Tag: deference

Can the Administrative Process Achieve Social Justice?

Can administrative law achieve any ideal of social justice? The answer is perhaps yes. But there is nothing built-in the system to encourage this result. For that reason, deference to administrators because of the political aims they might pursue is a week reed on which to rest a more general case for deference.

This much was made clear to me when I read a recent piece by perhaps the most revered administrative law scholar in Canadian history, John Willis. Celebrated in the academy, Willis is best known for his piece on administrative law functionalism (John Willis, “Three Approaches to Administrative Law: The Judicial, The Conceptual, and the Functional” (1935) 1 U.T.L.J. 53), laying out his view of administrative law as a body of law that should charitable to the aims and expertise of administrators—fundamentally, in their good-will as holders of the public trust, and in their ability to deliver impartial, efficient justice relative to the courts. The idea was that courts should defer to administrators for this reason. Willis was at heart a social democrat, as noted in this paper sketching an intellectual history of administrative law in Canada. The underlying philosophy was a belief in government, in contrast to a belief in judges, who were said to stultify the development of the social welfare state in favour of the common law. Indeed, Willis self-described himself as a “government man.”

The administrative law functionalists were politically-minded people, advancing a political agenda against the common law judges. But their argument for deference was also admittedly political. Says  Michael Taggart (at 257):

These left-leaning scholars were deeply resentful of what they saw as conservative judges twisting the pliable rules of statutory interpretation to favour the existing order, privileging the rich and the powerful, and defeating the purposes of statutes intended to further the interests of the workers, the homeless, and the least well-off in society.

One might see, here, a commitment to social justice broadly conceived. But the functionalists, and the way they taught us to think about administrative law, had significant blindspots, in an ideological sense. Not all causes were equally represented in their social justice mindset. Read, for example, this quote by Willis in his “Administrative Law in Retrospect” at 227, in which Willis decries growing trends to subject the administrative process to norms of transparency and accountability:

I am thinking particularly of a number of currently fashionable cults and the damage they may do to effective government if they are allowed to infiltrate too deeply into the procedural part of administrative law: the cult of ‘the individual’ and claims by prisoners in penitentiaries, complaining of their treatment there or applying for parole, to a formal ‘right to be heard’; the cult of ‘openness’ and claims by the press to the right to dig into confidential government files; the cult of ‘participatory democracy’ and claims by ‘concerned’ busybodies to the right to be allowed to take court proceedings to curb, say, alleged illegal pollution or alleged dereliction of duty by the police.

One need not belabour the point; to the extent Willis is representative of a functionalist mindset, the commitment to social justice only went as far as required to protect the prerogatives of government. This is an empty form of social justice, one more attuned to the preservation of government as a functioning institution than the use of government to achieve outcomes that improve social welfare. This might be a legitimate aim, though one should wonder why courts should have any involvement in propping up modern government. But let’s not pretend it is an ideal vision of social justice.

What’s more, the vision ended up being remarkably short-sighted. Nowadays, the administrative state is most problematic in areas which affect the least well-off, including those that Willis slagged in his article: prisoners, those suffering from pollution, immigrants and refugees, and social assistance recipients. How can a broader theory of delegation to administrators, based on the relative conservatism of courts, miss out on all of these people?

This illustrates a broader point, about which the real functionalist motivations shed light. Delegation to administrators, no matter the substantive or pragmatic justifications for it, is about power. Whether it is a delegation of legislative power, an executive power of appointment, or otherwise—delegation is about a transfer of a power from one entity to another. In this case, it is a transfer of power from one branch of government to another—most notably from the legislative to the executive. The power of the executive branch is aggrandized by delegated power. The functionalists, at least Willis, understood this, By trying to fend off pesky “prisoners” and “busybodies,” the functionalists directed their attention as much to courts as to litigants seeking to challenge executive action in courts. The effect of their doing so was the preservation of administrative power.

As I’ve previously written, the upshot of this is that power can be wielded in either direction. Executive power in particular can be put towards social welfare ends. But power is inherently neutral, and is shaped by the person wielding it. Administrative power, just as much as it can be used for social welfare ends, can also be used to stymie social welfare goals. This much the administrative law functionalists teach us.

Ignoring Legislative Intent: Deference in Quebec and s.96

The constitutionality of a regime of deference is not something much explored in the wider context of Canadian administrative law. But in Quebec, the question is a live one because of particular statutory and judicial arrangements. The Quebec Court of Appeal just released a case [the Reference] that dealt with the question head on: does a statutory court’s statutory review of administrative decision-makers become unconstitutional if that court is required to apply principles of deference?

In this post, I first review the set-up of the Court of Quebec and its relationship with various statutes that nourish it with appellate review power. Then I address the controversy surrounding the way the Court is arranged. I argue that deference in these circumstances is, indeed, unconstitutional based on first principles. It deprives the Superior Court of Quebec of a core element of its jurisdiction—its ability to review, without impediment, inferior tribunals. But I argue that there is a way around the constitutional problem. Courts should begin to recognize, and give full effect, to statutory rights of appeal as elements of legislative intent. Doing so largely eliminates deference questions and is more aligned with the task of judicial review: to discover what the legislature means when it delegates power.

The Court of Quebec, Established Law, and the Quebec Court of Appeal’s Conclusion

The Court of Quebec is a statutory court. It has been given, through a number of statutes, appellate review jurisdiction over a number of administrative tribunals in the province of Quebec. This is a key point that I will return to later: appellate, statutory review jurisdiction should be fundamentally different from an application for judicial review.

In the reference before the Court of Appeal, the chief justices of the Superior Court challenged eight separate legislative schemes that provide for appeals to the Court of Quebec. Their challenge was based on s.96 of the Constitution Act 1867, which, among other things, guarantees a core jurisdiction for the superior courts of the provinces. The challenge concerned not the establishment of a statutory court/tribunal per se (which has typified the jurisprudence around s.96), but the requirement imposed doctrinally that the Court of Quebec must apply principles of judicial deference when they review the decisions—via statutory appeal—of administrative decision-makers.

Administrative law buffs might immediately recoil at the argument, because the Supreme Court has long made clear that judicial review principles apply regardless of whether a case comes to the court via an application for judicial review or statutory rights of appeal (see Dr. Q, at para 20; Saguenay, at para 38). The Court has even held, with respect to the Court of Quebec, that it is required to apply principles of judicial deference (Proprio Direct, at paras 19-21). But recall that this argument is constitutional in nature—that the status of the Court of Quebec, coupled with the requirement of deference, runs afoul of the protections afforded in s.96 of the Constitution Act, 1867 for superior courts. This is a unique argument because it is both the jurisprudential requirement of deference and the Court of Quebec’s statutory status which, together, create an alleged unconstitutional effect.

The Quebec Court of Appeal, though, rejected this argument in whole. It held (1) that the Court of Quebec must apply common law principles, with Dunsmuir standards of review as the governing tests (see para 280); and (2) although there was a transfer of authority to the Court of Quebec that, at first glance, usurps the Superior Court’s s.96 role, this was insufficient to cause a s.96 problem, because “…all of these legislative schemes maintain the Superior Court’s superintending and reforming power” (324). In other words, there was no privative clause ousting the Superior Court’s power on “jurisdiction,” even if the Court of Quebec was to apply deferential principles of review. Since what was envisioned was not an exclusive transfer of jurisdiction (as exemplified in the s.96 cases, see MacMillan Bloedel), there was no constitutional problem.

Avoiding the Constitutional Problem: Statutory Rights of Appeal

In my view, and putting aside for the moment the constitutional concerns, whether the Quebec Court of Appeal got this right is dependent on how one characterizes a statutory right of appeal. If a statutory right of appeal is characterized as a legislative signal for a reviewing court—even a statutory court like the Court of Quebec— to simply apply the ordinary principles applicable on appeal, what basis is there for a court to apply the principles of deference? It is only by accepting that the common law principles of judicial review override clear statutory signals that we get into this problem of constitutionality, at least in the context of this case.

As noted above, though, the Court has been content to permit uniformity in the way courts review administrative decision-makers, through the application of the typical common law tests. In a variety of contexts, the Court has either treated statutory rights of appeal as non-determinative (see Pezim, at 591 and Southam, at para 54) or has specifically said that the common law principles of judicial deference apply, even in the face of a clear legislative regime governing a statutory court (Khosa, at para 25).

While the Quebec Court of Appeal rightly followed this jurisprudence, it seems to me completely wrong in principle. Under no circumstances should common law principles of judicial review apply if the legislature has specified, in the relevant statutes, a right of appeal to a statutory “court of justice” (see para 363). This is because a statutory right of appeal is an implicit legislative signal that, on questions of law, the statutory court should simply intervene in a lower administrative decision as it sees fit. Statutory rights of appeal stand for this proposition unless they contain some wording that would imply deference, or unless there are other signals in the statute, like a privative clause.  Forcing these courts to apply common law principles of judicial review ignores this implicit legislative signal.

What’s more, the theoretical underpinnings of the Supreme Court’s maintenance of the common law rule are wanting. The basic point is that the very act of delegation to (apparently) “specialized” and “expert” administrative tribunals justifies deference. But there are two problems with this justification. On one hand, it is completely unjustified to impute a legislative intent of deference to the legislature when it merely delegates power. The reasons why a legislature delegates power are many, but there is no evidence to assume that it does so because it wants the decision-maker to receive deference. Why should courts assume so? Secondly, the across-the-board expertise presumption is not necessarily empirical true. In this sense, it is a classic overbroad rule.

This conclusion was forcefully expressed by Rothstein J in Khosa. In that context, the Supreme Court majority held that the ordinary principles of judicial review apply when the Federal Court reviews decisions of federal decision-makers. But the Court gave no effect to the Federal Courts Act, which establishes certain grounds of review that could also be said to imply standards of review (see s.18.1(4)). Rothstein J noted that “a common law standard of review analysis is not necessary where the legislature has provided for standards of review” (Khosa, at para 99).  Instead, where the legislature has done so,  the common law idea of deference melts away. It is for the legislature to evaluate expertise, and include a privative clause, if it sees fit to mandate deference; it is not for the court to simply override legislative language in service of some court-created ideal of deference.

