politics – Double Aspect

And Again

Confidence, not head counts, is the key to responsible government

I thought I was done with dispelling government formation misconceptions, having responded in detail here and here to claims that the party winning a plurality of seats in the House of Commons was somehow entitled to form government even if it lacked an overall majority. But I return to this issue, briefly, to address the converse mistake: the claim, advanced by Patrice Dutil in a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Inside Policy essay, that “[r]esponsible government requires the support of the majority of the House of Commons”, so that “in order to form government in a parliament that is split among five parties, one of them must earn the support—at least the tacit support—from the others”. This is, at best, an oversimplification of the conventional position.

As explained in my previous posts, what responsible government requires is for the ministry to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. Whether the ministry is doing this is assessed by its ability to win certain key votes: that on the Speech from the Throne, which outlines its legislative programme, at the beginning of a new session of Parliament, and then mainly “money votes” on taxes and spending, as well as anything that the ministry itself designates as a vote of confidence, or a motion of non-confidence brought by the opposition. This has a couple of important corollaries.

One is that at no point does the ministry actually need “the support of the majority”. It simply needs not to be outvoted. If it can win votes with less than a majority of MPs supporting it because even fewer are voting for the opposition, that’s fine. Maybe this is what Professor Dutil is alluding to this when he refers to “tacit support”, but I’m not sure that this is a fair description of all conceivable political arrangements. Tellingly, Professor Dutil’s review of political precedents runs from King’s minority governments in the 1920s to that of Joe Clark in 1979. It does not consider Stephen Harper’s governments from 2006 to 2011. These were kept in office, in part, by the opposition’s failure to vote against the Conservative government in sufficient numbers ― the opposition either abstained or made sure that too few of its members turned up to outvote the government. This did not involve any sort of lasting arrangement or even cooperation with the opposition, which was either in no position to fight an election campaign (being leaderless, penniless, or both) or afraid that an election would yield even worse results for it than the status quo. I don’t think this counts as support, even tacit, but it was enough to keep the government in office. In short, a government lacking majority support in the House of Commons can stay in office without making any sort of deal with the opposition, so long as the opposition does not bring its full numbers to bear to vote it down on a matter of confidence.

This brings me to the second corollary from the convention of responsible government outlined above. A government ― by whatever count or margin it wins the votes of confidence it must win to remain in office ― does not “require the support of the majority of the House of Commons” for anything else, constitutionally speaking. There is no impediment to a government remaining in office despite taking a loss on a legislative project or a symbolic motion, provided it has not been designated as a matter of confidence. And other than money votes and motions of no-confidence brought by the opposition, governments have the choice not to designate votes as implicating confidence. If they do so, that is a political choice for which voters ought to judge them. If a majority government whips its MPs and forces them to toe the party line on every vote, and not just on matters of confidence, that is also a political choice for which voters ought to judge it. If a government won’t allow a vote on a private member’s bill to be held, or won’t let it be treated as a free vote on which individual MPs are free to follow their conscience and/or their constituents’ wishes, that is a political choice for which voters ought to judge it.

Such judgments do not seem to be occurring in Canada, despite our governments controlling their MPs to a much greater extent than those in the UK or in New Zealand. I’m no political scientist and not in a position to speculate as to why that is the case. (One common hypothesis ― that with a smaller House of Commons than the UK, Canadian MPs are too blinded by the higher prospect of a ministerial position than their UK colleagues to show independence ― does not account for the greater prevalence of free votes in the much smaller House of Representatives in New Zealand.) But I think that misrepresenting the constitutional position, even by implication and even with the laudable intention of making it accessible to ordinary citizens, by suggesting that governments (always) need to be supported by majorities to remain in office does not help matters.

I may be wrong, of course, but I would like to think that the conventions of responsible government do not require oversimplification to be understood. A government needs to maintain confidence, which is assessed by its ability to win ― by whatever head count ― a limited set of votes in the House of Commons. All the other stuff that is being discussed these days ― pluralities, majorities, popular vote ― is largely or entirely irrelevant. It’s not that complicated.

Government Formation, Revisited

The orthodox understanding of the conventions of government formation is better than its populist rival

I am grateful to Charlie Buck for taking up my invitation to explain why the constitutional conventions of government formation in Canada have diverged from those recorded in the Cabinet Manuals of the United Kingdom and New Zealand, which I discussed here. However, I am not persuaded by his argument to the effect that, whatever may have been the case in Canada in the past, and still be the case in its fellow Commonwealth realms, our present conventions make the plurality party in the House of Commons uniquely entitled to govern.

There are several strands to Mr. Buck’s argument. First, conventions are political and flexible, and thus subject to revision from time to time as an “outgrowth of democratic impulses”. Second, the nature of Canadian politics today favours treating the plurality-winning party as endowed with a special governing mandate that any opposition coalition would lack. Third, recent (and perhaps not-so-recent) precedent favours this interpretation of the conventions of government formation. Finally, if the plurality party in the House of Commons is unable to govern in the face of a united opposition, the solution is a new election, rather than, potentially, an opposition takeover. At every step in this argument, Mr. Buck starts from truth, and quickly errs.

So far as the flexibility of conventions is concerned, there is no doubt that new conventions can add themselves to the constitution, as Mr. Buck’s example of the (arguable) convention requiring a referendum prior to any constitutional amendment illustrates. The present Prime Minister’s policy of only appointing bilingual judges to the Supreme Court is likely an attempt to create a convention, and there is nothing improper about it, though whether the attempt succeeds will depend on whether future Prime Ministers play ball.

Whether existing, established conventions can also decay or be replaced by something quite different strikes me as a more difficult question ― at least when the convention is as central to our constitutional order as those regulating government formation. At the very least, we should be wary of too quickly concluding that this has happened. This is because, if constitutional conventions are to serve as rules and as meaningful constraints on the behaviour of political actors, they cannot simply be whatever “partisans, acting on the wishes of their constituents” happen to believe. As I said in my original post, conventions must “have an existence independent of misrepresentation by either political partisans”. The issue here isn’t, contrary to what Mr. Buck suggests, whether we believe that conventions are different from law, let alone an academic’s self-serving wish to obtain “a monopoly on interpreting the nature of Canadian constitutional conventions”. It is that if the conventions are whatever a politician claims they are, then what we have is not a political constitution, but no constitution at all.

Besides, it is too easy to say that politicians “act on the wishes of their constituents”. Mr. Buck refers to no evidence of these wishes, other than the politicians’ own say-so ― and politicians just aren’t great at discerning their constituents wishes. At most, we have the unpopularity of the 2008 attempt by a coalition of opposition parties to oust the Conservative minority government. I will return to it below, but for now, suffice it to say that attributing it to an alleged belief that the plurality winner is entitled to govern is pure speculation.

What is not speculation, and needs to be taken into account, is that voters are generally ignorant of even basic constitutional rules, be they legal or conventional. This may very well result in their having wishes that are contrary to such rules. But that does not give the politicians license to break the rules. Even if a poll were to show unambiguously that Canadians would rather that a Governor General not assent to a bill passed by the House of Commons and the Senate, that would not justify the Governor General in withholding assent. Again, were it otherwise, we would not a political constitution, but no constitution at all.

I turn now to the claim that changes in the way politics are done and understood ― namely, the prominence of parties and party leaders at the expense of individual MPs ― favour abandoning the longstanding conventions of government formation in favour of a plurality-winner-take-all rule. The changes are real enough: I have discussed them here, in a post drawn from an article published in the McGill Law Journal (and based, for this part of the argument, on Bernard Manin’s historical and theoretical work and a close look at the 2011 election campaign in Canada). But they are not a compelling explanation, let alone justification, for an alleged change in the conventions of government formation in Canada.

For one thing, one has to wonder what took so long. These changes aren’t new. The emergence of political parties rather than individual parliamentarians as the dominant actors ― what Professor Manin describes as “party democracy” ― was well underway in the second half of the 19th century. The increased prominence of leaders due to their ability to speak directly to voters ― Professor Manin’s “audience democracy” takes off in the 1970s. Why would it be the case that government formation conventions only responded to these changes in the last 10, perhaps 15 years?

Perhaps even more strikingly, though: why would this only have occurred in Canada of all places? As Professor Manin explains, the tendencies to which Mr. Buck points are common to Western democracies. They certainly have not bypassed the UK and New Zealand. More than that: in the 1990s, New Zealand switched to a (mixed-member) proportional electoral system where the partisan composition of its House of Representatives depends almost entirely on the votes cast explicitly for a political party. To a much greater extent than Canada (and the UK), New Zealand has consecrated the dominance of parties over electoral politics in its law. Yet, as I have shown in my last post, New Zealand retains the traditional conventions of government formation, to whose operation the prominence of political parties and their leaders is evidently no obstacle. After the 2017 election, a Labour-led government under Jacinda Ardern took office, despite Labour winning 10 fewer seats than the National Party (in 120-member House!). There is nothing “nostalgic” about this; this is just the Westminster system operating as it always has.

