Hamburger – Double Aspect

Making a Monster

A report on the future regulation of the internet proposes giving the CRTC overwhelming and unaccountable powers

The final report of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel, grandly entitled Canada’s Communications Future: Time to Act (the “BTLR Report”) has already attracted its share of commentary, much of it, but by no means all, sharply critical. As Michael Geist has explained, the report articulates

a vision of a highly regulated Internet in which an expanded CRTC … would aggressively assert its jurisdictional power over Internet sites and services worldwide with the power to levy massive penalties for failure to comply with its regulatory edicts.

The discussion has mostly focused on the wisdom of the BTLR Report’s 97 recommendations for regulating the way in which Canadians engage with the online world, and also on their impact on freedom of expression. But one aspect of the report ― indeed, not merely an aspect but a fundamental element of the report’s underlying philosophy ― has, I think, received less attention, although Professor Geist alludes to it with his reference to “an expanded CRTC”: the report’s commitment to administrative power. This is, perhaps, a less obvious issue, but we should not underestimate its significance. If followed, the report’s recommendations would not merely expand the CRTC, but make into a bureaucratic behemoth. We must not let this happen.

The BTLR Report recommends multiple amendments to the legislation governing electronic communications in Canada that would tend to produce the “highly regulated internet” to which Professor Geist refers. Yet the striking thing is that most of the proposed changes do not describe the regulations that they call for with any precision. Instead, they say that the CRTC should be given vast powers to bring into being the report’s imagined brave new world.

The CRTC would be givens new powers to make rules of general application. Most ominously, it would be given the ability to regulate “media content undertakings” ― that is, all manner of entities creating their own content, whether written, sound-based, or visual, as well as those providing platforms for the content created by others, everything from a humble podcast to giants like Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube. These “undertakings” would be required to register with the CRTC, which would be

enable[d] … to establish classes of registrants, to amend registrations, and impose requirements — whether through conditions of registration or through regulations — on registrants (Recommendation 57)

These requirements could, in particular, include “codes of conduct, including provisions with respect to resolution mechanisms, transparency, privacy, and accessibility”. (Recommendation 74) At the same time, the CRTC would be given

the power to exempt any media content undertaking or classes of media content undertakings from registration in instances in which — by virtue of its specialized content or format, revenues, or otherwise — regulation is neither necessary nor appropriate to achieve media content policy objectives. (Recommendation 58)

In other words, the CRTC would decide ― with virtually no guidance from legislation ― both what the rules for “media content undertakings” would be an who would in fact have to comply with them at all. In particular it would be to

impose discoverability obligations on all audio or audiovisual entertainment media content undertakings, as it deems appropriate, including … prominence obligations [and] the obligation to offer Canadian media content choices(Recommendation 62).

The CRTC could impose similar requirements on “on media aggregation and media sharing undertakings” ― again “as appropriate” (Recommendation 73). The CRTC would also be directed to “intervene, if necessary … in order to respond quickly to changes in the communications services, improve transparency, and promote trust” in the face of technologies that “combine algorithms and artificial intelligence with Big Data” (Recommendation 93).

The CRTC would also be empowered, and indeed required, to regulate behaviour of individual market actors. It would be given the remit “to ensure that rates are just and reasonable” in “key electronic communications markets” (Recommendation 29). Indeed, in a rare instance of seeking to restrain rather than expand the CRTC’s discretion, the BTLR Report suggests that the ability of the CRTC to “forbear” from regulating the justness of rates should be eliminated (Recommendation 30). The CRTC would also be given the power to “regulate economic relationships between media content undertakings and content producers, including terms of trade” (Recommendation 61). In relation to CBC/Radio-Canada, the CRTC would be tasked with “overseeing all its content-related activities” (Recommendation 83).

But the report would not only have the CRTC make the law for the online world. It would also be given a substantial autonomous power of the purse. It would be given the power to designate “from an expanded range of market participants — all providers of electronic communications services — … required contributors to funds to ensure access to advanced telecommunications”. (Recommendation 25) Among the requirements the CRTC would be able to impose on those required to register … would be “the payment of registration fees” (Recommendation 57). It could, further, “impose spending requirements or levies on all media content undertakings, except those” mainly providing written news (Recommendation 61), “some or all” of which it could use to fund “to the production of news content” through “an independent, arm’s length CRTC-approved fund for the production of news, including local news on all platforms” (Recommendation 71).