Rothstein J’s position is on better footing. Rather than buying into the expertise presumption, and the subversion of the relationship between common and statutory law that it creates, his position expresses support for the typical relationship between these two types of law; statutory law takes priority over the common law. It is for the legislature to prescribe the relevant standard of review. And in the context of the Court of Quebec—at least the relevant statutes in the case—the legislature has. Of the eight statutes at play in the Quebec case, all of them contain a statutory right of appeal. Some even contain language specifying that “The Court can confirm, alter or quash any decision submitted to it and render the decision which it considers should have been rendered in first instance (see para 217; s.175 of the Professional Code). This is strong, “correctness”-type language.  Even in absence of such language, a statutory right of appeal ousts the common law rule of deference, and removes any constitutional doubt from the issue. In each case of a statutory right of appeal, it is a sign that deference should not be the modus operandi.

Addressing the Constitutional Problem: The Core of Judicial Review

But, whether or not my preferred position is adopted, there could still be cases where deference arises—either by legislative language or judicially imposed doctrines. In such a case, was the Quebec Court of Appeal right to hold that there is no constitutional problem with deference?

In my view, it was not. The starting point is the Supreme Court’s comment in MacMillan Bloedel that it is not permissible for the legislature to remove any “core” powers of the superior courts in the provinces (MacMillan Bloedel, at para 37). As the Court noted, “ [d]estroying part of the core jurisdiction would be tantamount to abolishing the superior courts of general jurisdiction.” Therefore, even abolishing part of the core jurisdiction is tantamount to destroying it all, according to the Supreme Court. This conclusion was cited by the Quebec Court of Appeal (at para 46).

What is protected in the core jurisdiction? For our purposes, as the Quebec Court of Appeal noted, “the exercise of a superintending and reforming power over the provincial courts of inferior jurisdiction and provincial public bodies” is part of the core (at para 45, citing MacMillan Blodel at paras 34 and 35). This is an aspect of the core jurisdiction which can never be removed—even in part. Yet the effect of asking the Court of Quebec to apply deference is to dilute this reviewing function. As Professor Daly notes in his “Les appels administratifs au Canada” (2015) 93 Canadian Bar Review 71:

This power of the Superior Court to correct certain types of illegalities committed by inferior tribunals in the exercise of their jurisdiction was an integral part of the Court’s supervisory authority as it existed in 1867; it is therefore clear that such control power cannot be validly transferred by the Legislature from the Superior Court to a court that is not comprised within the enumeration contained in s. 96 of the B.N.A. Act.

Attorney General (Que.) et al. v. Farrah [1978] 2 SCR 638 at p. 654. See similarly Séminaire de Chicoutimi v. City of Chicoutimi, 1972 CanLII 153 (SCC), [1973] S.C.R. 681.

The requirement of deference significantly dilutes this role, to the point where the core power of the superior court is imperiled. This is because of a “double deference” problem, as Professor Daly argues. The Court of Quebec will apply deference to the administrative tribunal’s legal findings. Then, the Superior Court will defer to the Court of Quebec. When the Superior Court defers, though, it simply asks whether the Court of Quebec’s decisions is reasonable or not. It does not get a first instance glimpse of the legality of the decision. This double deference problem significantly limits, if not fundamentally changes, the task of the Superior Court.

The Court in the Reference responds to this problem by saying that:

[W]hen the Superior Court hears an application for judicial review of a judgment of the Court of Quebec, it must begin by focusing on the administrative decision in order to first determine whether the Court of Quebec identified the appropriate standard (which, in Superior Court, is a question of law subject to the correctness standard, and then determine whether it applied the standard properly. Thus, strictly speaking, the judgment of the Court of Quebec is set to one side and the impugned administrative decision is the one under review.

This might solve the double deference problem, but it creates a whole other issue: it deprives the Court of Quebec of the appellate jurisdiction that the legislature intended it to have (see Professor Daly’s post here). Now, the Court of Quebec’s ruling is set aside. Here again is another example of courts failing to respect legislative intent.

This is a less-than-ideal solution to the constitutional problem of double-deference.

Conclusion

This is a complex case, and my views are necessarily tentative. But I think, in the first place, that the constitutional problem can be avoided in many cases by simply giving effect to the appellate jurisdiction that the legislature granted to the Court of Quebec. In cases where the problem does arise, I think the Quebec Court of Appeal’s solution to the problem is less than ideal, because it again ignores legislative intent.

The Rule of Law All the Way Up

Introducing my recently-published chapter on the Rule of Law and Canadian constitutional law

LexisNexis Canada recently published (if I understand correctly, as a standalone book as well as a dedicated issue of the Supreme Court Law Review (2d)) Attacks on the Rule of Law from Within, a collection of essays co-edited by my friends Joanna Baron and Maxime St-Hilaire. The publisher’s blurb gives a concise summary of the project’s background and contents:

This volume is a collection of six papers developed from the Runnymede Society’s 2018 national conference by a community of legal experts in response to Supreme Court of Canada Justice Rosalie Abella’s comment that “the phrase ‘rule of law’ annoys her”. 

Grounded on the intuition that the legal profession supports the rule of law, the papers examine the historical perspective on threats to the rule of law, the sufficiency of the current Canadian legal framework to support this ideal and how the principle of stare decisis as observed by the Supreme Court of Canada undermines the spirit of the rule of law. The volume also discusses how the law relating to Aboriginal title and the duty to consult fails to adhere to the Rule of Law standards … to the detriment of indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians alike.

I am honoured to have contributed to this volume, with an essay called “The Rule of Law All the Way Up”, which focuses on what I see as the lack of commitment to the Rule of constitutional Law in by scholars, judges, and politicians. Here is the abstract:

Canadian constitutional law is seldom criticised for its failure to live up to the ideal of the Rule of Law. This article argues that it should be so criticised. A number of widely accepted or uncontroversial Rule of Law requirements―the need for general, stable, and prospective rules, the congruence between the “in the books” and the law “in action, and the availability of impartial, independent courts to adjudicate legal disputes―are compromised by a number of ideas already accepted or increasingly advocated by Canadian lawyers, judges, and officials.

This article describes four of these ideas, to which it refers as “politicization techniques”, because they transform what purports to be “the supreme law of Canada” into a set of malleable political commitments. These are, first, deference to legislatures or the application of a “margin of appreciation” and the “presumption of constitutionality” in constitutional adjudication; second, constitutional “dialogue” in which courts not merely defer, but actively give way to legislative decisions; the substitution of political for legal judgment through the application of the “notwithstanding clause” of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and the rewriting of constitutional law by the courts under the banner of “living tree” constitutional interpretation.

The article concludes with an appeal to those who profess commitment to the Rule of Law in relation to the Constitution not to embrace or endorse the means by which it is subverted.

The entire chapter is available to download on SSRN. It builds on many of the themes developed on my posts here ― the rejection of judicial deference on constitutional issues, whether to legislatures or to the administrative state; the imperative to renounce the use of the Charter‘s “notwithstanding clause”; and the perils of “living constitutionalism”. Some of these, notably the issue of deference to administrative interpretations of constitutional law and constitutional interpretation, I will also be pursuing in future work. (Indeed, the first of these is the subject of the paper I will be presenting at the Journal of Commonwealth Law symposium next month.)

I am very grateful to Ms. Baron and Professor St-Hilaire for having given me the opportunity to present these thoughts, and write them up for publication. I am also grateful to Justice Bradley Miller, of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, who gave me thoughtful comments when I presented my chapter (then still very much in draft form) at the 2018 Runnymede Society conference, as well as to Kerry Sun, who was a very helpful editor. And I am looking forward to reading the other contributions in the volume, once I am done preparing the talks I am about to give in the coming weeks.

Madison and Canadian Constitutional Law

Because we are in the slow days of summer, and I have a bit more time on my hands than I would usually have, I picked up a copy of Richard Matthews’ 1995 book, If Men Were Angels: James Madison & the Heartless Empire of Reason. Immediately, one’s Canadian eyes might begin to glaze over. Why should one care about an American Founding Father, specifically one that is somewhat more obscure in the common eye than Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton? To my mind, Madison raises a number of implications for contemporary debates in Canada about the nature of our government and the interpretation of our Constitution. In this post, I’d like to address two of those implications. First is the idea of deference to legislatures, and how Madison’s views serve as lighting rods for debate on the relative institutional capacities of courts and legislatures. Secondly, and more controversially, is the idea of to whom the Constitution “belongs” and whether it matters for the interpretive approach one adopts in relation to the Constitution.

First, a bit of background about the book and its subject. Matthews paints a picture of Madison as a “quintessential liberal,” who continues to, today, impact the way Americans view their government. Madison, who was a chief architect of the Constitution’s structural provisions and the Bill of Rights, is often placed on a lower rung than Thomas Jefferson in the hierarchy of American founders. And yet, for Matthews, it is Madison who has come to typify modern American government and life. This reality lies, for Matthews, in a quintessential difference in Madisonian and Jeffersonian politics. Matthews paints Madison, at heart, as a Hobbesian; or perhaps a Malthus. Either way, Madison does not view political life as a teleological good as the ancients did. Rather, political life is nasty, brutish, and short; and humanity leans inexorably towards degeneration. Madison is a political skeptic. To him, left to their own devices, humans will inevitably turn on one another, no matter how good or virtuous they might be. Hence, democracy had to be tempered because “had every Athenian Citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob (see The Federalist Papers, No. 55). For Matthews, “[f]rom Madison’s view of the individual, democracy was a fool’s illusion; in the long run, little could be done, beyond playing for time, to forestall the decline or to improve the human condition” [51] because “passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason” (The Federalist Papers, No.50).

Madison’s prescription for this natural state of affairs was republican constitutionalism. If the human condition could not be improved, and if virtue could not be instilled, the least one could do is preserve a peaceful status quo. For Hobbes, the method to do this was the Leviathan. But for Madison, the separation of powers was the preferred prescription. By making “ambition counteract ambition” through the mutual jealousy of the branches of government, the worst vices of humanity could be tempered. And, by making a republic that extended over a large geographic area rather than a classic Athenian demos, the risk of factionalism decreased.

