Senate reform
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Immuring Dicey’s Ghost
Introducing a new article on the Senate Reform Reference, constitutional conventions, and originalism ― and some thoughts on publishing heterodox scholarship Continue reading
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Immuring Dicey’s Ghost
The Senate Reform Reference and constitutional conventions Continue reading
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A Bad Case
As promised, here are some thoughts on the Memorandum of Fact and Law that the federal government’s lawyers have filed in response to Aniz Alani’s challenge of the Prime Minister’s policy of not appointing Senators. (I had previously canvassed what I thought ― mostly, but not entirely, correctly ― would be the main issues in Continue reading
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Don’t Blame the Courts
Critics of judicial review of legislation, such as Jeremy Waldron, argue that judicial invalidation of democratically enacted laws often occurs in the realm of reasonable disagreement. Perhaps we have a moral right to assisted suicide; perhaps not; it’s a difficult question and we can disagree about the answer ― and it’s not obvious that in Continue reading
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Making Sense of Constitutional Crises
Not surprisingly, my suggestion that the Governor General dismiss Stephen Harper as Prime Minister for his (Mr. Harper’s, that is) unconstitutional policy of not appointing Senators turned out to not to be any more popular than my earlier suggestion that the Governor General just appoint Senators on his own, without the Prime Minister’s blessing. That idea was Continue reading
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Dismiss Him
The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has announced that he will no longer be making any Senate appointments. Not that he had been making any recently ― in the last couple of years in fact. However, just last month, for the purposes of contesting Aniz Alani’s court challenge to the apparent policy of non-appointment, the federal government’s Continue reading
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Let’s Hear It
I’ve mentioned Aniz Alani’s challenge to the constitutionality of the Prime Minister’s apparent and admitted policy of not making any Senate appointments before. The federal government moved to strike Mr. Alani’s application for judicial review, arguing that it had no chance of success, and also that the Federal Court had no jurisdiction to hear it. Yesterday, that Continue reading
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Please Advise
The Prime Minister is apparently refusing to have any new Senators appointed, until, well, who knows (though one may suspect that it is until the next election. The leader of the official opposition has already declared that he would never appoint any Senators ever. And, as I noted in my first post on this subject, Continue reading
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Constitutional Defiance
In news which perhaps did not receive the attention it deserved, the federal leader of the opposition, Thomas Mulcair, announced that, if he becomes Prime Minister following the next federal election, he would imitate the current Prime Minister and refuse to appoint any Senators. La Presse quotes him as saying that [t]he Senate is like Continue reading
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Constitutional Amendment and the Law
I have been a bit harsh on the Supreme Court in my first post on its opinion in the Reference re Senate Reform, 2014 SCC 32, saying that it had reduced the constitutional text to the status of a façade, which hid as much as it revealed of the real constitutional architecture, which only the Continue reading
Double Aspect 