The CRTC would acquire additional adjudicative powers too. For example, Recommendation 38 suggests that it should resolve disputes over the location of telecommunication infrastructure. More significantly, it would be both prosecutor and judge when “imposing penalties for any failure to comply with the terms and conditions of registration” imposed on “media content undertakings” (Recommendation 57), with “resolv[ing] disputes” among which it would also be tasked (Recommendation 61). Not that this adjudication would necessarily look like that done in the courts, since the BTLR Report would empower the CRTC “to issue ex parte decisions where the circumstances of the case justify it”. (Recommendation 75)

The prophet of the administrative state in Canada, John Willis, described administrative agencies as “governments in miniature”. One hesitates to describe the law-making, trade-regulating, money-grabbing CRTC envisioned by the BTLR Report as in any sense miniature, but it sure looks like a government unto itself, albeit a rather undemocratic one. In addition to the Commissioners who would exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers, it would have a sort of representative body, the Public Interest Committee, “composed of not more than 25 individuals with a wide range of backgrounds, skills, and experience representing the diversity of public, civic, consumer, and small business interests, and including Indigenous Peoples”. (Recommendation 15) It’s not quite clear who would be appointing these people, but it certainly does not seem that, despite their supposed mandate to represent the public, they would be elected. Not to worry though: there would also be funding, out of fees collected by the CRTC, for “public interest interventions” (Recommendations 12 and 13), in case, I suppose, the Public Interest Committee doesn’t sufficiently intervene to represent the public interest. And, in addition to the prosecutorial and judicial functions of the Commissioners, there would be

an independent, industry-funded, communications consumer complaints office with the authority to investigate and resolve complaints from individual and small business retail customers of services covered by the respective Acts,

whose “mandate and structure” the CRTC would “create and approve” (Recommendation 96).

Meanwhile, outside control over this machinery will be be reduced. The Commissioners, who are currently appointed to renewable five-year terms, would instead serve for seven years, with no possibility of renewal (Recommendation 4). A limited form of Parliamentary supervision, the laying of government “directions” to the CRTC before the Houses of Parliament would be abolished in the interests of swift regulation (Recommendation 6). And, of course, given the vagueness of the legislative guidance to the CRTC and the breadth of its mandate, it is unlikely that the courts would intervene much to police its regulatory activities.

To sum up, the CRTC would be put in control, with very few restraints, of Canadians’ interaction with the online world, and with one another. Who can speak online and on what conditions ― the CRTC would have control over that. How much they have to pay for the privilege, and where the money goes ― the CRTC would have control over that. How disputes among them, and between them and the CRTC itself, are to be resolved ― the CRTC would have control over that too. The only “checks” on it would come from handpicked representatives of the “public interest” as the CRTC itself conceives it ― not from Parliament or the courts.

The empowerment of the CRTC proposed by the BTLR Report is, of course, no accident. It proceeds from a specific philosophy of government, which the Report describes quite forthrightly. According to its authors,

The role of government is to establish broad policies. The role of regulators is to implement those policies through specific rules and in a transparent and predictable fashion. Legislation is the key instrument through which government establishes these policies. It should provide sufficient guidance to assist the CRTC in the discharge of its duties, but sufficient flexibility for it to operate independently in deciding how to implement sector policy. To achieve this, legislative statements of policy should set out broadly framed objectives and should not be overly prescriptive. (46-47)

In other words, government ― Parliament is left out of the equation entirely, as if it has nothing to do with legislation ― should mostly leave the CRTC alone. Indeed, it is important to preserve “proper balance between the government’s role in policymaking and the regulator’s role in implementing those policies independent of government influence”. (47) And, judging by the amount discretion ― to make law and dictate the behaviour of individual organizations, to levy fees and spend money, to identify, prosecute, and condemn alleged offenders and to adjudicate disputes ― the BTLR Report would vest in the CRTC, the “balance” is really all on the side of the regulator.