On the other hand, Jefferson’s political philosophy reveals a different sort of view of the human condition and political organization. For Jefferson, politics is a constitutive act of citizenship, in which the people constantly reinvent their laws to suit their circumstances. Hence Jefferson’s frequently-cited admonition that “[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And Jefferson operationalized this reality: he believed that the Constitution and the laws should renew every generation, so that the dead do not bind the living in their constant fulfillment of democratic, civic republicanism. Jefferson obviously viewed humans as far less fallible than Madison did.

Matthews views the matter differently than Madison, adopting a Jeffersonian position on the matter. For Matthews, “Madison’s liberal dream has, as he knew it would, turned into a nightmare for an increasing number of marginalized Americans” [279]. And this rings somewhat true: even more so than in 1995, the ability of people to connect over the Internet and to peddle in fake news and “deep fakes” has made it much easier to bypass republic protections and create mob rule.

This political theorizing seems far off from the world of Canadian law, and so how does any of it apply? As I noted above, I think there are real reasons why Madison’s thinking, Jefferson’s philosophy, and Matthews’ book all have something to say about contemporary debates in our own institutions. Take first the question of judicial deference to legislatures. In Canada, courts will defer to legislatures on constitutional questions under the Oakes test. If one adopts the Madisonian position, why is there any reason to defer to legislators? The question rings powerfully in the context of Canadian law, where there is a more closely-tied legislature and executive, and where the executive is responsible to the legislature. In such a case, there are no separation of powers protections to prevent the worst human vices. Couldn’t the legislature or executive simply channel mob rule?

There is some evidence of this, as co-blogger Leonid Sirota and I wrote about here in reference to the SNC-Lavalin affair. The example shows that humans—of which politicians are a special class—will not act properly when the incentives aren’t right. The lure of winning an election and doing whatever it takes to do so might be too great a Madisonian evil. After all, it was Justin Trudeau’s justification in the SNC-Lavalin affair that “jobs” were the driving force behind his attempted interference in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. This leaves us wondering whether there is any reason for courts to defer to legislatures controlled by calculating executives.

But one must take the situation as it is. In this sense, Hart and Sacks and the legal process school had something right: institutional competency matters. And while legislatures are apt to turn into ineffectual mobs (look at the US Congress and the issue of gun control), or to focus on their own electoral futures, we are talking here about deference to legislatures on constitutional questions. Constitutional questions are more questions of policy-resolution than legal interpretation in the modern day. Of course, this is not normatively desirable or necessary. But it is the state of the world. And if that is the case, legislatures should have a legitimate say—if not a final one, because that responsibility is the judiciary’s—in how issues of policy are resolved. This says nothing of the fact that the people are the ultimate control on government, and for that reason, are always the best control on legislatures appealing to the worst of us.

Finally, I want to say a note about Jefferson’s living constitutionalism. Madison, I think, provides a response that is still apt today:

Would not a Government so often revised become too mutable to retain those prejudices in its favour which antiquity inspires, and which are perhaps a salutary aid to the most rational Government in the most enlightened age?

Madison advances a valid epistemological reason for refusing to throw away the past, one I find convincing instinctively. But there is an additional reason why the principle of constitutionalism means that we cannot escape the past. As Hayek notes, the distinctive American contribution to the Rule of Law was the addition of the principle of constitutionalism, explained by Madison as the idea that the Constitution is supreme over ordinary law; that it is “fundamental.” The choice to make supreme certain elements of law is an intentional one, taken by a people after the expense of extensive political capital and energy. It is a sacred act. When it comes to bills of rights, the choice to make certain rights and freedoms beyond the reach of ordinary legislation is a deliberate choice to remove from the sphere of political debate those rights and freedoms. That, too, is a sacred act. The reason why the Constitution cannot be automatically renewed every generation—short of the amending procedure—is that to do so would disrespect the original choice to remove certain, important rights from the sphere of debate. This is an important formal act that should be presumptively respected because it represents the democratic choice of the people at a select time. That choice, absent the amending procedure, should not be abridged by an extralegal “renewal” of the Constitution; especially by courts. This, of course, is slightly different than saying that the people made the choices they did for good reasons.

I could write more, but this post is long enough. It is enough to say that Madison’s politics do view humans as inherently flawed, and these flaws reverberate through all of our institutions. It is fundamentally a question, though, of asking with respect to a particular legal question who is worse. Sometimes courts are best suited to deal with issues, but other times they are decidedly not.

The Empire is Still Strong: A Response to Prof. Daly

Over on Administrative Law Matters, Prof. Daly writes that “[a]nti-administrativists have not had a good couple of weeks.” So his argument goes, in the last number of years “the administrative state in the United States has been under sustained attack, traduced as illegitimate and a betrayal of the commitment of the Founding Fathers.” This “cartoonish version of modern public administration” with “quavering judges unable or unwilling to get in its way” apparently met three defeats in three separate cases at the United States Supreme Court this spring: (1) Gundy, a non-delegation challenge, which I wrote about here (2) Kisor, a challenge involving the doctrine of deference which applies when administrators interpret their own regulations and (3) Dept of Commerce v New York, the census case, in which so-called “hard look review” was deployed by the Court. To Prof Daly, each of these cases represents the victory of well-developed administrative law principles over broad-side constitutional challenges to the administrative state. In this sense, “anti-administrativists” indeed had a bad few weeks.

I view the matter quite differently. Each of these cases actually shows how the “anti-administrativist” position has gained some traction, such that administrative state sympathizers like Justice Kagan must respond and incorporate them. In different ways, each case represents at least a partial triumph for positions and tools of administrative law that have roots in what Prof Daly calls the “anti-administrstivist” position.

Before moving to the cases, a note first about terminology. The term “anti-administrativist” implies that there is some objection to administrators writ large. But virtually no one makes this argument—not even Gorsuch J, who in Gundy did not criticize the very act of delegation to administrators itself, only the practice of legislative delegation. Much administrative law criticism sounds in bringing doctrine into a more coherent state, with a greater tie to fundamental constitutional arrangements. Jeff Pojanowski’s article, Neo-Classical Administrative Law, is a good example of this sort of argument. Accordingly, I will not use the term “anti-administrativist,” because it catches too much criticism: criticism that is not necessarily opposed to administrators making decisions, but that is instead focused on rooting those decisions in legislative authorization or other constitutional norms.

In terms of the cases cited by Prof Daly to support his argument, consider first Gundy. There, Justice Kagan interpreted the statute at issue to avoid a non-delegation problem, noting that delegation problems are in reality problems of statutory interpretation. To be sure, this was not a success for those who believe in a strong-form version of the non-delegation doctrine. Some of Kagan J’s opinion reads as a paean to administrative law functionalism, speaking for example to the modern “necessities of government” and concluding that if the statute at issue was unconstitutional, “then most of Government is unconstitutional.” But at the same time, the actual conclusions in Kagan J’s opinion are not at all monolithic. Rather than simply stating that the delegation passed muster under the easy-to-satisfy “intelligible principle” test, she took pains to qualify the delegation according to the text, context, and purpose of the statute. This had the effect of narrowing the delegation to avoid the sort of broad non-delegation problem that Gorsuch J saw in the case.

What motivates this sort of reasoning? It is very similar to the adoption of a clear statement rule, used variously as substantive canons of statutory interpretation in the United States. Clear statement rules work like this: absent a clear statement in the legislation, courts will not presume a certain result. Usually that certain result is contrary to some constitutional norm or value, even though the result is not an in-law constitutional violation. As William Eskridge explains, the Court has variously deployed this sort of reasoning in the context of delegation problems, “refer[rring] to the non-delegation idea as a canon of statutory interpretation rather than an enforceable constitutional doctrine.” Why? Because the US Constitution vests all legislative power in the Congress, and statutes (laws) cannot be made without bicameralism and presentment. This was the approach adopted in the Benzene Case, for example, where the Court interpreted a delegation to OSHA to create a “safe and healthful workplace.” The Court interpreted the statute to prevent the broad delegation, imposing a requirement of cost-benefit analysis on the agency.

Kagan J’s opinion is basically the same. She qualified the delegation with reference to the broader statutory scheme. She would only do this to avoid some delegation problem that engages a core constitutional presumption against delegation, as Eskridge points out. The result was an interpretation of the statute that avoids constitutional problems that many of us who oppose widespread delegation would find problematic. In this sense, constitutional objections to widespread delegation found their way into Kagan J’s opinion.

Consider next Kisor, the regulatory deference case. Kisor reformulated so-called Auer deference to administrative interpretation of regulations, which simply held that a court would only interfere with such an interpretation if it was “plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” But Kagan J, in a majority opinion, came to a very different view of the conditions for the engagement of now-renamed “Kisor deference.” This opinion had the effect of cabining deference such that it only applied when the underlying justifications for it—legal and epistemic—were truly present. Consider each of the steps of Kisor deference, as explained by Chris Walker and excerpted by Professor Daly:

  1. The regulatory provision must be “genuinely ambiguous” after applying all of the traditional tools of interpretation (Chevron step one).
  2. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must be “reasonable,” and “[t]hat is a requirement an agency can fail” (Chevron step two).
  3. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must be the agency’s “authoritative” or “official position,” which means it must “at the least emanate from [the agency head or equivalent final policymaking] actors, using those vehicles, understood to make authoritative policy in the relevant context” (some version of the Mead doctrine/Chevron step zero).
  4. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must implicate the agency’s substantive expertise (some version of Skidmore deference).
  5. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must reflect “fair and considered judgment” — not an ad hoc litigating position or otherwise an interpretation that causes regulated entities unfair surprise (existing Christopher exception to Auer deference).

Each of these steps reflect varying justifications for deference that must actually be present before deference follows:

(1)-(2): Genuine ambiguity engages the presumption that if the legislature spoke clearly to a matter, its view must prevail over contrary interpretations by an agency. This is related to fundamental constitutional ideals of congressional/legislative superiority over a mere delegated body.

(3) and (5): Authoritativeness and fair and considered judgment reflects the requirement that agencies must adequately explain their conclusions, so that courts can conduct the constitutional act of judicial review, and so that the public can understand their conclusions. Both of these conditions are important for the public acceptance and legality of the administrative state, as noted in the Commerce Department case discussed below.

(4) Truly-existing expertise is an epistemic reason for deference, as Prof. Daly points out in his book, A Theory of Deference in Administrative Law. While it may not be a legal reason for deference (and hence not a very persuasive reason for it), it at least shows that Kagan J was concerned with ensuring that deference should apply when the reasons for its justifications are present.