Of course, Mr. Buck is right that “Westminster systems are also capable of diverging from each other”. But the whole point of the challenge I issued in my earlier post was to ask those who think like him to explain why they think the divergence has happened. What is different in Canada? Emmett Macfarlane usefully reminds us that the simple fact that plurality winners have always taken office after 1925 is not enough. Nor is Mr. Buck’s generic claim that “diversity in response to shifting environmental conditions is a strength not a weakness of the Westminster model”. What environmental conditions have changed in Canada in the way they have not in the UK and in New Zealand ― other, that is, than the self-serving claims of politicians?

This brings me to the question of precedents. Mr. Buck mentions three: the King-Byng Thing, the implosion of the 2008 opposition coalition, and the statements of major party leaders in 2015. None are conclusive.

King-Byng is inapposite, if not outright contrary to Mr. Buck’s point. If King was the good guy in that story, which I’m not particularly convinced of, it is worth recalling that he had formed a government despite Arthur Meighen’s conservatives having won more seats than his Liberals at the previous election. Not a problem then, I suppose. But more importantly, King-Byng is a very well known story throughout the Commonwealth ― I used to teach it in New Zealand, for instance ―, yet nowhere is it thought to stand for the proposition that the plurality party in the House of Commons (or its equivalent) is specially entitled to govern. It is, above all, a cautionary tale about the appearance of vice-regal partiality, and helps explain why the Cabinet Manuals of the UK and New Zealand are so insistent that the Sovereign or his representative are not to be drawn into government formation discussions, and that the politicians need to work out for themselves where the confidence of the House lies. As I pointed out in the previous post, none of that would be worth saying if the Sovereign simply needed to appoint the leader of the plurality party as Prime Minister.

As for the events of 2008, we know that the coalition was unpopular, and was unable to hold together long enough to actually oust the Prime Minister. But was that due to rejection of the principle of coalition governments without the participation of the largest party? Or to that particular coalition’s membership (notably its including the Quebec separatists)? To the personal unpopularity of its putative leader? To it being an attempt to change governments months after, rather than in the immediate aftermath of, an election? That, I don’t think we know.

The 2015 statements are a somewhat different matter, because they were seemingly explicit and on point. While I have struggled to find news stories to link to, I share Mr. Buck’s recollection of the events: “The leaders of all the major parties in 2015 [stated] that the largest party should form government”. What I do not share is his interpretation of these statements as concessions: hence the change I have made in quoting him. One needs to recall the peculiar dynamics of the 2015 election campaign, during much of which it was widely thought that all three major parties had a decent shot at ending up as plurality winners. The eventual result, an outright majority for one party, was unexpected until perhaps the final week if not the last few days of the campaign. In these circumstances, the leaders’ claims that the plurality winner ought to become Prime Minister were not concessions made against interest but demands for deference made in the hope that the would be in a position to claim this supposed mandate. As Professor Macfarlane notes, “we should be cautious about relying on statements by political leaders in the midst of election campaigns as if they reflect constitutional principle rather than political tactic”.

What the King-Byng and 2008 precedents can help with is the consideration of Mr. Buck’s final point: that, while it is legitimate for the opposition to deny a minority government the confidence of the House of Commons, the only legitimate consequence of such a denial is an election. The formation of an alternative government by the opposition is out. I want to credit Mr. Buck for making clear that a denial of confidence is legitimate. As I said in my earlier post and as I am about to explain again, I strongly suspect that the politicians who share his views on the conventions of government formation would inappropriately deny this. But I am not convinced that the only legitimate response to such a situation is a new election.

What 1926 and 2008 have in common is that they happened months after an election and after the government whose ouster was being contemplated had initially retained the confidence of the House of Commons. In such circumstances, a new election may well be the best response to a loss of confidence, though I would not yet say that this is a conventional requirement. Evidently the opposition leaders in both 1926 and 2008 did not believe that they were bound by any rule against mid-Parliament government changes, and what is politically unwise or even reckless is not necessarily unconstitutional, even in a conventional sense.

But the focus of the present debate about government formation, as I see it, is not so much on what might happen months after an election, but rather ― as in 2015 ― on an election’s immediate aftermath. If (like King’s liberals in 1925) the party of the incumbent government fails to win a plurality of seats, must it (unlike King) resign and give way to the new plurality winner? Or, if it does win a plurality (like New Zealand’s National in 2017), is it automatically entitled to continue in office despite the opposition joining forces to deny it confidence, (as National was not)?

I suspect that voters’ appetite or perhaps even tolerance for a new election in the immediate aftermath of the one that was just held would be nil, and understandably so. There would not be much reason to expect a second election to produce a different result from the first, and so provide a way out of the impasse. This is why I think that, although this is not Mr. Buck’s intention, adopting his interpretation of the conventions of government formation will inevitably lead to claims that it is illegitimate for the opposition to deny confidence to a government formed by the plurality party in the House of Commons. Note that, in 2008, the then-Prime Minister’s reaction to the coalition’s attempt to oust him was not to go to the Governor General and ask for a dissolution ― which, in light of King-Byng, may have been granted. It was to avoid facing a denial of confidence by the House of Commons and to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of such an eventuality.

By far the better view is the one captured by the UK and New Zealand cabinet manuals. When an election produces a hung Parliament ― i.e. one in which no one party has a majority in the House of Commons ― the politicians should work out where confidence lies. Ideally, this should be done by negotiation before the new House meets. Failing that, the incumbent administration, which of course remains in office throughout, is entitled to meet the new House and see if it can secure its confidence, which is tested by the vote on the Speech from the Throne. And if confidence is denied, which is perfectly legitimate, the opposition, whether or not it includes the plurality party, gets a chance to form a new government without an election needing to be held. Only if the alternative government cannot secure confidence either does an election become the only way out of the impasse and a constitutional necessity.

In short, there are no good reasons to think that the constitutional conventions of government formation in Canada have changed from what they have long been understood to be both in this country and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. There is no real evidence of the public understanding and demanding such a change; nor are the politics of an “audience democracy” any less suited to the orthodox understanding of conventions than those of earlier periods. Political precedents do not support the alleged change either. On the contrary, as explained both in my previous post and here, unsurprisingly, our political system will work better ― the legitimacy of opposition being preserved and wholly unnecessary and futile elections being averted ― with the orthodox understanding of conventions.

All that being so, both I in my previous post and Professor Macfarlane have been wondering why this whole debate is even happening. Part of the answer is excusable confusion. Part, I am afraid, is that, exactly as in 2015, some political actors see fanning this confusion as a shortcut to power. And part is that the populist spirit of the times is seeping even into good faith intellectual discussions, as Mr. Buck’s post illustrates. His appeal from the consensus opinion of “academics dictating” what the constitution ought to be to the authority of the voters “in this democratic age” is a familiar one. As with all such populist appeals, the irony is that allowing it would empower self-serving political elites at the expense of voters too poorly informed to see through it.

In the face of these populist tendencies, the role both of politicians and of academics is to remind the voters of the rules and the reasons these rules exist. Of course, academics have an easier time doing this because their self-interest is not nearly as implicated. But if politicians aren’t capable of doing what is right instead of what will win them some extra votes, what good are they? It is regrettable that Canada’s politicians failed in 2015, and may well fail again. But that only makes it more important for academics to hold the line.

Private Conscience or Public Choice

Why universities should not trade on their reputation to intervene in politics or social debates

At her invaluable Substack (can we just say blog? isn’t one neologism enough for this sort of thing?) What Katy Did, Katy Barnett has posted a thought-provoking essay on “Universities and politics: The modern phenomenon of ‘official positions’“. It is worth a comment, both for what it gets right and also for what, I think, it doesn’t.

Professor Barnett argues that “it’s inappropriate for a university” ― and, I assume, an another academic organization, such a professional association of the scholars in a given field ―

to have an official position on political matters not directly related to their operation. Individual academics and students can, of course, adopt political positions, and advocate for them. … [But] it should be for them to make up their own minds what causes they support. The idea of an official position is inimical to freedom of conscience.

I agree with Professor Barnett’s substantive position: universities should avoid making pronouncements on political or social issues ― including, I would specify in reaction to some emails I got a month or so ago as an NYU Law alumnus, controversial judicial decisions.

Professor Barnett notes that these public statements have no practical impact. They do not change the lives of those whose side they are ostensibly take: “Words are powerful—I’m a lawyer, after all, and using words is part of my stock-in-trade—but there’s a limit to how far words can change reality.” Indeed.

These statements also do not persuade those not already inclined to agree; when they concern electoral issues, they do not sway votes. On this point I would probably go even further: those who see an academic institution wading into electoral politics on the other side, whatever “other” means in this context, will not change their minds about how to vote, but they may eventually change their minds about whether their taxes should support an independent academia that is their political opponent. Anyone outraged by this should consider the level of vitriol directed at intellectual institutions that refuse to be part of the progressive consensus, such as the Federalist Society in the United States and the Runnymede Society in Canada, the legality of whose existence is apparently disturbing to some bright young things. And these are independent associations of like-minded people which do not rely on the support of those who disagree with them. Why should people feel any more magnanimous about political opponents whom they are coerced to fund?