This is the philosophy the BTLR Report would impose on the 2020s and, perhaps, beyond. It ostensibly envisions “the CRTC’s shift toward a future-oriented, proactive, and data-driven style of regulation”. (44) But its ideology comes, not from the future, but from a distant and, as article on “The Depravity of the 1930s and the Modern Administrative State” by Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson about which I blogged here shows, detestable past. As Professors Calabresi and Lawson explain, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s

administration and a compliant Congress created a vast array of new “expert” regulatory agencies, many of which followed the “independent” model by insulating the agency heads from at-will presidential removal, and many of which contained (and still contain) statutory authorizations to the agencies so vague as to be literally meaningless. … These agencies, controlled neither by the President nor by Congress, made life-altering decisions of both fact and law subject only to deferential judicial
review. (829)

This is the governance model proposed by the BTLR Report. Its original backers

fundamentally did not believe that all men are created equal and
should democratically govern themselves through representative institutions. They believed instead that there were “experts”—the modern descendants of Platonic philosopher kings, distinguished by their academic pedigrees rather than the metals in their souls—who should administer the administrative state as freely as possible from control by representative political institutions. (829)

(For more on the beliefs of 1930s pro-administrativists, see also this post by co-blogger Mark Mancini.) Judging by their proposals, the views of the authors of the BTLR Report are rooted in just this kind of thinking. They mistrust the free market as well as democratic institutions, and want fundamental decisions about what is, by their own account, an unbelievably important part of our lives to be made by officials deemed wiser than everyone else.

And if the philosophy behind the BTLR Report’s proposed future goes back a mere century, its institutional vision is considerably older still. In fact, at the risk of sounding a bit like Philip Hamburger (which, after all, isn’t a bad thing!) I would argue that it amounts to a counter-revolution against the 17th-century subjection of executive authority to law, and a reversal of the the post-1689 constitutional settlement. To be sure, everything the BTLR Report proposes to do would be covered by the fig leaf of ― deliberately vague and unconstraining ― legislative authority. But in substance, the proposals amount to executive law-making contrary to the Case of Proclamations, executive dispension from the law contrary to article 2 of the Bill of Rights 1688, executive adjudication contrary to the case of Prohibitions del Roy, and executive taxation contrary, this time, to article 4 of the Bill of Rights. James I and James II would be proud.

So when we hear that “this time it’s different” ― that the online world is like nothing we’ve seen before ― that its actors “pose a unique set of challenges for contemporary regulators”, as Paul Daly argues ― and that this justifies the sort of overwhelming regulatory response recommended by the BTLR Report, we need to be skeptical. For all that the issues raised by the modern world are ― now as a century ago! ― said to be quite unlike anything that came before, the solutions offered are the same old. More unfettered bureaucratic power is always said to do the trick. When all you have is a hammer…

More recently, a very different philosophy seemed, however briefly, to prevail in the online world. In the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace“, John Perry Barlow proclaimed:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

The Declaration isn’t much more remembered than the term “cyberspace” itself, nowadays, and the weary giants whom Barlow was taunting have come after the cyber-libertarians like Pushkin’s Stone Guest. If the authors of the BTLR Report get their way, the we would indeed be governed, to keep with the 17th century English political thought, by Leviathan himself.

NOTE: A petition to “the Government of Canada to Reject the recommendations regarding the legislation and regulation of free speech, free expression and the free press made by the” BTLR Report is open for signature at the House of Commons website. Please sign it!

Taming the Administrative State

Two books in the administrative law literature

In the spirit of the upcoming review of Dunsmuir by the Supreme Court, I’ve read two important books about administrative state skepticism in the United States: Phillip Hamburger’s The Administrative Threat; and Joseph Postell’s Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government. Both books address the constitutionality and necessity of the “administrative state,” and I see some of these conclusions transferring to the Canadian context. What follows is my tortured look at the problems of constitutionality and necessity with a Canadian twist.