So, Kisor is actually a representation of a much more constitutionally-justifiable doctrine of deference that is consistent with critiques of the administrative state as untethered to and uncontrolled by constitutional norms. Kisor is driven by a need to cabin deference to the situations where it is most justifiable, especially with reference to constitutional norms that require congressional text to govern and judicial review to be available and effective. This is in direct contrast to the Supreme Court of Canada’s unprincipled, automatic doctrine of deference.

Finally, consider the Commerce Dept case concerning a citizenship question on the census. The problem here was the Government’s explanation for why it wanted such a question. As Chief Justice Roberts explained:

We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process…[W]e cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given. The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law, after all, is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public. Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.

This formulation of the requirement of so-called “hard-look” review frames the problem as one of public justification so that courts can scrutinize administrative action, as a corollary to the Rule of Law. To Professor Daly, this means that the “anti-administrativists’ caricature of fawning judicial servility to technocratic masters” is incorrect. But it is useful to note that the tools used to restrain judges pointed to by Professor Daly developed because of important critiques of the administrative state. Hard look review developed because of a broad trend towards pluralism, as explained by Martin Shapiro. This pluralism, which supported broader standing rules to challenge administrative action, also supported the creation of a new ground of review to ensure the adequacy of judicial review and the public justification of administrative actions. This trend was decidedly skeptical of administrative power, on the theory that agencies were “captured” by regulated parties. Far from being a welcome tool of administrative law, hard look review was and remains deeply contested. Those who might consider themselves Wilsonian progressives would balk at hard look review, even on procedure, because it means that courts are readily interfering in the policy and discretionary judgments of so-called “experts.” This says nothing of hard look review on substance. But administrative skepticism, and the requirement of public justification, cuts hard the other way in hard look review—which also means, like liberal standing rules, that agencies must be ready to defend its action before the courts and in the public eye (the APA is broadly representative of this trend).

For these reasons, each of the cases identified by Prof. Daly are not rejections of administrative skepticism. Rather, they are incorporations of a certain idea of administrative law as a control over the fiat of administrators. In this sense, reflexive deference and delegation met strong judicial rules and attitudes about controlling the administrative state. This might not amount to “anti-administrativism” but it means that the administrative critique is not without its judicial defenders. Professor Daly and I get to the same place; there are tools of administrative law available to control administrators. It just depends on whether judges use them, and from where they come.

A Perspective from the North

A review of Jeffrey Pojanowski’s “neoclassical” approach to administrative law

Jeffrey Pojanowski, whose contribution of “A View from South of the Border” to the Dunsmuir Decade symposium readers may recall, has posted a very interesting paper on “Neoclassical Administrative Law” on SSRN. (The article is to be published in the Harvard Law Review later this year.) Although written in an American context, Professor Pojanowski’s article should be read north of the border too, because it is framed around the tension that is central to Canadian, as well as if not more than, American administrative law: that between the Rule of Law and (what we in the Commonwealth call) Parliamentary sovereignty. Professor Pojanowski’s solution to this tension ought to be appealing in Canada ― though accepting it would require giving up some of the assumptions that are built into our administrative law.

Professor Pojanowski starts by describing three ways of addressing the conflict between the courts’ role of saying what the law is and the legislatures’ prerogative of committing certain governance issues to the resolution of administrative decision-makers. What he terms “administrative supremacy”

sees the role of courts and lawyers as limited to checking patently unreasonable exercises of power by the administrative actors who are the core of modern governance. To the extent that durable, legal norms are relevant, the primary responsibility for implementing them in administrative governance falls to the discretion of executive officials, who balance those norms’ worth against other policy goals. (7)

“Administrative skepticism”, by contrast,

rejects deference to agency interpretations of law, even if the agency is charged with administering the statute. Deference shirks the judicial duty to say what the law is and introduces a pro-government bias of dubious constitutional provenance. (14)

As for those cases where the lawyers’ traditional interpretive tools are of no avail, because the administrative decision-maker has been given a policy-making role, “the [American] administrative skeptic is more likely to recommend an approach that is both more radical and more modest: invalidating the provision on non-delegation grounds”. (16-17)

Finally, the approach Professor Pojanowski terms “pragmatist” “seeks to reconcile the reality of administrative power, expertise, and political authority with broader constitutional and rule-of law values”. (18) It is relatively deferential to administrative interpretations of law, but makes “certain exceptions, such as withholding deference on major questions or jurisdiction”, (18) and “may … demand evidence that the agency engaged in reasoned decisionmaking” (18) even on those issues where it is normally prepared to defer, both interpretive and policy ones.

In jurisprudential terms, administrative supremacy comports with “a form of legal realism that dissolves the line between legal interpretation and policymaking”, deeming “most interesting questions of legal interpretation … inextricable from legislative policy choices”. (13) The skeptical position embraces A.V. Dicey’s vision of ordinary courts interpreting law as the keystone of the Rule of Law. The pragmatist view reinterprets the Rule of Law as involving “requirements of fair participation and reasoned justification”, and asks the courts to enforce these requirements, rather than to impose their view of what the law actually is.

Professor Pojanowski articulates and begins the defence of another approach to administrative law, which differs from those just outlined, though it has some affinities with each of them, perhaps especially the skeptical one. This “neoclassical administrative law … is skeptical of judicial deference on questions of law but takes a much lighter touch on review of [administrative] agencies’ procedural and policymaking choices”. (23) It seeks to preserve, indeed it emphasizes, the distinction between law and policy, and makes the courts masters of the former while asking them to stay out of the latter.

In part, this is motivated by a “formalist” rejection of the “legal realist premise that all interpretive uncertainty involves policy choices calling for political accountability and non-legal expertise”. (27; footnote omitted) To be sure statutes sometimes employ language that is only amenable to policy-laden elaboration (such as “in the public interest”); such elaboration should be the preserve of administrative decision-makers, subject only to a thin rationality review. However, this is precisely because in such “cases … there is no surface upon which traditional lawyers’ tools can have purchase”, (31) and the obverse of accepting this is a denial of “the more generalized presumption of implicit [legislative] delegation of interpretive authority”, which is no more than “a legal fiction delicately veiling a functionalism that dare not show its face”. (26) Legal questions, even difficult ones that have “more than one reasonable answer”, (33) can and ought to be answered by the courts, although “reviewing judges are likely to confer at least some mild epistemic authority on expert agencies”. (25n) In addition, the “neoclassical” position rests on a belief in the importance of the legislation governing judicial review of administrative decisions, especially (in the United States) the Administrative Procedure Act.

But while the “neoclassical” approach is similar to the skeptical one in its confidence in the law’s autonomy from politics and policy, it does not go as far in its rejection of the administrative state. It does not seek to reinvigorate the constitutional non-delegation doctrine (which holds that only the legislature, and not its creatures in the executive branch, can make law). Instead, “[t]he neoclassical approach turns down the constitutional temperature”, (36) accepting that the administrative state’s rule-making and discretionary powers are here to stay. It, in other words, “classical Diceyan public law theory adapted and persisting in a new regulatory environment”. (38)

Professor Pojanowski ends by addressing some potential criticisms of “neoclassical administrative law”. Of greatest relevance to Canadians will be his admission that

much here turns on interpretive method. The extent to which appeal to craft determinacy is plausible goes a long way toward deciding whether neoclassicism is promising or misguided. Furthermore, if interpretive formalism is inferior to strong purposivism or dynamic statutory interpretation, the case for deference is far stronger. Those methods explicitly, and to a greater degree, call for interpreters to consider policy consequences and evolving public values alongside, and sometimes above, formalist tools. The more those values infuse legal interpretation, the stronger the bite of arguments for deference based on political accountability and technical expertise. (40; footnote omitted)

Professor Pojanowski points out, however, that the pragmatist view, at least, is also tenable only if there are legal answers to at least some interpretive questions, which its adherents exclude from the scope of judicial deference.

I find Professor Pojanowski’s summary of the various existing approaches to administrative law illuminating, and his own “neoclassical” approach, mostly compelling. As a matter of first principle, I might be attracted by anti-administrativist skepticism but, especially in Canada, it is not a plausible position. Whatever might be the persuasiveness of the originalist arguments in favour of the non-delegation doctrine, and of strict separation of powers more broadly, in the United States, I doubt one can take them far in Canada. Subject to (somewhat vague) constraints on legislative abdication, the delegation of discretionary and rule-making authority is within the powers of Parliament and the provincial legislatures under the Constitution Act, 1867. The question, then, is not whether we can burn the administrative state to the ground, but whether we can ensure that it remains subject to law. The “neoclassical” understanding of administrative law is a better way of doing that then the available alternatives.

At present, Canadian administrative law is torn between “administrative supremacy” and “pragmatism”. Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190, the soon-to-be-former leading case, is representative of the pragmatic approach, with its insistence that

[i]n judicial review, reasonableness is concerned mostly with the existence of justification, transparency and intelligibility within the decision-making process. But it is also concerned with whether the decision falls within a range of possible, acceptable outcomes which are defensible in respect of the facts and law. [47]

By contrast, cases such as Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, 2016 SCC 47, [2016] 2 SCR 293, which allow unjustified, unreasoned administrative decisions to stand in the name of an (almost?) irrebuttable “presumption of expertise”, epitomize administrative supremacy. That said, even the pragmatist strand of Canadian administrative law is infected with a metastasizing belief in the absence of legal answers to interpretive questions which in Dunsmuir and elsewhere has been said to warrant thoroughgoing deference to administrative interpretations of law.

In the circumstances, even reasserting the belief in the law is in fact autonomous from policy and politics, and that interpretive questions must be resolved by relying on legal rather than on administrative expertise, is a tall order. Professor Pojanowski points out that this belief goes hand in hand with a commitment to interpretation based “on the text’s original meaning, statutory context and structure, linguistic canons, and perhaps historical intent … rather than normative canons or legislative purpose at a high level of generality”. (34) Contrast this with the broad pro-regulatory purposivism of cases like West Fraser Mills Ltd v British Columbia (Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22, [2018] 1 SCR 635, and you will see just how far we have to go. Yet West Fraser, with its purported acknowledgement of an “unrestricted delegation of power” [11] to an administrative tribunal, illustrates the dangers of the prevailing Canadian approach.