Where I part company with Professor Barnett is in her connection of this stance to the freedom of conscience. She writes that “[h]ow one votes is a matter of conscience”, which I agree with, and that “it’s not up to any organisation to tell me what to think”. I would guess that this isn’t meant literally: some organizations, above all political parties, but also, say, the editorial boards of newspapers, exist precisely to (among other things) tell us how to vote. Professor Barnett writes that “it’s not for universities or corporations to tell me or anyone else how to vote, one way or the other”, but even so I would guess that she ― like many others who condemn corporate interventions in politics, would make an exception for the media; many would also be tempted to exempt non-profits.

To me, though, these exemptions show that any general rule against corporate, let alone organizational, political intervention is untenable. If some corporation tries to convince me to vote one way or another, I’ll probably just shrug; if I am particularly exercised about it, I’ll boycott them. (This is why, until recently, commercial interests mostly stayed out of electoral politics; as Michael Jordan famously put it, Republicans wear sneakers too.)

That said, there is a narrower but, I think, more plausible version of Professor Barnett’s position: it’s not up to any organization to tell us how to vote if (1) it has some measure of control over us, and (2) we did not join this organization for electoral or political purposes. Professor Barnett might actually have something like this in mind when she writes that “[b]y stating an institutional position, any debate within that institution is chilled. That’s not good for democracy, and it’s not good for an educational institution which should be able to discuss contentious matters.” This is probably right so far as it goes.

But I wouldn’t connect this issue to either freedom of conscience or voting choices. In a university context, official statements are beside the point; a half-decent university won’t punish people for disagreeing with its official proclamations, and they know this. An indecent one will punish them for their politics, official statements or not. This happens (mostly, of course, in the black box of academic hiring, but sometimes more overtly too) but, I think, in ways that simply aren’t sufficiently connected to the sort of statements Professor Barnett has in mind for them to really matter.

My objection to these statements is different. They are a pretty typical example of a problem identified by public choice theory: politicians ― in this case, academic politicians ― use the resources of which they obtain control for their own ends instead of those of their constituents. The resource, in this case, is primarily reputational rather than pecuniary, but that hardly matters. The political entrepreneurs who get themselves into positions of academic authority, or sway faculty councils and university senates, privatize the university’s reputation for independent-minded expertise and spend it on their own agendas ― and their individual self-aggrandizement too. I am enough of cynic to suspect that they won’t mind any chilling effect they manage to create in the process, but I doubt this is the main consideration.

This is as objectionable as politicians building bridges to nowhere to make sure their allies get juicy contracts, their constituents re-elect them, and their name gets attached to some reinforced concrete. It is immoral, in the same way as taking something that isn’t yours and disposing of it as if it were always is. And, as discussed above, in this case, the reputational capital of universities, built up over the past 150 years or so (I’m not sure the relatively few universities that existed before mattered all that much in the public discourse, but I might be wrong) is squandered on what are, at best, quixotic quests for a better world, and at worst, vulgar political machinations. Perhaps too much of this capital has been squandered already for this to matter, but the people who believe universities should make political statements must think otherwise.

So I very much agree with Professor Barnett that statements by universities or other academic entities in support of political or social causes are useless at best, seriously damaging at worst, and morally objectionable quite apart from that. But I come to this position from a somewhat different perspective, and think we should not be too hasty to invoke freedom of conscience, even in the face of disturbing developments. This is something I might soon have occasion to return to.

Mischief and the Chief

The Chief Justice has thoughts on the Supreme Court and the political climate

Yesterday, Radio-Canada/CBC ran an article by Daniel Leblanc that discussed Chief Justice Richard Wagner’s concerns about the standing of the Supreme Court and the judiciary more broadly, and his ideas for fostering public acceptance of and confidence in their work. This made quite a bit of noise on Twitter, and I jumped in too. A reader has encouraged me to turn those thoughts into a post, and I thought that would indeed be a good idea, so here goes.

Mr. Leblanc’s article starts with a discussion of the leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US Supreme Court’s pending abortion case. This prompts the Chief Justice to say that “[i]t takes years and years to get people to trust institutions, and it takes a single event to destroy that trust”. The Chief Justice is worried. According to Mr. Leblanc, he “said recent global political events — like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection attempt in Washington, D.C. — should serve as a warning to Canadians” that our institutions, notably judicial independence, are at risk. The Chief Justice is also concerned that people are misinformed, notably in that they import fragmentary knowledge of American law into their thinking about Canada’s legal system.

To gain public trust, the Chief Justice has embarked the Supreme Court on a campaign to become more accessible. This includes a social media presence, publishing “plain English” versions of opinions, and sittings outside Ottawa. Mr. Leblanc describes the Chief Justice as saying “he knows he’s taking a risk by communicating more openly and frequently with the public and by taking the court outside of Ottawa. He said he still believes doing nothing would be riskier.”

Mr. Leblanc also turns to other people, notably Vanessa MacDonnell, to second the Chief Justice’s concerns. According to him, Professor MacDonnell “said Conservatives in the United Kingdom have criticized judges’ power to interpret the Human Rights Act, adding it’s part of a pattern of ‘political attacks’ against the courts in that country”. Attacks on judicial independence in Hungary and Poland are mentioned too, presumably at Professor MacDonnell’s behest, though this isn’t quite clear. Moreover, “Canadian institutions aren’t immune from attack either, MacDonnell said. The controversy over Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre’s vow to fire the Bank of Canada governor has dominated that leadership race”. Meanwhile, Senator Claude Carignan argues that “the Supreme Court is right to want to establish, through a certain communication plan, that there are differences with” its American counter part, and that it is “not there to represent a movement of right or left, or of red or blue, but … to judge the merits of the judgment according to current laws”.

So, some thoughts. To begin with, the Chief Justice deserves praise for thinking about making his court’s role and jurisprudence more accessible. Courts wield public power, and people should be able to know what they do with it. Indeed, I don’t know that anyone else thinks differently. The Chief Justice really needn’t pose as doing something “stunning and brave” with his transparency efforts; it looks a bit pathetic. But that doesn’t mean that the efforts themselves are to be denigrated.

That said, one shouldn’t expect too much from them. To the extent that people don’t understand what the Supreme Court is getting up to, I really think it’s more because of a lack of interest or effort than any failures on the Court’s part. The major cases are reported on, tolerably well, by the media. There is CanLII Connects, which hosts summaries and comments on all sorts of cases, written by students, professors, and practitioners. There are blogs like this one. There are podcasts. There are lots of people out there, in other words, who work hard to explain what Canadian courts, and especially the Supreme Court, are doing. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying the Supreme Court shouldn’t bother. It might do some good in this regard. But, again, when people are uninformed or misinformed ― and many are ― I don’t think it’s because of a lack of accessible information. In 2022, ignorance is usually wilful.

And I will criticize the Chief Justice for one part of his outreach programme: the roadshows. I fail to see how hearings outside Ottawa are anything other than taxpayer-funded junkets. Most people haven’t the time, let alone interest, to sit through arguments, be it in Ottawa or elsewhere. I’ve sat in on a couple of Québec Court of Appeal cases, some years ago, but I was a grad student would have done anything if that meant not writing my thesis ― not the Chief Justice’s target audience, I suspect. For more productively employed people, having a hearing in their city once in a blue moon is just not going to do anything. And of course anyone already can conveniently watch the Supreme Court on CPAC. This, by the way, is really a point on which the Supreme Court of Canada is better than that of the United States.

Speaking of those Americans, though, if one is concerned about the excessive influence of American thinking and American culture on Canada’s legal system, as the Chief Justice apparently is, one probably shouldn’t invoke American news as justifications for doing anything in Canada, as the Chief Justice definitely does. Again, some of his initiatives at least are worthwhile, but they are so on their Canadian merits, not because of anything that has occurred south of the border. Of course, the Chief Justice isn’t the only one trying to have this both ways. The Prime Minister, for instance, seems pretty keen to capitalize on American news to push ever more gun restrictions ― which he successfully deployed as a wedge issue in the last election campaign. In other words, the importation of American concerns of questionable relevance is something Canadians of all sorts, and not just the dark forces supposedly gnawing away at our institutions’ foundations, do, and Mr. Leblanc would, I think, have done well to note this.

Now, let’s consider these dark forces a bit more. Specifically, I don’t think that the discussion of populist attacks on courts in Mr. Leblanc’s article is all that helpful. I’m no expert on Poland and Hungary, but I take it that some Very Bad Things really have happened there, as part of broader programmes to dismantle institutional checks and balances and constraints on government power. To say that anything of the sort is about to happen in Canada, or could succeed if attempted, strikes me as a stretch. The analogy between the courts and the Bank of Canada doesn’t quite work, since the latter lacks constitutional protections for its independence. But perhaps I am mistaken about this.