Hamburger’s short, pithy text is a condensed version of his other important work, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? The Administrative Threat starts from an historical perspective and builds a sustained response to the administrative state. Hamburger analogizes modern administrative power to the English prerogative power. This prerogative power was famously abused, it was absolute, and it operated outside of the law—it was, according to Hamburger, “extralegal.” To Hamburger, the Star Chamber is the quintessential example of such power.

Hamburger argues that the US Constitution from the beginning barred such prerogative power, repackaged in “administrative” terms. Articles I (legislative power exclusively in the Congress) and III of the US Constitution (judicial power exclusively in the courts), block “irregular” or “extralegal” power, according to Hamburger. When decision-makers create binding rules, they operate outside of the constitutional structure. The worry is more pronounced when decision-makers combine rule-making (legislative), adjudicative (judicial), and investigatory (executive) functions. From a separation of powers perspective, we should be concerned about such power concentrated in the hands of bureaucrats.

On the other hand, Postell’s book attempts to place the administrative state and its challenges in the context of American constitutional history. Postell argues that “administrative state skepticism,” far from being a new, radical movement, is entrenched in the idea of American constitutionalism. Similarly, to Postell, modern administrative law insufficiently addresses the threat of the administrative threat and its combined executive, judicial, and legislative power. Postell’s review of history demonstrates how Americans have dealt with the threat of administrative power, if imperfectly.

What do these books have to say to Canadians? The books basically assault (1) the constitutionality of the administrative state and deference to it and (2) the necessity of the administrative state. These arguments can transfer, if uneasily, to Canadian law. It’s worth mooting them out to see where they go, if we view a generalized notion of the separation of powers as a worthy organizing principle of the legal system.

Canada’s separation of powers is in part rooted in the judicature provisions of the Constitution Act, 1867. Section 96 protects the role of superior courts of inherent jurisdiction. Parliament cannot divest these courts of their core powers, while non-core powers can be divested if they were not exercised exclusively by superior courts in 1867, or if they were but the broad policy context of the decision-maker transforms the decision-maker’s function (Reference Re NS Tenancies Act).

It could be tempting in the Canadian context to say, as Hamburger does in the American, that the vesting of power in administrative tribunals somehow deprives the constitutionally protected courts of their powers of adjudication and interpretation of law. At first blush, there is no case for this in Canada, because the “core” of s.96 powers is drawn narrowly, and clearly law adjudication and application is not part of that core. For example, the Federal Court is a statutory court created under s.101 of the Constitution Act, 1867. The Supreme Court itself is a mere “s.101 court.” Yet both courts clearly have the power to interpret and apply law, and that power does not derogate in any meaningful way from the power of s.96 courts to do the same. If the logic follows, therefore, there is no constitutional problem with similarly constituting administrative tribunals.

But this is an unsatisfying conclusion, because there is a meaningful distinction between s.101 courts, for example, and administrative decision-makers. Most importantly, the former can stand in review of the latter (ie) the Federal Court to the Refugee Appeal Division. And there are certain principles that thelcourts must uphold–judicial independence, the Rule of Law, the list goes on. In upholding those principles in cases, the courts must interpret and apply law against the delegated decision-maker. One has a supervisory function over the other, a constitutional role recognized as a part of the Rule of Law. On this question, the distinction is not between s. 96 courts and all other decision-makers, but rather between supervisory courts and other statutory creations.

So, even if interpretation and application of law is not a core function of courts, it is a function on judicial review conducted by courts. This function of law interpretation and application is something quintessentially judicial. The transfer of these powers to statutory institutions, created by the government that adopts the laws under interpretation, seems to remove something from the uniformity required by the Rule of Law and implicit in ss. 96 and 101. Law that is interpreted by a thousand statutory creations cannot be a uniform law interpreted and enforced across the legal system by courts with a constitutional connection. If this is a constitutional problem, it would require a recognition that s.101 courts (and perhaps other supervisory courts) have some higher constitutional purpose alongside s.96 courts. Such an argument is not new, and in my view, it is implicit in the Rule of Law, the requirements of judicial review, and legal uniformity. Delegation (read: divestment) of the powers of s.96 and 101 courts would, on this account, raise constitutional concerns.