That said, I have a couple of interrelated concerns about Professor Pojanowski’s approach. The broader one has to do with judicial review of policy decisions, including “interpretation” (or rather construction) of such terms as “reasonable” or “in the public interest”. I am inclined to think that the approach to (constitutional) construction set out by Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick in “The Letter and the Spirit: A Unified Theory of Originalism” is apposite here. A reviewing court should ensure, not that just that the administrative decision is rational, but also that it is a good faith attempt to further the original purpose of the statutory provision on which it is based and of the statute as a whole. While legal craft may not be able to tell us how best to serve the public interest in a particular regulatory context, it can help shed some light on statutory purpose. Indeed, I think it is necessary that courts, rather than administrative decision-makers naturally incentivized to overvalue to importance of their perceived mission and to underrate the countervailing considerations that may well have led a legislature to limit their ability to advance their agenda, be the final arbiters of statutory purpose. As Justice Rand famously said in Roncarelli v Duplessis, [1959] SCR 121

In public regulation … there is no such thing as absolute and untrammelled “discretion” … there is always a perspective within which a statute is intended to operate; and any clear departure from its lines or objects is just as objectionable as fraud or corruption. (140)

A related but more parochial concern has to do with constitutional law. Whatever deference might be warranted to administrative decision-makers engaged in the policy-laden elaboration of vague statutory terms, none should be accorded on constitutional issues. As a matter of the positive law of the Canadian constitution, the courts are the supreme arbiters of its meaning, against the executive branch as well as against the legislative. This question, if I understand correctly, does not even arise in the United States, but so long as Doré v Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12, [2012] 1 SCR 395 remains on the books, it must be flagged in the Canadian context.

Another somewhat parochial question that the “neoclassical” approach to administrative law would force us to confront is that of what to do about a large number of statutory provisions that Canadian courts have so far more or less deliberately ignored or distorted beyond recognition. These are, on the one hand, “privative clauses” that purport to preclude review of administrative decisions; and on the other provisions such as section 18.1(4) of the Federal Courts Act, sections 58 and 59 of the Administrative Tribunals Act of British Columbia, and other provisions that seek to guide judicial review of administrative decisions. Privative clauses would be unconstitutional if taken literally; but instead of holding them unconstitutional and simply ignoring them as nullities, Canadian courts (used to) affect to take them seriously rather than literally, as indications that the decisions of tribunals protected by such clauses should be given greater deference. As the “presumption of deference” spread, even this position has become increasingly meaningless. Meanwhile, as co-blogger Mark Mancini has pointed out, in Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v Khosa, 2009 SCC 12, [2009] 1 SCR 339, the Supreme Court subverted the guidance that section 18.1(4) provides, insisting on imposing its own views on the standard of review applicable to decisions of federal boards and tribunals. The Supreme Court has similarly ignored provisions creating statutory rights of appeal, treating appeals from administrative decisions like judicial reviews.

Professor Pojanowski calls for such legislation to be taken as binding law rather than guidelines to be subsumed into or overridden by the Suprme Court’s own views about judicial review. This should be the obvious thing to do: statute trumps the common law. However, there is a catch; two even. First, the principle of legality holds that common law rights, including the right to access courts, including, I think it is fair to say, for the purposes of judicial review, cannot be abolished by implication. I’m not sure whether this has repercussions for interpretation of legislation that guides judicial review, but it might in some cases. Often, however, the legislation is quite clear. Notably, section 58 of the above-mentioned BC statute requires review for patent unreasonableness, including on questions of law in the case of certain tribunals. I think the courts would need to squarely face, in an appropriate case, the question of whether legislatures are constitutionally permitted to set the bar so high. And the courts should stop pretending to attach any significance to unconstitutional privative clauses.

Professor Pojanowski has articulated an approach to administrative law that is at once principled and (relatively) realistic. It responds to concerns that animate not only American, but also Canadian law, and should therefore be of considerable interest to us, not just as a comparativist curiosity, but as a source of compelling ideas. For this approach to take hold in Canada, long-held assumptions will require revision, and difficult questions will need answering. Yet it is quite clearly superior to available alternatives. Count me a cautious neoclassicist.

Australia 1:0 Canada

Canadians have much to learn from the Australian High Court’s take on election spending limits for “third parties”

The High Court of Australia has just delivered Unions NSW v New South Wales [2019] HCA 1, a decision that should be of interest to readers who are concerned with freedom of expression in the electoral context ― a topical issue in Canada, given the recent imposition of further restrictions in this area by the recently enacted Bill C-76. The decision resulted from a challenge by a number of labour unions to New South Wales legislation that reduced the maximum amount a “third party” ― that is anyone not a candidate at an election or a political party ― is allowed to spend on campaigning in a nearly-six-month period preceding an election, from 1,050,000AUD (jut under a million Canadian) to 500,000AUD. The High Court unanimously held that the legislation was contrary to the implied freedom of political communication, which it had previously read into the Australian constitution‘s provisions requiring “representative” government.

The plurality judgment, by Chief Justice Kiefel and Justices Bell and Keane, finds that the third party spending limits are unconstitutional. That they restrict the ability to communicate is not in dispute. And while the plurality is prepared to assume that these limits are imposed for the legitimate purposes of levelling the campaigning playing field and preventing the wealthy from “drowning out” the voices of the less fortunate, they are not justified. Experts consulted prior to the enactment of the legislation provided no particular justification for recommending that the then-existing spending limits be reduced. A Parliamentary committee, however, recommend that the legislature look into the actual spending needs of third parties, and this was not done either. As a result, there is no reason for saying that the reduced limits are “reasonably necessary”.

Justice Gageler agrees with the plurality’s disposition of the case. He is persuaded of the legitimacy of the state’s pursuit “of substantive fairness in a manner compatible with maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of representative and responsible government”. [91] This might, in principle, justify much lower spending limits for third parties, which campaign on single issues, than for parties that must address a broad range of issues in their quest to form a government. However, “[i]t is not self-evident, and it has not been shown, that the cap set in the amount of $500,000 leaves a third-party campaigner with a reasonable opportunity to present its case”. [101] Absent such a showing, the restriction on the freedom of communication is not justified.

Justice Nettle’s conclusion is similar. He accepts the legitimacy of the objective of creating a level electoral playing field ― one on which political parties will be primary players ― and agrees that a legislatures may from time to time review the measures it takes to ensure fairness, including by lowering spending caps previously enacted. However, there must be a justification for whatever measures it takes from time to time. Such a justification is missing in this case. Although it was recommended that more evidence on the needs of third parties be collected, “for reasons which do not appear, that recommendation went unheeded. It is as if Parliament simply went ahead … without pausing to consider whether a cut of as much as 50 per cent was required”. [117]

Justice Gordon, like the plurality, assumes that restrictions on third party spending pursue a legitimate purpose, which she characterizes as the privileging of political parties and candidates. However, in the absence of evidence about the actual need for restrictions set at their current level, “the Court … cannot be satisfied that the level of the expenditure cap is reasonably appropriate and adapted to achieve the asserted constitutionally permissible end”. [150] It was for the State to show that the restriction it seeks to impose was justified, and it has not done so.

For his part, Justice Edelman considers that the reduction in the spending limits imposed on third parties, even as the limits imposed on political parties rose, cannot be explained by the purposes of maintaining a fair and corruption-free electoral system. Rather, it must have had an “additional purpose”, which “was to ensure that the voice of third-party campaigners was quieter than that of political parties and candidates”. [159] In other words, the reduction’s aim was “to burden the freedom of political communication of third-party campaigners”. [160] Justice Edelman considers that, although laws that rely on the relative silencing of some views in order to ensure that all can be heard are legitimate, to aim only at silencing some voices “is incompatible with the maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of representative and responsible government”, and legislation so motivated is “invalid”. [160]

Needless to say, I am not qualified to comment on whether the High Court is correct as a matter of Australian law. What I can do is compare its decision with that of the Supreme Court of Canada in Harper v Canada (Attorney-General), 2004 SCC 33, [2004] 1 SCR 827, which addressed much the same issues. (Readers will recall that I am not a fan of Harper, to put it mildly, and included it in my list of the Supreme Court’s five worst decisions of the last half-century in this blog’s recent Twelve Days of Christmas symposium.)

This is most obviously so on the issue of deference to the legislature on the issue of the appropriateness of a limitation of the freedom of (political) expression, and the evidence required for the government to make this case. The Harper majority insisted that courts should approach legislative choices with deference. In its view, “[t]he legislature is not required to provide scientific proof based on concrete evidence of the problem it seeks to address in every case”, and that “a reasoned apprehension of … harm” [Harper, 77] is sufficient to restrict fundamental freedoms protected by the Canadian constitution.

This approach is explicitly rejected in Unions NSW. While the Australian judges avoid directly criticizing the Harper majority, both the plurality opinion and Justice Nettle explicitly side with the “strong dissent” of Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice Major (joined by Justice Binnie). The plurality takes a dim view of the submission “that Parliament does not need to provide evidence for the legislation it enacts [and] is entitled to make the choice as to what level of restriction is necessary to meet future problems”. [44] When legislative choice are made in a way that burden the freedom of political communication, they must be justified. Similarly, Justice Gageler speaks of the need for a “compelling justification”, and insists that “[i]f a court cannot be satisfied of a fact the existence of which is necessary in law to provide a constitutional basis for impugned legislation, … the court has no option but to pronounce the legislation invalid.” [95] Justice Gordon insists that “the Court must … be astute not to accept at face value the assertion that freedom of communication will, unless curtailed by a reduction in the cap to $500,000, bring about corruption and distortion of the political process”. [148]

Another point of contrast between Harper and Unions NSW is the treatment of the so-called “egalitarian model of elections” designed in part to favour the interests of political parties and candidates over those of the civil society groups, disparagingly consigned to the status of “third parties”. According to Harper, election campaigns must focus attention on parties and candidates, including by ensuring that any other participants in the public debate, except the media, will behave unobtrusively. By contrast, the plurality opinion in Unions NSW explicitly rejects the submission that candidates and parties deserve preferential treatment, advanced in part on the basis that elections are “not a choice between ideas, policies, views or beliefs except insofar as such choice may be reflected in the electoral choice between candidates”. [39] Rather, the plurality says, “ss 7 and 24 of the Constitution guarantee the political sovereignty of the people of the Commonwealth by ensuring that their choice of elected representatives is a real choice, that is, a choice that is free and well-informed” [40] ― including by third parties. Justice Gageler, of course, takes the contrary view on this point. Justice Edelman’s position is more complex. He explicitly endorses “a Rawlsian, egalitarian model” [178] in which spending limits prevent some speakers from “drowning out” others. However, he also considers that it is not legitimate to target particular speakers for silencing apart from such an anti-drowning out purpose.