What I am pretty sure about, however, is that it is quite wrong to equate the “attacks” on the judiciary in the UK with those in Hungary and Poland. To be sure, there have been some dangerously vile attacks in parts of the media, some years ago. I have written about this here. And it may well be that the government did not defend the courts as strongly as it should have at the time. But so far as government policy, let alone legislation, is concerned, it simply isn’t fair to say that the courts have been “attacked”. There is debate about just what their powers with respect to judicial review should be for instance, and it may well be that some of the proposals in this regard are at odds with the best understanding of the Rule of Law. But nobody is suggesting anything so radical as, say, requiring UK courts to defer to civil servants on questions of law, so I’m not sure that Canadians, in particular, should be too critical about this.

The specific issue example to which Professor MacDonnell refers is even more clearly a nothingburger. It has to do with the interpretation not of the Human Rights Act 1998, but of other legislation, which the Act says “[s]o far as it is possible to do so … must be read and given effect in a way which is compatible with the” European Convention on Human Rights. As readers will know, I happen to favour very robust judicial review of legislation ― more so than what exists under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, let alone the UK’s Human Rights Act. But I’m inclined to think that UK courts have gone rather beyond the limits of what is fairly “possible” in exercising their interpretive duty. They certainly have gone further than New Zealand courts applying a similar provision. Whether or not constraining them in this regard is the right thing to do on balance, there is nothing illegitimate or worrying about it.

It is important to remember that, precisely for the reason the Chief Justice is right to work on the Supreme Court’s transparency ― that is, because the court is an institution exercising public power on the citizens’ behalf ― the Court can also be subject to legitimate public criticism. Again, criticism can be overdone; it can be quite wrong. But on the whole it’s probably better for public institutions to be criticized too much than not enough. And the courts’ powers, just like those of other government institutions, can and sometimes should be curtailed. Each proposal should be debated on the merits. Many are wrong-headed, as for instance the calls to use the Charter “notwithstanding clause”. But they are not wrong just by virtue of being directed at the courts.

Meanwhile, Canadians who are concerned about public perceptions of the judiciary should probably worry a bit ― quite a bit ― more about the actions of our own judges, rather than foreign governments, let alone journalists. Sitting judges to some extent ― as when, for instance, they decide to give “constitutional benediction” to made up rights instead of “judg[ing] the merits of the judgment according to current laws”, as Senator Carignan puts it. But even more, as co-blogger Mark Mancini has pointed out, former judges who compromise the perception of their political neutrality and lend their stature and credibility to serve the wishes of governments at home and abroad:

https://t.co/Z2jEkSmzzp

One clear Cdn judicial independence issue–as opposed to what is happening in the US–is the weaponization of fmr judges re "advice." And fmr CJ McLachlin continuing to lend legitimacy to China.
— Mark P. Mancini (@MarkPMancini) June 5, 2022

In short, I think that the Supreme Court is trying some useful, if likely not very important things to become a more transparent institution, which is a good thing on the whole. But it is not saving democracy or the Rule of Law in the process. One should certainly be vigilant about threats to the constitution, but one should not dream them up just for the sake of thinking oneself especially courageous or important. One should also be wary of grand transnational narratives, and be mindful of the very real imperfections in one’s own backyard before worrying about everything that’s going on in the world.

Not as Advertised

Legislative debates leading to Saskatchewan’s use of the notwithstanding clause show little interest in constitutional rights

There are two main views out there about what section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a.k.a. the notwithstanding clause, does, descriptively speaking. One is that it is a means by which legislatures can free themselves from constitutional constraint to effectuate their own policy preferences. The other is that, far from being an escape hatch from the constitution, section 33 allows legislatures to give effect to their own considered views of what the constitution requires. The majority in the recent decision in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34 (on which I commented here) recently endorsed the latter view, as defended by Dwight Newman. (An early version of Professor Newman’s chapter making this case is available on SSRN.)

The defenders of this view, including Professor Newman, hold up Saskatchewan’s use of its section 33 powers a few years ago as exemplary in this regard. Geoffrey Sigalet and Ben Woodfinden have written that it was “[p]erhaps the best illustration” of what they had in mind. The Saskatchewan legislature enacted the School Choice Protection Act, 2018 in response to the Court of Queen’s Bench decision in Good Spirit School Division No. 204 v Christ the Teacher Roman Catholic Separate School Division No. 212, 2017 SKQB 109, which declared unconstitutional the funding of Catholic schools for educating non-Catholic students but not of other religious or secular private schools. (I wrote about that decision here. It was later reversed on appeal in Saskatchewan v Good Spirit School Division No. 204, 2020 SKCA 34. ) The Court of Queen’s Bench found that preferential funding of Catholic schools infringed the principle of state neutrality and thus both the freedom of religion and equality rights protected respectively by sections 2(a) and 15(1) of the Charter.

As part of a broader research project looking at whether legislatures do indeed put forward their own interpretations of the constitution when they invoke section 33 of the Charter, I have read the debates about Bill 89, which became the School Choice Protection Act, in the Saskatchewan legislature. In light of the importance that this particular law has assumed in the notwithstanding clause discussion, I thought it would be worthwhile to share my account of these debates, followed by some comments, without waiting complete the entire project (which I am due to present at the Legacies of Patriation Conference this coming April).

Bill 89 was introduced in the Legislative Assembly on November 8, 2017—almost seven months after Good Spirit was decided. A week later, the then-Minister of Education launched the second reading debate with a speech that occupies all of six paragraphs in the Hansard transcript. The Minister acknowledged that the Bill was “in response to the Court of Queen’s Bench … decision” and referred to the Court’s finding that the state’s duty of religious neutrality, and hence the Charter’s religious liberty and equality provisions had been infringed. (2927) However, the Minister asserted that the province’s “funding model … does not discriminate based on religious affiliation”. (2927) The Minister did not explain why she disagreed with the court; nor did she make any other argument about freedom of religion or equality, beyond this one sentence.

Rather, she insisted that “[h]aving to wait for a decision on the appeal could leave parents and students with a great deal of uncertainty about the future, not knowing if they would continue to be funded to attend a separate school”. (2928) As a result, said the Minister, “[i]t is important to invoke the notwithstanding clause now in order to provide certainty to parents and to students so that they can be assured that they will continue to be funded to attend their school without having to wait for the outcome of an appeal”. (2928) This would be the entirety of the contribution the government side of the Assembly would make to the second reading debate.

That debate went on until May 2018, albeit at a desultory pace (on the last day, one of the opposition members complained that “[w]e haven’t seen this bill up too often on the order paper this session and there are a lot of outstanding questions here that do remain outstanding.” (4222)) A number of opposition members spoke, most of them acknowledging the potential for disruption if the Good Spirit judgment were allowed to enter into force. For one, indeed, “there’s no question that, unchallenged, that [sic] this ruling would make fundamental changes to education and classrooms, not only in Saskatchewan but the entire country”. (3173) They also repeatedly endorsed resort to section 33 in some cases, at least as a last resort, one invoking Alan Blakeney in doing so. (3259-60)

However, opposition members argued the government should not have relied on its section 33 powers before the appeals were exhausted. In the words of the member who spoke immediately after the minister, “[w]hile the appeal is being considered, there is no legitimate need to jump to the notwithstanding clause”. (2928) Another darkly warned of “the unintended consequences of using the notwithstanding clause at this point”, which “could be huge”. (3119) However, the member did not specify what these huge unintended consequences might be. Beyond voicing these concerns with process and timing, the opposition members did not add to the Assembly’s collective consideration of the Charter, despite occasional calls on “every member of this House to look through this court decision, to read through the findings”. (3173) Instead, they took advantage of the “debate” to voice recriminations about the government’s funding and management of Saskatchewan’s schools—an issue that is not obviously germane to the constitutional issues Bill 89 raised.

The second reading debate was concluded on May 7, 2018, and the bill was committed to the Standing Committee on Human Services. The committee met on May 23, for an hour and a half. Much of this time was taken up by exchanges between the (new) Minister of Education, assisted by a Ministry of Justice lawyer, and a single member from the opposition. It is worth noting that the Committee Chair warned the members that the Minister may have felt constrained by the ongoing appeals process, although it is not obvious in what respects, if at all, the Minister was really prevented from making his views clear, or for that matter why he should have felt so constrained.

The Minister reiterated his predecessor’s argument that Bill 89 was a response to the Good Spirit decision and that “[i]nvoking the notwithstanding clause ensures that the government can continue to fund school divisions based on the status quo funding model, which … does not distinguish based on religious affiliation”. (733) This would “ensure that parents continue to have a choice as to where they wanted to send their children, … [if] non-Catholic parents wanted to continue to send their children to Catholic schools and have government funding for those children attending those schools” (734)―something he would later describe as “protecting the rights of non-Catholic parents”. (737) The Minister further asserted that “in terms of using it to protect the rights of individuals … it’s a fair use of the [notwithstanding] clause. But from that perspective, I think that any time that you’re using that particular clause, I think you want to be very cautious and very careful about that.” (737) In response to an opposition member’s question, he also noted that, except with respect to the funding of non-Catholic students at Catholic schools, the existing constraints on discrimination in school admissions would not be affected by Bill 89. (740) The Minister pointed to the uncertainty with which the parents were faced, a concern the opposition member shared, and claimed that this concern could not have been addressed in any other way. (738) Yet he later admitted that “whether there are other tools that can be implemented” or what they might be was something he was “not prepared to talk about”, “because [he] ha[d]n’t given a whole bunch of thought to them”. (742) It would, rather, be “for the parties to start giving some fairly serious thought to what this all looks like at the end of the day”. (742) There was no debate on the single amendment approved by the select committee and no Third Reading debate either. Bill 89 received Royal Assent on May 30, 2018.

