control. Sometimes, like other government functions, accountability mechanisms are necessary and beneficial. But it is always useful to ask ourselves whether any given one really is, and perhaps even to start with a presumption, albeit a rebuttable presumption, against government intervention. The reasons I once outlined for having such a presumption in the case of government provision of goods and services mostly apply to accountability mechanisms too.

If you have borne with me this far, you probably want to ask: isn’t this whole argument counter-intuitive to the point of absurdity? Mustn’t the government be held to account, whatever the problems attempts to do so engender? Given the government’s scope and power, aren’t accountability mechanisms a necessary safeguard against abuse? But here’s the thing: I don’t think we should accept the government’s scope and power as a given. The fewer things government does, the fewer issues there are to hold it accountable on, and the more readily external accountability mechanisms ― whether the media or citizens suing the government on their own, without its assistance ― are able to deal with it. Instead of having a Court Challenges Program to hold government to account when it legislates, and then additional accountability safeguards to make sure the Program works as intended, how about we have a government that legislates less, and thus is in less need of being held to account? As Ilya Somin says, smaller government is smarter. Or, as one might also say, an accountable government is no substitute for a small government. It is, at best, an ersatz.