A last difference between Harper and Unions NSW worth highlighting is recognition by Justice Gageler of “the propensity of an elected majority to undervalue, and, at worst, to seek to protect itself against adverse electoral consequences resulting from, political communication by a dissenting minority”. [66] Justice Gageler refers to prior cases where the risk of a government legislating to limit political competition the better to maintain itself in office was explicitly adverted to. Such legislation, he notes, is incompatible with presuppositions of the Australian constitutional order. Although he finds that, in this case, “[t]here is no suggestion of abuse of incumbency” [85] by one party against others, this clear-eyed position is in contrast to that of the Harper majorityr, which ignored the possibility that incumbent governments favour legislation that excludes “third parties” from electoral campaigns in order to avoid unpleasant criticism and so reduce the odds of losing power.

There are more interesting things in the Unions NSW decision than I have room to discuss in this post. For example, Justice Gageler’s comments about the role courts in finding facts that are relevant to deciding whether a statute is constitutional are in contrast to the position of the Supreme Court of Canada in cases such as Canada (Attorney General) v Bedford, 2013 SCC 72, [2013] 3 SCR 1101, and should be very nutritious food for thought for those who are skeptical of the Bedford requirement of deference to trial judges. Justice Eledman’s comments on identifying statutory purpose (and in particular the role of general statements of purpose in the legislation) are also very interesting.

Overall, based on this one decision, I think that Canadians have a great deal to learn from Australians. Admittedly, the length of the High Court’s decisions is a deterrent ― Unions NSW is about 85 pages long, and I take it that it’s pretty short by Australian standards. That’s the cost of so many judges delivering full individual reasons. But the upside is that interesting ideas don’t get swept under the carpet in the process of getting to a set of reasons many judges can sign onto. I’m not saying the Supreme Court of Canada should go back to having each judge deliver his or her own reasons (though I wonder sometimes) but, at any rate, reading the Australian decisions may well be worth our while. In particular, the willingness of the Australian judges to keep a legislature accountable for imposing limits on the freedom of political expression without justification is a welcome reminder that their Canadian counterparts can do much more to protect individual rights in the electoral realm, and elsewhere.

Administrative Law’s Virtues and Vices

What Joseph Raz’s classic Rule of Law article tells us about administrative law

Joseph Raz’s article on “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue” (eventually incorporated in the collection of essays The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality) is well known, mostly for the argument that the Rule of Law should not be confused with good law, and that a legal system can be thoroughly iniquitous while still complying with its requirements. The Rule of Law (I follow Jeremy Waldron’s practice in capitalizing the phrase), Professor Raz famously says, is like the sharpness of a knife: a knife needs to be sharp to be useful, and a legal system should comply with the requirements of the Rule of Law to be effective, but that tells us nothing at all about whether the knife is being used to cut bread or to kill people, and whether law is used to protect or to repress them. Professor Raz describes his “conception of the rule of law”  as “formal”, (214) although a number of its tenets have to do with the operation of the courts, and are best described (following Professor Waldron again) as procedural.

I think, however, that Professor Raz’s understanding of the Rule of Law amounts to a substantive one in one particular area, in which his insights are not, so far as I know, particularly appreciated: administrative law. Administrative decision-making and its review by the courts are at the heart of the Razian Rule of Law. The third Rule of Law “principle” Professor Raz lists, after the ones calling for “prospective, open, and clear” (214) laws and “stable” ones, (214) is that “the making of particular laws (particular legal orders) should be guided by open, stable, clear, and general rules”. (215) This is a warning about the dangers of administrative (and executive more generally) discretion:

A police constable regulating traffic, a licensing authority granting a licence under certain conditions, all these and their like are among the more ephemeral parts of the law. As such they run counter to the basic idea of the rule of law. They make it difficult for people to plan ahead on the basis of their knowledge of the law. (216)

This is not to say that no executive power can be exercised consistently with the Rule of Law. Professor Raz suggests that the problem with its “ephemeral” nature

is overcome to a large extent if particular laws of an ephemeral status are enacted only within a framework set by general laws which are more durable and which impose limits on the unpredictability introduced by the particular orders. (216)

This framework includes

[t]wo kinds of general rules … : those which confer the necessary powers for making valid orders and those which impose duties instructing the power-holders how to exercise their powers. (216)

The former are the substantive statutory (or prerogative) basis for the exercise of executive power. The latter, which I think would include both procedural rules strictly speaking and those guiding the administrative decision-makers’ thought process (such as the prohibition on taking irrelevant considerations into account or acting for an improper purpose), form an important part of administrative law.

Professor Raz’s next Rule of Law “principle” is that of judicial independence. But the way he explains is also directly relevant to administrative law. Professor Raz points out that

it is futile to guide one’s action on the basis of the law if when the matter comes to adjudication the courts will not apply the law and will act for some other reasons. The point can be put even more strongly. Since the court’s judgment establishes conclusively what is the law in the case before it, the litigants can be guided by law only if the judges apply the law correctly. … The rules concerning the independence of the judiciary … are designed to guarantee that they will be free from extraneous pressures and independent of all authority save that of the law. (217; paragraph break removed)

Although Professor Raz does not explore the implications of this for administrative law (why would he have, in the post-Anisminic United Kingdom?), they seem obvious enough. Only independent courts applying the law, and not acting on extra-legal considerations can assure that the law is able to guide those subject to it. Administrative decision-makers, however, typically lack anything like the safeguards that exist for the independence of the judiciary. In Canada, in Ocean Port Hotel Ltd v British Columbia (General Manager, Liquor Control and Licensing Branch), 2001 SCC 52, [2001] 2 SCR 781,  the Supreme Court has held that there is no constitutional requirement of administrative tribunal independence. In Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v Government of Saskatchewan, 2013 SKCA 61, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal upheld legislation that allowed an incoming government to summarily dismiss all the members of an administrative tribunal in order to replace them with those deemed more ideologically  acceptable. Indeed, for many administrative tribunals, their sensitivity to considerations of policy ― and ideology ― is part of their raison d’être. This makes it essential that independent courts be committed to policing these (and other) tribunals’ compliance with the law ― with the entire framework of stable general rules that guide administrative decision-making, both the limits on substantive grants of power and the procedure- and process-related administrative law rules. Judicial deference to non-independent, policy-driven administrative decision-makers is incompatible with legally bound adjudication that is necessary for the law to provide guidance, and is thus anathema to the Rule of Law as Professor Raz describes it.

Professor Raz’s next Rule of Law requirement is that “[t]he principles of natural justice must be observed”. This is a point that obviously applies to administrative law, as everyone now agrees ― in a (perhaps insufficiently acknowledged) victory for administrative law’s erstwhile critics. But here too it is worth noting Professor Raz’s explanation: respect for natural justice is “obviously essential for the correct application of the law and thus … to its ability to guide action”. (217) (Of course, respect for natural justice is important for other (dignitarian) reasons too, but they are not, on Professor Raz’s view, embedded in the concept of the Rule of Law.)

The following Rule of Law principle Professor Raz describes is that

[t]he courts should have review powers over the implementation of the other principles. This includes review of … subordinate … legislation and of administrative action, but in itself it is a very limited review—merely to ensure conformity to the rule of law. (217)

Although review for conformity to the Rule of Law is “limited” in the sense that it need not entail review for conformity with any particular set of substantive fundamental rights, it is nevertheless very significant. It means that the courts are empowered to ensure the consistency of administrative decisions with grants of power that purportedly authorize them, as well as with the rules that govern the procedures and processes by which they are made. And while Professor Raz does not explicitly address the question of how stringently the courts should enforce these rules, it seems clear that only non-deferential correctness review will satisfy the requirements of the Rule of Law as he presents them.

Finally, Professor Raz writes that “[t]he discretion of the crime-preventing agencies should not be allowed to pervert the law”. (218) He addresses the behaviour of police and prosecutors, and specifically their ability to exercise discretion so as to effectively nullify certain criminal offenses. Yet, presumably, similar concerns apply to administrative tribunals ― most obviously, those that are charged with the prosecution of regulatory offences, but arguably others too. Professor Raz’s argument seems to be only a special case of Lon Fuller’s insistence (in The Morality of Law) on “congruence” between the law on the books and its implementation by the authorities, at least insofar as it applies to the executive. (Fuller also wrote about the what congruence meant in the context of statutory interpretation ― something I touched on here.)

Why is this important? I don’t suppose that an appeal to the authority of Professor Raz will persuade the proponents of judicial deference to administrative decision-makers, and in particular to their interpretations of the law. Those who defend deference argue that administrative interpretations are the law, so that there is nothing else, no statutory meaning meaning or independent standards, for the judges to ascertain and enforce. As the majority opinion in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190 put it,

certain questions that come before administrative tribunals do not lend themselves to one specific, particular result. Instead, they may give rise to a number of possible, reasonable conclusions. [47]

In such cases, the Supreme Court held, the courts would only engage in deferential reasonableness review of the administrative decisions. Moreover, Dunsmuir suggested, and subsequent cases have confirmed, that all questions regarding the interpretation of administrative decision-makers’ grants of power (the first part of what Professor Raz describes as the framework of general rules governing the making of administrative orders) will be presumptively treated as having no “one specific, particular result”. I have already argued that this is an implausible suggestion, because

the great variety of statutes setting up administrative tribunals, and indeed of particular provisions within any one of these statutes, makes it unlikely that all of the interpretive questions to which they give rise lack definitive answers.