To be blunt, if this is supposed to be a good advertisement for legislative engagement with the constitution, the product is not an impressive one. A key proponent of section 33, Peter Lougheed, who was Alberta’s Premier at the time of Patriation, would later argue that, in deciding to invoke the notwithstanding clause “a legislature should consider the importance of the right involved, the objective of the stricken legislation, the availability of other, less intrusive, means of reaching the same policy objective, and a host of other issues”. (16) Professor Newman has similarly lofty expectations. But there is precious little of this in evidence in the Bill 89 debates.

The importance of the right involved? No one, neither the Ministers nor opposition members, engage with freedom of religion, equality, and the state’s duty of neutrality at all, unless we want to count the Ministers’ bald assertions that the funding system the court has declared to be discriminatory does not discriminate. It is fair to say that politicians should not be held to the same standards of reasoning as judges, but surely we’d expect to see something, anything, by of an explanation. Nor does any of the speakers question why the funding model was set up the way it was, with a privilege for Catholic schools that was denied to others. Nor, evidently ― and despite the Minister’s initial, quickly self-contradicted, assertion to the contrary ―, has anyone given serious thought to alternatives to this scheme and to using the notwithstanding clause to keep it in existence, although ― as I wrote here shortly after the decision was rendered, an obvious alternative does exist: the legislature could fund non-Catholic minority schools on equal terms with the Catholic ones.

The only relevant concern that was voiced during these proceedings was that with ensuring stability for non-Catholic students in Catholic schools and their parents. This is, obviously an issue that deserved a lot of attention. Yet paradoxically ― and, certainly by the time of the committee discussion, everyone was aware of this! ― invoking section 33 was only a short-term fix, not a permanent solution to this difficulty. Yet no thought was given either to a system of equal funding for all schools, which would have solved the constitutional problem, or to a system of gradual transition out of the arrangement the Court of Queen’s Bench had found to be unconstitutional, at least for those children who were only starting their schooling.

One final thing to note is that, quite apart from the quality of the legislature’s consideration of the issues, the quantity is rather lacking. In particular, I find the lack of participation by the government side of the legislature remarkable, and not in a good way. The only remotely serious discussion ― and even this is a generous assessment ― of the rights issues happened in committee, where the Minister was present in his executive capacity, not as a legislator. The government had a strong majority in the legislature ― but it was largely a silent one. In a very real way, the legislature did not offer any views at all on Bill 89.

In short, the Saskatchewan legislature did not put forward any alternative interpretation of the Charter rights involved ― it paid no mind to them at all. Its consideration of justified limitations on these rights was limited. The solution it adopted was not a permanent one. In my respectful view, those who hold up this episode as a proof of concept for the claim that legislatures can use section 33 to give effect not to brute majoritarian preferences but to constitutional judgments are wrong to do so. Perhaps, as I consider other recent episodes where section 33 was used or where its use was serious contemplated, I will find better support for their theory. But this ain’t it.

The Public Good Trap

Why thinking that the public good is the measure of law and politics is a mistake

The rhetoric of public good has always been part of legal discourse; even scholars who are, one might think, hard-boiled legal positivists are surprisingly sympathetic to the idea that law inherently serves the public interest, as are, of course, the positivists’ critics and opponents. Mark Elliott and Robert Thomas capture this sentiment in their textbook Public Law, which I have just finished reading as I prepare to teach in the United Kingdom starting next month. Professors Elliott and Thomas write:

In a democracy, citizens elect a government to protect, advance, and serve the public interest. In normative terms, democratic governance presupposes that government acts as the servant—rather than the master—of the people. There are two dimensions to this notion that good governance means (among other things) governing in the public interest. The positive dimension is that government should make decisions that advance the public good. … Governing in the public interest has a second, negative dimension. Government must not act in a self-interested manner. (Ca. 401; paragraph breaks removed; emphasis in the original)

I suspect that most people, of all kinds of political and ideological persuasions would view this as correct and indeed uncontroversial. But for my part I do not, and indeed I think that the things that Professors Elliott and Thomas themselves say, and the examples they use, expose the difficulties with this argument.

Two things, though, before I go further. First, to be very clear, I do not mean to pick on Professors Elliott and Thomas. I just happened to be reading their book (and I might have more to say about it soon), and thought that it was representative of what strikes me as a pervasive problem with the way people think and talk about these issues. And second, I think that Professors Elliott and Thomas are right to say, just before the passage quoted above, that “[g]overnments have no legitimate interests of their own, and nor, when acting in their official capacities, do the individuals who lead and work in governments”. This might be a more controversial thing to say than the claim that government must serve the public interest, but if it is true it must, then I don’t think there is any room for a raison d’État independent of the public interest.

But what about the main claim? Why wouldn’t governments need to work in the public interest? How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Well, consider what Professors Elliott and Thomas also say by way of explaining the “positive dimension” of the public interest:

The public good is a highly contestable notion. Concepts such as good governance and the public good are not objective yardsticks against which the legitimacy of governmental action can be determined. … In a democracy, the ultimate question is not whether the government is acting in an objectively correct way (whatever that might mean); rather, it is whether it is governing in a manner that is regarded as broadly acceptable by the public. Elections are the pre-eminent means of doing this. … There are [in addition] a number of different ways that enable or require government to take account of the views and wishes of the people: the need to obtain parliamentary approval of legislative proposals; submission to scrutiny by Parliament, the media, courts, tribunals, and ombudsmen; and public participation in government decision-making (eg by consulting with the public). (Ca. 401)

So: citizens elect governments to serve the public interest, but we can’t actually tell what the public interest is, and the only measure we have is the outcomes of elections and other processes, largely (except, arguably, for scrutiny by courts and tribunals) political ones too. And when you start factoring in political ignorance, the role of special interests in non-electoral accountability mechanisms (and, to a lesser extent, in elections too), the difficulty of interpreting electoral outcomes… the idea that any of it has anything to do with a discernable set of parameters we might usefully describe as the public interest disappears like a snowflake in a blizzard.

The example Professors Elliott and Thomas give makes my case, not theirs. According to them,

it is a relatively uncontentious proposition that, when using public resources—especially public money—government should, so far as possible, seek to attain value for money. Government is largely funded by the public through taxation. Accordingly, the public can, in turn, rightfully expect that government should not waste its money. (Ca. 401)

I think it’s true that, if you just start asking people in the street whether government should “seek to attain value for money”, they will say that of course it should. The trouble is that, if you start asking some follow-up questions, it will quickly turn out that people don’t really mean it. Many people believe, for instance, that government should only, or at least preferentially, do business with suppliers from its own country. The entire point of such policies, of course, is to override the concern for getting value for public money ― they wouldn’t be necessary otherwise. Others (or perhaps the same people) believe that governments should allow, and perhaps even encourage, their employees to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Again, the point of such policies is to override the preference for value for money: unionized labour is definitionally more expensive than its non-unionized counterpart.

For my purposes here, it doesn’t matter that such preferences are wrongheaded, although they certainly are. What matters is that, wrong though they are, people hold such preferences. As a result, even something as seemingly uncontroversial as the idea that government should get the best bang for the taxpayer buck turns out not to be consistent with how many people understand the public interest ― in the polling booth. In words, they will keep complaining about government inefficiency. In other words, it’s not just that different people and different groups can’t agree on what the public good is and we have no way of extracting any real meaning from the procedures they use to resolve their disagreements; it’s also that a single individual is quite likely not to have any sort of workable view of what the public interest is or requires.

For similar reasons, the “negative dimension” of the public good as articulated by Professors Elliott and Thomas fares no better. They argue that “it would be improper for an elected public body—whether the UK central government, a devolved government, or a local authority—to elevate political gain above the public good”. (Ca. 401; emphasis in the original) But if there is no such thing as the public good, objectively understood, then how can we sensibly claim that a public authority is elevating political gain above this non-existent yardstick? Worse, if the public good is to be assessed based in part on electoral outcomes, then doesn’t it follow that the pursuit of electoral success and the pursuit of the public good are one and the same?

What follows from this? Some would say that we should accept revelation and authority as our guides to the meaning of the common good, as a solution to the empty proceduralism of which they would no doubt see the argument of Professors Elliott and Thomas as representative. But such people have no means of persuading anyone who does not already trust their revelation and their authorities. Many of them recognize this and have given up on persuasion entirely. Like Lenin, they think that a revolutionary vanguard would be warranted in imposing their vision on the rest of us.

If we are disinclined to Leninism, I would suggest that we should shift our expectations and ambitions, for politics, for public law, and indeed for law tout court. Instead of looking to them to produce or uphold the public good, we ought to focus on how they can protect private rights, as the US Declaration of Independence suggests.