This is a rough-and-ready attack on delegation, but it is admittedly not where the debate currently is in Canada. Instead, Professor Glover recently asserted that the administrative state could be constitutionally mandated. But the same concerns I’ve noted above are relevant here. Apart from whether the administrative state is constitutional in the first place, the effect of constitutionally entrenching the administrative state (whatever that term means) would be the establishment of at least some adjudicative bodies alongside s.96 courts. Yet the Supreme Court has said that legislatures and Parliament cannot, in effect, constitute s.96 courts (see McEvoy, at 719). More importantly, it would be an odd constitutional mandate that requires the legislature to maintain an aspect of the Constitution through ordinary legislation, putting it in the realm of majority control. This is the opposite of what a Constitution is about–putting certain matters beyond the reach of the majority.

If we accept that there may be constitutional concerns with delegation, deference to that delegation should similarly raise problems. As Hamburger notes, deference has a little explained practical effect. When courts defer to administrative decision-makers in Canada, they effectively impose an onus on claimants to rebut a presumption of legality. Government lawyers have the upper hand—the decisions of their own statutory creations are what they defend. This raises a question of doctrinal independence, though emphatically not independence in the traditional, judicial sense. On questions of law, as Dunsmuir notes, a core function of s.96 courts (which extends to all judicial review courts) is the enforcement of that law against administrative decision-makers. But deference to the administrative state dilutes that enforcement function, sacrificing it at the altar of expertise, while giving the government an upperhand. The concern here is that the decision under review is viewed as presumptively legal when there is no reason to presume it so.

This raises the necessity question, and whether administrative law and its doctrines can save us from the constitutional worries associated with the administrative state. Or perhaps there is another option. The books raise the prospect that we may not need the administrative state if we embrace certain constitutional principles.

To Postell, the administrate state is broken, and we do not need it in its current form. More importantly, administrative law can’t save us. As I have written before, and as Postell demonstrates, the tools of delegation and deference are used as quintessentially political tools. From the New Deal to the conservative counter-revolution, deference evolved as a way for governments to impress on courts their political will—their desire to limit the supervisory function of courts. These tools have operated at the same time as the administrative state has grown, an insatiable beast eating up more basically adjudicative and legislative functions.

Yet, the answer is not necessarily a strict politics-administration dichotomy. Instead, Postell puts forward the idea of a “constitutional administration,” where representation and republican protections are the organizing principles of the administrative state, rather than rule by experts. Postell points out that contrary to scholarly “consensus,” antebellum America was not a place of robber-barons and laissez-faire, but instead a place where this constitutional administration flourished. There was an administrative state, and much of it operated at the state and local governments, subject to strict judicial review. At the national level, a stricter separation of powers governed, based on principles of non-delegation of legislative powers and strong-form judicial review. These forms of regulation, though based on simple principles rather than variable forms of expertise, accomplished the policy goals of the era.

In contrast, modern administrative state sympathizers argue that complex problems require complex solutions and that an expert administrative state is required to efficiently manage public policy. First, one has to seriously query whether the administrative state any longer accomplishes this goal, if it ever did. Expertise is not empirically demonstrated by administrative state defenders. And not all administrative tribunals are “flexible” (whatever that means), quick, and cost-effective, like the Court seemed to think in Edmonton East .As an example, the wait time for a refugee hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board is currently 20 months.

More fundamentally, and as Richard Epstein points out, a complex society does not necessarily require complex rules in a complex bureaucracy. Simple legal rules based around the common law can transform and adapt to exigencies of modern society while similarly protecting individual liberty. Further, much of the administrative state is executive action that could be completed by the executive itself, as Hamburger notes. If the legislature stays in its lane by adopting clear rules, and the executive completes its executive functions, the combination of powers in the administrative state is avoided.

None of this should be construed as a full acceptance of either Hamburger or Postell’s thesis in the Canadian context. A simpler system of administrative law based on republican principles is not doable in Canada. But both authors give us something to think about. It might be worthwhile thinking about taming the administrative state.