But Professor Raz’s arguments point to an even more fundamental problem with the pro-deference position. Those who defend this position are, of course, entitled to their own definition of the Rule of Law, which is a fiercely contested idea. If they think that the Rule of Law does not require the existence of clear, stable, and general rules, or that it can accommodate “particular laws” not guided by such general rules, well and good. (It is worth noting, however, that Dunsmuir itself embraced an understanding of the Rule of Law not too distant from that advanced by Professor Raz: “all exercises of public authority must find their source in law”. [28]) But I do not think that the proponents of deference have a response to the underlying difficulty Professor Raz identifies. In the absence of general rules that are stable enough not to depend on the views each administrator takes of policy considerations, or simply in the absence of an enforcement of such rules by independent courts, people will find it “difficult … to plan ahead on the basis of their knowledge of the law”, “to fix long-term goals and effectively direct one’s life towards them” (220). As Professor Raz notes, this compromises respect for human dignity, which “entails treating humans as persons capable of planning and plotting their future”. (221)

I do not mean to exaggerate. As Professor Raz and other Rule of Law theorists note, compliance with the Rule of Law is a matter of degree. Deferential judicial review of administrative action is a failure of the Rule of Law as Professor Raz understands it, but it is hardly the worst failure one can imagine, at least so long as some meaningful review is still involved. (Suggestions, such as that recently voiced by Chief Justice McLachlin in West Fraser Mills Ltd v British Columbia (Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22, that there can be “unrestricted” [11] delegations of regulatory power are disturbing in this regard, but perhaps they only need to be taken seriously, not literally.) Nevertheless, and whether or not the proponents of judicial deference to administrative tribunals recognize this, deference does undermine the ability of citizens to rely on the law and to plan their lives accordingly. To that extent, it does amount to mistreatment by the state, of which the courts are part. It needs, at the very least, to be viewed with serious suspicion, and probably outright hostility. An administrative law that takes the requirements of the Rule of Law seriously has important virtues; one that does not is mired in vices.

No Shortcuts to Legality

Justice Stratas on the limits of the judicial practice of making up reasons for administrative decisions

What are the courts to do when reviewing an administrative decision that doesn’t meaningfully (or indeed at all) address a key issue? This is one of the issues that faced the Federal Court of Appeal in Bonnybrook Industrial Park Development Co Ltd v Canada (National Revenue), 2018 FCA 136, decided last week. The case involved the review of a decision of a Minister that some provisions of the Income Tax Act had the effect of preventing her from granting a taxpayer a waiver of or an extension of time to comply with certain filing obligations ― both of which appeared to be contemplated by other provisions. The Minister’s explanation for reading the statute in the way she did was conclusory to the point of non-existence, leaving the Court to guess at her real reasons ― and indeed uncertain whether she had even turned her mind to the issue.

On the issue of the waiver, the Court is unanimous in sending the matter back to the Minister. Justice Woods, for the majority notes that “[t]here is no evidence that the Minister gave any consideration” [30] to the matter; Justice Stratas agrees. However, the majority, while acknowledging “concerns” with the inadequacy of the explanation given by the Minister, accepts to review her decision on the extension of time, taking the government lawyer’s arguments to “supplement[]” this explanation. [33] Justice Stratas dissents from this approach, and his reasons are worth paying attention to.

Justice Stratas insists that an administrative decision that is reviewed on a reasonableness standard ― as interpretations of administrative tribunals’ “home statutes” usually are ― must be explained. While a reviewing court can sometimes draw inferences from the record supporting an administrative decision about how and why certain issues were resolved, in the presence of only a conclusory “bottom-line position”, its “ability to conduct reasonableness review is fatally hobbled”. [88] Even deferential review does not require a court to take administrative interpretations of law on trust. Nor is appropriate to  take the lawyers’ submissions as the equivalent of the decision-maker’s reasons; in this case, to do so would amount to “a bootstrapping of the Minister’s decision after she became functus officio” [73] ― that is to say, after she no longer had the authority to decide the matter.

And, since the Income Tax Act requires the Minister to decide whether to grant an extension of time, it is quite inappropriate for the courts to interpret the relevant provisions for the first time on judicial review. That would be “doing the job of statutory interpretation and reasons-writing that the Minister should have done”. [74] As Justice Stratas pithily points out:

My job is judicial review of the Minister, not judicial impersonation of the Minister. I do not work for the Minister. I am not the Minister’s adviser, thinker, or ghostwriter. I am an independent reviewer of what the Minister has done.

In conducting review, I am entitled to interpret the reasons given by the Minister seen in light of the record before her. Through a legitimate process of interpretation, I can sometimes understand what the Minister meant when she was silent on certain things.

But faced with a silence whose meaning cannot be understood through legitimate interpretation, who am I to grab the Minister’s pen and “supplement” her reasons? Why should I, as a neutral judge, be conscripted into the service of the Minister and discharge her responsibility to write reasons? Even if I am forced to serve the Minister in that way, who am I to guess what the Minister’s reasoning was, fanaticize about what might have entered the Minister’s head or, worse, make my thoughts the Minister’s thoughts? And why should I be forced to cooper up the Minister’s position, one that, for all I know, might have been prompted by inadequate, faulty or non-existent information and analysis? [91-93]

Would that the Supreme Court were always so clear. And would that the majority in this case, which apparently shared these concerns, and indeed gave them effect in disposing of one of the issues, had been more consistent.

The Supreme Court, of couse, has grappled with the issue of judicial “supplementation” ― which, as in this case, often means making-up ― of deficient administrative reasons in the course of reasonableness review. This problem arises because in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190 the Court had endorsed the suggestion, first made by David Dyzenhaus, that courts ought to defer not only to the “reasons offered” by administrative decision-makers, but also to those “which could be offered in support of a decision”. [48] This suggestion has always sat uneasily with the statement, made in the previous paragraph of Dunsmuir, that “[i]n judicial review, reasonableness is concerned mostly with the existence of justification, transparency and intelligibility within the decision-making process”. [47] Justice Stratas refers to the latter passage in explaining why reasonableness review is impossible when administrative decisions are not explained. Perhaps the high point of deference to “reasons which could be”, but were not, “offered in support of a decision was th Supreme Court’s decision came in Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, 2016 SCC 47, [2016] 2 SCR 293, where the majority spent 20 paragraphs making up missing administrative reasons in order to purportedly defer to them. In a blog post (which Justice Stratas cites, for which I am very grateful!) I described this process “playing chess with [one]self, and contriving to have one side deliberately lose to the other”.

Justice Stratas notes, however, that the Supreme Court has, at least on occasion, been more sympathetic to the idea that there must be limits to judicial “supplementation” of non-existent administrative reasons. In particular, Justice Stratas cites Delta Air Lines Inc v Lukács, 2018 SCC 2, for the proposition that while “reviewing courts … are supposed to supplement the reasons of administrative decision-makers in some circumstances, in effect participating in the reasons-giving process”, [76] they are not “require[d] … to figure out … the merits of the matter, decide the merits for the administrator, and then draft the administrator’s reasons”. [77] Filling in gaps in an adminsitrative decision-maker’s reasons is one thing; writing these reasons on a blank slate is quite another.

This is a plausible, but arguably an optimistic view of Delta, which after all did say that “[s]upplementing reasons may be appropriate in cases where the reasons are either non-existent or insufficient”, [23] and sought to distinguish precedents where the Supreme Court had done just that ― albeit not Edmonton East which, as Justice Stratas points out, it did not mention. Moreover, more recently, in  Law Society of British Columbia v. Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32 and Trinity Western University v. Law Society of Upper Canada, 2018 SCC 33, the Supreme Court again upheld largely unexplained administrative decisions (including one taken in unreflecting obedience to a referendum of a law society’s membership), instead of remitting them to the decision-maker.

That said, there is enough confusion and uncertainty in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in this area that it is difficult to fault lower courts that interpret this jurisprudence, Dworkin-fashion, to make it the best it can be, whether or not the Supreme Court itself would have treated with equal consideration. And that’s precisely what Justice Stratas does in Bonnybrook, by going back to the principles underpinning administrative law, and following their implications to a rule that can, and ought to, be consistently applied. As Justice Stratas points out, the law is not a tool for the ratification of the diktats of power, and the courts are not mere rubber-stampers of ukases. For administrative decision-makers, there are no shortcuts to legality, and for the courts, no quick fixes for administrative failures.

Is Deference Possible Here?

The Supreme Court’s latest administrative law decision shows why disguised correctness is the default standard of review

In Groia v Law Society of Upper Canada, 2018 SCC 27, decided last week, the Supreme Court of Canada once again fractured over the approach to take to the judicial review of an administrative decision ― and, once again, the majority chose correctness review disguised as reasonableness as its methodology. The substantive issue in Groia was whether the Law Society was entitled to discipline a lawyer for advocacy that took “the form of personal attacks, sarcastic outbursts and allegations of professional impropriety, grinding the trial to a near standstill”. [12] I have no articulate views on this, except a general sense that the fewer powers law societies have, and the more circumscribed these powers are, the better. But I do want to comment on the administrative law aspects of the decision.

* * *

As Justice Moldaver, writing for the majority, describes its decision, the Law Society’s

Appeal Panel grappled with the issue of when in-court incivility amounts to professional misconduct under the Law Society’s codes of conduct in force at the relevant time. It reasoned that incivility “capture[s] a range of unprofessional communications” and ultimately settled on a multifactorial, context-specific approach for assessing a lawyer’s behaviour. [36; references omitted]

The Panel then applied this test to Mr. Groia’s case. The issue for the Supreme Court is twofold: first, it must review the approach devised by the Panel; second, the Panel’s application of this approach. However, although all distinguish the two questions they must answer, the majority, Justice Côté, who concurs, and Justices Karakatsanis, Gascon, and Rowe, who jointly dissent, all consider that the Panel’s decision on both must be reviewed on the same standard. The majority and the dissent opt for reasonableness, though they apply it differently. Justice Côté goes for correctness.