This is not an unambitious vision for politics and law, by the way. It is difficult enough to agree on a list of such rights that public institutions can and should enforce, and to work out the mechanisms for enforcing them without compromising other rights in the process. What is, for instance, the extent of property rights? Should it be defined entirely through the political process or should we make property rights judicially enforceable? If we set up police forces to (among other things) protect property, how do we prevent them from engaging in unjustified violence? Those are difficult enough questions, and the pursuit of even more intractable ones under the banner of the public good largely detracts us from paying attention to them.

Disinformation by Omission

Additional thoughts on the futility of regulatory responses to mis- and disinformation

In my last post, I wrote about the Canadian Forces’ attempts to manipulate public opinion, including by means of disinformation, and about the dangers of regulations ostensibly meant to counteract disinformation. I briefly return to the issue of disinformation to highlight an excellent, if frightening, essay by David French in his newsletter for The Dispatch.

Mr. French writes about the alarming levels of polarization and mutual loathing by political partisans in the United States. He argues that this results from a “combination of malice and misinformation”, which mean “that voters hate or fear the opposing side in part because they have mistaken beliefs about their opponents. They think the divide is greater than it is.” Mr. French observes that many Americans are stuck in a vicious cycle:

Malice and disdain makes a person vulnerable to misinformation. Misinformation then builds more malice and disdain and enhances the commercial demand for, you guessed it, more misinformation. Rinse and repeat until entire media empires exist to supply that demand.

And, crucially, Mr. French points out that misinformation does not just consist of “blunt, direct lying, which is rampant online”. It also includes “deception by omission (a news diet that consistently feeds a person with news only of the excesses of the other side) and by exaggeration and hyperbole”, which can be “in many ways more dangerous than outright lies”, because they cannot easily be countered with accurate information. (This is why the rhetorical practice of “nutpicking” ― pointing to the crazies on the opposite side, and claiming that they represent all those who might share something of their worldview ― is so effective. The nuts are real! They might even be somewhat prominent and influential, though not as much as the nutpicker suggests. Nutpicking isn’t lying. But it is deceptive, and destructive.)

And yet, Mr. French cautions against regulatory responses to this crisis, serious though it is:

there is no policy fix for malice and misinformation. There is no five-point plan for national harmony. Popular policies … don’t unite us, and there are always differences and failures to help renew our rage. Instead, we are dealing with a spiritual and moral sickness. Malice and disdain are conditions of the soul. Misinformation and deception are sinful symptoms of fearful and/or hateful hearts. (Paragraph break removed)

I think this is tragically right, even though I do not share Mr. French’s deep Christian faith. Call it heart or mind instead of soul; speak of moral error, indeed of immorality instead of sin; this all is secondary, to my mind. The point is that the fault is not in our laws, but in ourselves. And this is why, in my last post, I wrote that the government

cannot be trusted with educating citizens and funding media in a way that would solve the problems of the “environment that has created the disinformation crisis”. The solution must come from the civil society, not from the state.

As I wrote long ago in the context of hate speech, the law ― at least so long as it remains relatively cabined and does not attempt comprehensive censorship ― cannot counteract the corrosive “messages … sent by sophisticated, intelligent people”, who are able to avoid crude hate propaganda, or outright lies. The hint, the understatement, the implication, the misdirection, the omission are their weapons, and the shield against it must be in our hearts and minds, not the statute book.

We often think of regulation as a sort of magic wand that can do whatever we need, provided we utter the right sort of spell when wielding it. This is, of course, an illusion, and entertaining it only distracts us from working on the most difficult subject of all: our selves.

Disinformation and Dystopia

Whose disinformation efforts should we really fear―and why we should also fear regulation to stop disinformation

Mis- and disinformation about matters of public concern is much in the news, and has been, on and off, for the last five years. First kindled by real and imagined interference in election campaigns, interest in the subject has flared up with the present plague. Yesterday’s developments, however, highlight the dangers of utterly wrongheaded responses to the issue, one that would will lead to a consolidation of government power and its use to silence critics and divergent voices.

First, we get a hair-raising report by David Pugliese in the Ottawa Citizen about the Canadian Armed Forces’ strong interest in, and attempts at, engaging in information operations targeting Canadians over the course of 2020. Without, it must be stressed, political approval, and seemingly to the eventual consternation of Jonathan Vance, the then-Chief of Defence Staff, the Canadian Joint Operations Command sought to embark on a “campaign … for ‘shaping’ and ‘exploiting’ information” about the pandemic. In their view “the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience … and to bolster government messages”. They also saw the whole business as a “learning opportunity” for what might become a “routine” part of their operations.

Nor is this all. At the same time, but separately, “Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario”, including (but seemingly not limited to) from people associated with Black Lives Matter. This, supposedly, was “to ensure the success of Operation Laser, the Canadian Forces mission to help out in long-term care homes hit by COVID-19 and to aid in the distribution of vaccines in some northern communities”. A similar but also, apparently, unrelated effort involved the public affairs branch of the Canadian Forces, which want its “officers to use propaganda” peddled by “friendly defence analysts and retired generals” and indeed “information warfare and influence tactics”, “to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts” and “to criticize on social media those who raised questions about military spending and accountability.”

And in yet another separate incident,

military information operations staff forged a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose in a particular region of the province. The letter was inadvertently distributed to residents, prompting panicked calls to Nova Scotia officials … [T]he reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers.

To be blunt, there seems to be a large constituency in various branches of the Canadian forces for treating the citizens whom they are supposed to defend as enemies and targets in an information war. Granted, these people’s enthusiasm seems to outstrip their competence ― but we know about the ones who got caught. We can only hope that there aren’t others, who are better at what they do. And it’s not a happy place to be in, to be hoping that your country’s soldiers are incomptent. But here we are.

Also yesterday, as it happens, the CBA National Magazine published the first episode of a new podcast, Modern Law, in which its editor, Yves Faguy, interviewed Ève Gaumond, a researcher on AI and digital technologies, about various techniques of online persuasion, especially during election campaigns. These techniques include not only mis- and disinformation and “deep fakes”, but also advertising on social media, which need not to untruthful, though it may present other difficulties. Mr. Faguy’s questions focused on what (more) should Canada, and perhaps other countries, do about these things.

Ms. Gaumond’s views are somewhat nuanced. She acknowledges that “social media is not the main driver of disinformation and misinformation” ― traditional media still are ― and indeed that “we’re not facing a huge disinformation crisis” at all, at present. She points out that, in debates about mis- and disinformation, “the line between truth and falsehood is not so clearly defined”. And she repeatedly notes that there are constitutional limits to the regulation of speech ― for example, she suggests that a ban on microtargeting ads would be unconstitutional.

Ultimately, though, like many others who study these issues, Ms. Gaumond does call for more and more intrusive regulation. She claims, for instance, that “[i]f we are to go further to fight disinformation”, online advertising platforms should be forced not only to maintain a registry of the political ads they carry and of the amounts the advertisers spent, but also to record “[t]he number of times an ad has viewed” and “the audience targeted by the ad”. This would, Ms. Gaumond hopes, deter “problematic” targeting. She also wants to make advertising platforms responsible for ensuring that no foreign advertising makes its way into Canadian elections, and tentatively endorses Michael Pal’s suggestion that spending limits for online advertising should be much lower than for more conventional, and more expensive, formats.

Ultimatelty, though she doesn’t “think that we should tackle speech per se”, Ms. Gaumond muses that “[w]e should see how to regulate all platforms in a way that we can touch on all possible ways that disinformation is spread”. This means not only spending limits but also that “[y]ou cannot pay millions of dollars to microtarget … what you’re saying to people that believe the same thing as you do without oversight from other people, from Election Canada”. And beyond that

not only regulating social medias [sic], but also all of the environment that has created the disinformation crisis. That means education, funding and great journalism, the media ecosystem is one of the important components of why we’re not facing such a big disinformation crisis.

There are a few things to say about Ms. Gaumond’s proposals ― keeping in mind Mr. Pugliese’s report about the activities of the Canadian forces. The overarching point is the one suggested by the juxtaposition of the two: while researchers and politicians fret about disinformation campaigns carried ou by non-state and foreign actors, the state itself remains the most important source of spin, propaganda, and outright lies with which we have to contend. Unlike bots and Russian trolls, the state can easily dupe the opinion-forming segments of society, who are used to (mostly) believing it ― partly out of ideological sympathy, but partly, and it’s important to stress this, because the state is also an important source of necessary and true information which such people rely on and relay.

This means that we should be extremely wary of granting the state any power to control information we can transmit and receive. Its armed agents think nothing of manipulating us, including for the sake of propping up the government of the day. And it is no answer that we should grant these powers to independent, non-partisan bureaucracies. The Canadian Forces are also an independent, non-partisan bureaucracy of sorts. I’m pretty confident that they weren’t trying to manipulate opinion out of any special affection for the Liberal Party of Canada, say. They are just on the side of order and stability, and any civilian bureaucratic structure would be too. It would also be likely to be tempted to squish questions about its own budget and functioning, and to develop an unhealthy interest in people it regards as trouble-makers. Civilians might be more suspicious of right-wing groups than of BLM, but the ones have the same right to free speech and to privacy as the others.

Another thing to note is the confusion among the different issues clustered under the general heading of concerns about mis- and disinformation. Concerns about the targeting of advertising may be valid or not, but their validity often has little to do with the truthfulness of the ads at issue. Concerns about foreign influence may be magnified when it is being exercised through misleading and/or microtargeted ads, but they are not necessarily linked to the issues either of disinformation or of microtargeting. Spending limits, again, have little to do with disinformation. No doubt a knowledgeable researcher like Ms. Gaumond would be more careful about such distinctions in a paper than she sometimes is in the interview with Mr. Faguy. But can untutored policy-makers, let alone voters, keep track?

In light of all this, Ms. Gaumond’s suggestions, though sprinkled with well-intentioned caveats about “not saying ‘you cannot say that'”, should give us serious pause. Even increasing disclosure requirements is far from a straightforward proposition. As Ms. Gaumond notes, Google simply refused to carry political ads rather than set up the registry the government required. Facebook and Twitter might follow if they are forced to make disclosures that would reveal the functioning of their algorithms, which they may have good reasons for keeping out of their competitors’ sight. More fundamentally, the idea that all (political?) speech should at all times be tracked and monitored by the state does not strike me as healthy. Political debate is a fundamental right of citizens, not something we can only engage in on the government’s sufferance. We are not children, and government ― including Elections Canada ― is not a parent who needs to know what we are getting up to online. Last but not least, because of the government’s track record of spin and deceit, it cannot be trusted with educating citizens and funding media in a way that would solve the problems of the “environment that has created the disinformation crisis”. The solution must come from the civil society, not from the state.

Lastly, let me note in my view Ms. Gaumond may be far too optimistic about the willingness of Canadian courts to uphold constitutional limits on government regulation of electoral speech. Their record on this issue is generally abysmal, and the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the leading case, Harper v Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 33, [2004] 1 SCR 827, is itself misinformed and speculative. If government actors take the initiative on these matters, the courts will not save us.

The issue of mis- and disinformation is at least much a moral panic as a genuine crisis. As Ms. Gaumond points out, the trouble is to a considerable extent with traditional media and political forces outside anyone’s easy control; as Mr. Pugliese’s reporting makes clear, we must fear our own government at least as much as any outside force. Yet fears of new technology ― not to mention fear-mongering by media and political actors whose self-interest suggests cutting social media down to size ― mean that all manner of new regulations are being proposed specifically for online political discussions. And the government, instead of being reined in, is likely to acquire significant new powers that will further erode the ability of citizens to be masters in their own public and private lives.

Common Factionalism

The political rhetoric of the common good is poorly disguised factionalism, which the thinkers in whose name it is being advanced would have abhorred

The idea that law and politics should be organized around the principle of the “common good” is in the air on the political right. The left, of course, has had its versions of it for a long time. Both co-blogger Mark Mancini and I have written about “common good” arguments about legal issues, specifically the administrative state (Mark), constitutional law (me), and the Charter’s “notwithstanding clause” (also me), and found them severely wanting. A couple of recent newspaper articles give us an idea of what the “common good” philosophy looks like in practical politics.

On the northern side of the world’s longest closed border, Ginny Roth, writing in the National Post, identifies the Conservative platform in the late and lamented election with “a rich tradition of common-good conservatism that looks more like Edmund Burke than John Locke”. The master idea of this “new conservatism” (wait, is it new or richly traditional? never mind) is that “Conservatives must be positioned to build on the coalition of voters that will support it in this election by correctly identifying what appealed to them about the leader, the party and the platform”. Less blandly, “the left must not have a monopoly on populist politics”. The right should imitate the left, and in doing so advance the policies favoured, or assumed to be favoured, by “coalitions of voters who think the opposite of what the cocktail party goers do”.

The same ideas, if that’s what they are, are to be found south of the aforementioned border in Josh Hammer’s column in Newsweek. (Mr. Hammer, it is worth noting, is one of if not the closest thing the “common good” movement has to a leader. He is also, apparently, a research fellow with an outfit called the Edmund Burke Foundation.) Mr. Hammer defends bans on private businesses requiring their employees or customers to be vaccinated against the present plague. In doing so, he claims to take the side of “common-good-inspired figures” against “the more adamantly classical liberal, libertarian-inspired pundits and politicians who believe the quintessence of sound governance is simply permitting individuals and private entities to do what they wish”. Mr. Hammer “explains” that “[v]accine mandates will be a convenient fig leaf for a ruling class already gung-ho at the possibility of precluding conservatives from the full panoply of in-person public life”. (Why is that the defenders of tradition so often struggle with their native tongue?) This “wokeist ruling class” must be stopped by a “prudential use of state power to secure the deplorables’ basic way of life”.

With apologies to H.L. Mencken, “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” seems to be an excellent description of common good conservatism, as propounded by Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer. The common people are entitled to get their way, and to have the state’s coercive force used to ensure that they get their way. And no need to ask whether their preferences are consonant with some objective standards of morality, or the teachings of experts ― be it in economics, in epidemiology, or what have you. The beliefs of the common people are entitled to prevail because they are their beliefs, not because they are right.

Of course, it’s only the common people, that is, the right kind of people, that are entitled to have their way. The woke cocktail-swilling pundits and politicians are not. Even entrepreneurs, whom the conservatives of yesteryear lionized, must take their orders from those who do not drink cocktails. In other words, what Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer are promoting under the name of the common good is the view that the aim of politics is to give effect to the wishes of

a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

This is James Madison’s famous definition of faction, in Federalist No. 10. Ms. Roth might not have, but Mr. Hammer, who affects to be a constitutional sage as well as a political visionary, presumably has read the Federalist Papers. He’s read them, and has evidently concluded that he is cleverer than Madison, who feared faction as the seed of tyranny, civil strife, and destruction, and looked for ways to limit its ill-effects.

Madison saw the remedy in “[a] republic, … a government in which the scheme of representation takes place”. A “republic”, so understood, would

refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

Not so for Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer. Not for them the refining and enlargement of public views by representatives. (It’s the cocktails, don’t you know?) The people themselves, and more precisely the “deplorables”, the ones whose views are the opposite of refined and enlarged, who must govern, and officials are to take their marching orders from them.

Poor Edmund Burke is spinning in his grave. His single most famous idea is doubtless the argument he advanced in his “Speech to the Electors of Bristol”, which deserves to be quoted at length here:

Certainly … it ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any sett of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

My worthy Colleague says, his Will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If Government were a matter of Will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But Government and Legislation are matters of reason and judgement, and not of inclination; and, what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one sett of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

The populism masquerading as “common good” conservatism being peddled by Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer is the opposite not only of John Locke’s ideas and James Madison’s, but also of the deeply held views of the great man they dishonour by pretending to admire him.

I should note that there a more purely intellectual and, not coincidentally, intellectually respectable version of the “common good” thought. For the reasons some of which I set out more fully in my earlier posts, I don’t find it compelling. But, at its best, it does involve an honest reflection on the good of the community rather than window-dressing for factionalism. Michael Foran speaks from this perspective when he tweets that “[t]he Common Good shouldn’t be used as the new phrase for whatever political position one happens to already hold. A claim that X is in the common good needs to explain how X is both genuinely good and genuinely common in its goodness.”

As it happens, Adrian Vermeule (among others) has recently shared his thoughts on vaccine mandates with Bari Weiss, and they are not at all in line with Mr. Hammer’s. Along with much sniping at libertarians (does he think Mr. Hammer is one?), he argues that “the vaccine mandate is analogous in principle to … crisis measures” such as wartime conscription or the destruction of property to stop a fire: “[o]ur health, our lives and our prosperity, are intertwined in ways that make it entirely legitimate to enforce precautions against lethal disease — even upon objectors”.

The point is not really that Professor Vermeule is right (which I’m inclined to think he is, albeit not quite for the reasons he advances), and Mr. Hammer is wrong. It’s not even that their disagreement exposes the vacuity of the common good as a standard against which to measure policy (though it at least points in that direction). For my present purposes, it’s that the partisan version of the “common good” ideology, which Mr. Hammer and Ms. Roth represent, has next to nothing to do with its more cerebral namesake exemplified by Professor Vermeule’s comments to Ms Weiss. In its partisan incarnation, common good talk is nothing more than a fig-leaf meant to hide ― none too well, mind you ― the narcissism and cultural resentment that its promoters impute to a part of the electorate.

The UK Way

What a recent decision of the UK Supreme Court can teach us about courts, legislatures, and rights

A recent decision of the UK Supreme Court, R (SC) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, [2021] UKSC 26, might be of interest for Canadian readers. Lord Reed’s judgment for the Court addresses issues that are relevant to current Canadian debates about the relationship between courts, legislatures, and rights, equality rights in particular. To be sure, the UK context is not the same as Canada’s. Still there are lessons to be learned there.