As Justice Moldaver notes, the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions “establish that law society misconduct findings and sanctions are reviewed for reasonableness”. [43] This is because both the elaboration of the applicable analytical framework and its application “involve the interpretation of the Law Society’s home statute” ― or, as in this case, rules enacted under this statute ― “and the exercise of discretion”. [45] While the question of “the permissible scope of [lawyers’] in-court behaviour is arguably of central importance to the legal system as a whole”, [51] it is not “outside the Law Society’s expertise”. [51] Indeed, “Law Society disciplinary panels are composed, in part, of other lawyers”. [52] Justice Moldaver also rejects the claim, advanced by a dissenting judge at the Court of Appeal for Ontario and accepted by Justice Côté, that sanctions for lawyers’ behaviour in the courtroom are different in that imposing them risks trenching on judicial independence. In Justice Moldaver’s view, this is simply not so: “a trial judge is free to control the conduct in his or her courtroom irrespective of the degree of deference accorded to a law society’s disciplinary decision by a different court”. [55]

Having established reasonableness as the standard of review, Justice Moldaver considers the arguments advanced against the framework developed by the Panel in detail. I will not describe his reasons, partly because I have little to say on their substance, and partly because this part of them alone runs for almost 60 paragraphs. What matters for my present purposes is this: on each point and sub-point, after reviewing the Panel’s decision in at most a single paragraph, Justice Moldaver gives extensive explanations of what the Panel’s decision means, and why it is appropriate. Though these explanations are occasionally couched in the language of reasonableness, there is no doubt that Justice Moldaver provides his own views on the approach to judging alleged incivility by lawyers, instead of merely ratifying the Panel’s.

As for the application of the framework to Mr. Groia’s conduct, Justice Moldaver concludes that the Panel’s  decision was unreasonable. In Justice Moldaver’s view ― explained over the course of over 30 paragraphs ―, the Panel failed to apply the test it had itself articulated, and to take into account the factors that, on its own stated approach, ought to have mattered. For Justice Moldaver, “there is only one reasonable outcome in this matter: a finding that Mr. Groia did not engage in professional misconduct on account of incivility”. [125] (Now, here’s a question: would it be good if someone could reverse the Supreme Court’s decisions when they don’t follow the Court’s stated approach?)

As already noted, Justice Côté is of the view that the applicable standard of review is correctness, because lawyers’ in-court behaviour must be subject to the ultimate control of the judiciary. She insists that

An inquiry by a law society into a lawyer’s in-court conduct risks intruding on the judge’s function of managing the trial process and his authority to sanction improper behaviour. It does so by casting a shadow over court proceedings — in effect, chilling potential speech and advocacy through the threat of ex post punishment, even where the trial judge offered the lawyer no indication that his or her conduct crossed the line. And it permits an administrative body to second-guess the boundaries of permissible advocacy in a courtroom that is ultimately supervised by an independent and impartial judge. [168]

Justice Côté agrees with Justice Moldaver on the application of the test for misconduct, and thus concurs in the result.

The dissenters, by contrast, agree with Justice Moldaver that the standard of review is reasonableness, and also that the Panel’s approach was reasonable. However, they disagree with the way Justice Moldaver applied this standard, accusing him of

fundamentally misstat[ing] the Appeal Panel’s approach to professional misconduct, and reweigh[ing] the evidence to reach a different result. This is inconsistent with reasonableness review as it substitutes this Court’s judgment for that of the legislature’s chosen decision maker. [177]

The dissent faults Justice Moldaver with being insufficiently deferential to the Panel. “[D]eference”, they write, “recognizes that delegated authorities will have greater expertise in matters under their scope of authority”, [178] and when the applicable standard of review is reasonableness, it “is not optional”. [179] In particular, “deference bars a reviewing court from conducting an exacting criticism of a decision in order to reach the result that the decision was unreasonable”, or from “supplement[ing] the decision maker’s reasoning for the purpose of undermining it”. [180]

The dissenters “consider that Justice Moldaver reformulates” [188] the framework articulated by the Panel. As a result, they disagree with Justice Moldaver’s application of this framework too: “[i]t is not a respectful reading of the … Panel’s reasons to articulate a novel test … then fault the Panel for failing to apply it”. [199] The Panel’s decision is intelligible and defensible, and this is not a case where only one outcome could be reasonable. Indeed, such cases will be anomalies, because

[t]he existence of reasonableness review is, rather, premised on the fact that “certain questions that come before administrative tribunals do not lend themselves to one specific, particular result”. [215, quoting Dunsmuir v New-Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190 at [47]]

The dissent then describes ― at some length, and with limited reference to the Panel’s decision ― what it expects to be the pernicious consequences of the majority’s decision. The majority, the dissent fears, “sends the wrong message to those who look to this Court for guidance”. [227]

* * *

Therein, it seems to me, lies the rub. People look to the Supreme Court for guidance ― not for mere affirmation that an administrative decision-maker’s reasons were good enough and that in any event there is no right answer to the question they addressed. The whole point of having what the Constitution Act, 1867 foreshadows as a “general court of appeal for Canada” is that such an institution can explain what the law is. If such a court does not say what the law is, but only indicates that an administrative decision is within the bounds of what the law will tolerate ― without explaining where these bounds actually are ― then it is not doing its job.

It is no surprise, then, that Justice Moldaver’s reasons show little sign of deference to the Panel. What lawyers across Canada are interested in is what the Supreme Court itself thinks about their standards of conduct ― not in whether it thinks that the opinion of a single provincial disciplinary body on this subject was “within a range of possible, acceptable outcomes which are defensible in respect of the facts and law”. [Dunsmuir, [47]]  Indeed, the dissenters, for all the bitterness with which they chide Justice Moldaver for his failure to defer, and despite their own ostentatious display of deference, cannot help but enter the debate with their own comments about the appropriate standards of civility. If the question the Court is deciding is indeed one of central importance to the legal system, as Justice Moldaver concludes (and the dissent specifically agrees with this part of his reasons), this is entirely comprehensible.

Hence the question that, with apologies to Ronald Dworkin, I ask in this post’s title. Earlier this year, I wondered whether “the Court is growing disenchanted with deference to administrative decision-makers’ decisions on questions of law”, and perhaps even trying to kill off reasonableness review without telling anyone. The cases decided since then only provide more evidence for the proposition that the default standard of review in Canadian administrative law is disguised correctness, not reasonableness as the Supreme Court would have us believe. But perhaps the Supreme Court has a defence of  necessity to the charge of attempted murder. No court in its position could do otherwise.

Yet even if this be so, the Rule of Law issues I raised earlier do not go away. Law should be clear, and the fact of its change, transparent. The law of judicial review applied by the Supreme Court is opaque and hidden. And there is a further issue to think about: is it permissible for an apex court to apply a different law than the one it instructs other courts to apply, just because of its position within the legal system? It is, to say the least, not obvious that this is so ― which presumably is precisely why the Supreme Court engages in so much obfuscation. Once again, I conclude that it would be better ― more transparent, more conducive to the coherence of our legal system ― for the Supreme Court to (openly and publicly) abandon reasonableness review on questions of law in most or in all cases.

* * *

Groia illustrates a couple of additional problems with reasonableness review, as theorized and practised by the Supreme Court. On a theoretical level, it exposes the deficiencies in the Court’s justifications for deference, which I have already discussed at some length. Justice Moldaver explains that, while of central importance, the issue of lawyers’ behaviour is within the expertise of law society adjudicators. Indeed these adjudicators are themselves lawyers! But what, one would like to ask Justice Moldaver, are judges? Aren’t they lawyers too, and aren’t they, in principle (though, granted, not necessarily in practice) more eminent lawyers than those who sit on law society tribunals? As the dissenting opinion in Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, 2016 SCC 47, [2016] 2 SCR 293, co-written by Justice Brown ― who joined Justice Moldaver’s majority opinion in Groia ―, and joined by Justice Moldaver himself, pointed out, “expertise is a relative concept. It is not absolute.” [84] Sometimes administrative decision-makers are more expert than courts, which might be at least a practical reason for deference ― though not a legal one, as Mark Mancini’s contribution to the Dunsmuir Decade symposium pointed out. But this justification is implausible here.

For their part, the dissenters appeal to a different justification for deference: “reasonableness review is premised” on the existence a multiplicity of possible answers to questions to which it applies. Yet, as I noted in the posted linked to in the previous paragraph, deference is the presumptive standard of review for any question concerning the interpretation of administrative decision-maker’s “home statute”, and

the great variety of statutes setting up administrative tribunals, and indeed of particular provisions within any one of these statutes, makes it unlikely that all of the interpretive questions to which they give rise lack definitive answers. Perhaps the suggestion is that the very legislative choice of setting up administrative tribunals to address these questions means that legislatures think that these questions lack definitive answers, but that too seems implausible.

Indeed, the dissent’s reasoning is circular: reasonableness “is premised” on there being multiple possible answers, and since reasonableness applies, it follows that the question under review must have multiple answers.

The practical concern with reasonableness review that Groia illustrates has to do with the supplementation of an administrative decision-maker’s reasons by a reviewing court. The dissent says that Justice Moldaver is wrong to do this to “undermine” the Panel’s review. Yet one of its authors, Justice Karakatsanis wrote, and another, Justice Gascon, joined, the majority judgment in Edmonton East, which did not so much supplement as outright made up the administrative decision in order to uphold it. Both of these positions ― no supplementation to undermine, any amount of supplementation to uphold ― seem consistent with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. But they are quite inconsistent with one another.

A clarification: what I’ve said above primarily concerns the first issue in Groia, that of the applicable framework. On the second one, the application of that framework, without entering into the substance of the debate between majority and dissent, and subject to my comments regarding the supplementation of reasons, I think that reasonableness is the appropriate standard of review. To me, Justice Côté’s concerns about judicial independence seem misplaced, for the reasons given by Justice Moldaver. Besides, while this case did not turn on a credibility issue, other, similar ones may well do so. How are courts supposed to engage in correctness review on that? It seems to me that the two issues in Groia should have been addressed on different standards of review. But no opinion takes that approach.

* * *

Groia provides further confirmation, if any were yet needed, that the Canadian law (if it may be called law at all) of judicial review of administrative action is in a dire state. Its theoretical foundations, which have long been weak, are being eroded decision by decision; its practical construction is falling apart. Perhaps these concerns are soon bound to be a thing of the past, as the Supreme Court’s coming review of the Dunsmuir framework simplifies what is abstruse, clarifies what is opaque, and cuts through what is impenetrable. Perhaps. But considering the confusion and the acrimony that seem to be the most remarkable features of the Court’s latest administrative law pronouncements, I suggest that you should not hold your breath.

NOTE: As some readers have pointed out, I had initially mixed up Justices Karakatsanis and Côté at one point. Correction made, and apologies!

FURTHER NOTE: It wasn’t just at one point. More corrections made.