In a nutshell, at issue in SC was a statutory rule providing that one particular tax credit available to low-income families would only be payable in respect of a first and second child, but not for any subsequent children in a family. (Other benefits remained unaffected.) This was alleged to constitute discrimination, on a number of different grounds, in the protection of a right to family life, which is guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, and thus by the Human Rights Act 1998. The Supreme Court found that there was indeed prima facie discrimination against women (who were more likely to be caring for multiple children) and children living in families with three or more children, as opposed to those living in smaller ones. But the rule was still justified as a reasonable means of ensuring the fiscal sustainability of the credit programme.

One could make many interesting observations about this. Canadian readers might want to consider the different approach to equality rights under the Convention and under s 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ―no abstruse inquiries into human dignity, histories of stereotyping, and so on, and a ready recognition of what we’d term “analogous grounds”, but also a greater willingness to defer to Parliamentary judgment, except where some particularly invidious forms of discrimination are concerned. But in this post I focus on a different issue: namely, Lord Reed’s comments on the nature and scope of Parliament’s engagement with rights, and the courts’ consideration of this engagement in assessing the compatibility of resulting legislation with the Convention.

These comments are part of Lord Reed’s discussion of “the use which can be made of Parliamentary debates and other Parliamentary material when considering whether … legislation is compatible with Convention rights”. [163] This was necessary because the parties argued about whether or not Parliament gave sufficient consideration to “matters which were argued to be relevant to the proportionality of the legislation, such as its impact upon the interests of the children affected”. [163] Lord Reed, however, cautions about this kind of argument, both out of respect for Parliament’s privileges and, no less importantly, in light of Parliament’s distinct constitutional role.

Parliamentary privilege, as part of the separation of powers, means relevantly “that it is no part of the function of the courts … to exercise a supervisory jurisdiction over the internal procedures of Parliament”. [165] In particular, courts should not expect and must not demand “transparent and rational
analysis” of rights claims by Parliament, because this “would be liable to make the process of resolving political differences through negotiation, compromise and the exercise of democratic power more difficult and less likely to succeed”. [171] The quality of the reasons given by individual Members of Parliament, or even by Ministers, is not what is at issue when courts assess the effect of statutory provisions on rights or their justification and proportionality in a democratic society.

Another aspect of the separation of powers, Lord Reed points out, is the distinction between Parliament and government. Among other things, this means that “[a]s a matter of daily reality, ministers and party whips
have to negotiate and compromise in order to secure the passage of the legislation which the Government has promoted, often in an amended form.” [166] And it follows from this that “[t]he reasons which the Government gives for promoting legislation cannot therefore be treated as necessarily explaining why Parliament chose to enact it”. [166] Neither the government nor individual members can be taken to be speaking for Parliament. Its “will … finds expression solely in the legislation which it enacts”, [167] and its “intention … or (otherwise put) the object or aim of legislation, is an essentially legal construct, rather than something which can be discovered by an empirical investigation”. [172]

At most, Lord Reed says, courts inquire into “whether matters relevant to compatibility” between an impugned statute and Convention rights “were raised during the legislative process”, while “avoid[ing] assessing the adequacy or cogency of Parliament’s consideration of them”. [182] If they were, then ― regardless of the quality of these debates ― Parliament’s enactment may be entitled to an additional measure of deference. The converse, however, is not true: lack of Parliamentary consideration of the issues does not count against the statute.

Canadian courts need to take heed. The most egregious example of their failure to attend to the principles Lord Reed expounds is surely the one Maxime St-Hilaire and I have written about here: the first instance judgment in the Québec mosque shooter’s case, R c Bissonnette, 2019 QCCS 354 (since reversed in part by the Court of Appeal, and now under appeal at the Supreme Court). There, Professor St-Hilaire and I noted, the judge engaged in

play-by-play commentary on Parliamentary debate, praise for “[o]pposition members [who] did their job”, [1146] denigration of a government member’s answer as being of “dubious intelligibility” [1137] and of the Parliamentary majority as a whole for its “wilful blindness” [1146] in the face of opposition warnings.

Another recent example is provided by Justice Zinn’s comments in Smith v. Canada (Attorney General), 2020 FC 629 to the effect that “[a] statement made by the Prime Minister at the time as to the intent of Parliament and its members ought to be accorded significant weight, if not considered conclusive on the issue of Parliamentary intent”. [85]

But even the Supreme Court has sometimes succumbed to such misguided reasoning, if in less extreme forms. Thus in R v Safarzadeh‑Markhali, 2016 SCC 14, [2016] 1 SCR 180, Chief Justice McLachlin, writing for a unanimous court, picked and chose among various purposes offered by the Minister who had promoted the legislation at issue, declaring one to be the real purpose of the statute and the others “peripheral”. This arguably crosses the line into “impeaching” Parliamentary statements, and certainly wrongly attributes a Minister’s supposed purpose to Parliament, to the detriment of the separation of powers and to the advantage of the executive over the legislature.

That said, two caveats are in oder. First, Lord Reed’s emphasis on the separation of the executive and the legislature may not always be appropriate in the Canadian context, at least outside of minority government situations. When one considers the law-making practices of some governments and legislatures ― notably, ubiquitous abusive omnibus legislation, or laws interfering with constitutional rights passed in a matter of days, it is difficult to maintain that the legislatures involved are anything other than inanimate rubber-stamps, quite devoid of any “will of their own”. More generally, Canadian legislatures lack certain features and institutions that serve to maintain the Westminster Parliament’s partial independence from the executive. But that doesn’t change the principle that courts should not attribute the executive’s purposes to the legislature. Partly, this is to avoid rewarding the executive for overwhelming the legislature; partly because, as Lord Reed says, it is not the courts’ place to assess the quality of legislative deliberation, and that includes the degree of its independence from the executive.

Second, Lord Reed’s discussion of deference ― both the narrow point described above, to the effect that Parliament’s consideration of an issue should reinforce curial deference to its choices, and what he says elsewhere in the judgment ― is also to be treated with the greatest caution in Canada. Lord Reed is judging in a constitutional system where Parliamentary sovereignty rather than constitutional supremacy is the ultimate principle. But, moreover, section 1 of the Canadian Charter requires any limitations on the rights it protects to be “demonstrably justified” (emphasis mine). The wording of the European Convention is a bit different ― it speaks (for example in article 8, which was at issue in SC) of limits “necessary in a democratic society”. Those readers ― and judges ― who, like me, attach importance to the words of constitutional texts may well think that the Charter‘s emphasis on demonstrable justifications calls into question the appropriateness of judicial deference to legislative choices, and especially of deference on no stronger a basis than the fact that the legislature turned its mind to an issue.

But judges are not the only Canadians who should take note of Lord Reed’s explanations. The proponents of the use of the Charter‘s “notwithstanding clause”, which allows legislatures to maintain in operation laws that are contrary to the Charter‘s guarantees, ought also to consider what Lord Reed says about the difference between courts and legislatures. Their argument is premised, in part, on the claim ― often asserted though seldom supported ― that legislatures will serve “as a forum where rights are debated, articulated and enacted” with “the thoughtful participation of the people themselves”, in the words of Joanna Baron and Geoffrey Sigalet in a post over at Policy Options. Lord Reed’s explanations show why this claim is unlikely to be true, or at least nearly as true as its proponents make it out to be.

Lord Reed points out that the way in which Parliament does its business does not require debate and articulation of rights, or any particular degree of thoughtfulness on the part of the people’s representatives, let alone the people themselves. He writes:

First … Parliament does not give reasons for enacting legislation: it simply votes on a motion to approve a proposed legislative text. There is no corporate statement of reasons, and the individual members of Parliament do not give their reasons for voting in a particular way. …

Secondly, the decisions which Parliament takes are not necessarily capable
of being rationalised in any event. In the first place, Parliament does not operate only, or even primarily, as a debating chamber. It is also a forum for gathering evidence, and for extra-cameral discussion, negotiation and compromise. Furthermore, the way in which members of Parliament vote will usually, but by no means always, reflect party policy, and may be influenced by the discipline imposed by the party whips. [167]-[168]

Lord Reed further explains that while the courts’ task is “the production of decisions arrived at by an independent and transparent process of reasoning”, Parliament’s is

the management of political disagreements … so as to arrive, through negotiation and compromise, and the use of the party political power obtained at democratic elections, at decisions whose legitimacy is accepted not because of the quality or transparency of the reasoning involved, but because of the democratic credentials of those by whom the decisions are taken. [169]

In other words, when Parliament makes a decision, including a decision that impacts or even directly concerns the rights of citizens, it need not act on the basis of reasoned deliberation. It is just as likely to be giving effect to the results of horse-trading or to the political tactics of the majority, its ministry, and its whips. Rights, or any other considerations, need not be articulated in any sort of intelligent fashion in this process. To be sure, sometimes they will be ― but this is no more than a happy accident. It cannot be the foundation of a constitutional theory, let alone the basis on which anyone should accept that their rights can be suspended by a political faction that holds them in contempt.

For all that Canadians like to think of themselves as open to learning from the constitutional law of other countries ― and despite some reservations I have on this score! ― I think that we do not do it nearly enough. There is indeed a great deal to learn out there, and not least from the courts that, to some, might seem passé ― those of the United States and the United Kingdom. SC is a good reminder of that.