standard of review – Double Aspect

A Nod to the Pod

Introducing the experimental Double Aspect Pod

Co-blogger Mark Mancini and I have been toying with this idea for a while: should Double Aspect expand into the podcasting universe? Well, we have decided to give it a shot, and we are pleased to announce the arrival of the first and very much experimental episode of the Double Aspect Pod.

We’re very new to this medium and it shows. The audio on my end is especially sub-par, I’m afraid. Still we thought that the substance of our conversation, during which we covered the merits/procedure in administrative law, our recent post on statutory interpretation and election law, and medical assistance in dying, was pretty good. If you are willing to give us a shot and overlook the technical difficulties, you can listen to it here:

Please let us know what you think!

The Post-Vavilov Supreme Court and Administrative Law

Reason for optimism?

After the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Abrametz and ESA (both of which are summarized and analyzed in my newsletter here and here, respectively), there is much to say. But I just want to quickly identify one emerging trend: the centrifugal force of the principles in Vavilov in areas of administrative law not immediately in its contemplation. For reasons I hope to outline in future work, I think this trend is positive, because the sweeping and comprehensive approach in Vavilov provides a set of plausibly, administrable rules that reduces the amount of time spent on finding the standard of review, among other things. This is a good thing because the law of judicial review shouldn’t be overly complex. It is designed to be quick, on the record, and facilitative for individuals challenging government action. Labyrinthine doctrine stifles that purpose.

For now, though, I only write to highlight a few examples of this trend I identify:

In Abrametz, the question of the standard of review for procedural fairness issues arising in a statutory right of appeal was at issue. For a majority of eight, Rowe J applied Vavilov’s holding on rights of appeal (the appellate, not judicial, standards apply) to the issue of delay (Abrametz, at para 27). This was despite the majority’s acknowledgement that this “proposition was stated in the context of substantive review.” This was also despite the fact that the orthodox view is that correctness applies to issues of procedural fairness (set out in cases like Khela). As I outlined in my newsletter, I think this move is justifiable, and it may raise questions about assimilating all issues of procedural fairness to Vavilov’s rules and standards. This is not an argument I can explore here, but it has been mooted in the courts (e.g. Maritime Broadcasting, at para 50). That said, one will likely find a resolute voice in favour of hard-line correctness review on all issues of procedural fairness: see Côté J’s dissent in Abrametz. And the move made in Abrametz regarding rights of appeal is a much easier hill to climb than a full-on application of Vavilov to issues of procedural fairness.

In ESA, the question was whether the laws like the Copyright Act that confer jurisdiction over the same questions to courts and the Copyright Board invite the correctness standard. In Rogers, a previous Supreme Court case, the Court recognized this as an appropriate circumstance to deviate from a reasonableness standard. For a seven judge majority, Rowe J again approached the problem by asking how Vavilov altered the Rogers standard (ESA, at paras 24-25). This was because—as I argue—Vavilov “simplified the law” (ESA, at para 24) and “overtook the prior jurisprudence” (Vavilov, at para 14). Analyzing the problem from the perspective of Vavilov’s principles of legislative/institutional design and the rule of law, Rowe J recognized the Rogers exception as an additional category that would attract correctness review. It is “analogous” to a statutory right of appeal (ESA, at para 32) and inconsistencies could arise between judicial and administrative interpretation, undermining the consistency and systemic clarity required by Vavilov’s idea of the rule of law (and, I argue, the Supreme Court’s other precedents). Karakatsanis J and Martin J said the majority’s conclusion “undermines Vavilov’s promise of certainty and predictability” (ESA, at para 117) because despite the fact that Vavilov “obviously considered” cases like Rogers, it did not choose to recognize it as an example of a case requiring correctness review (ESA, at paras 117, 124). In fact, if anything, it implicitly (but not “inadvertently”) overruled it (ESA, at para 125). While I do not agree with the concurrence’s worry about the majority’s decision, I note that the concurrence, too, sees Vavilov as a simplifying, cohering mechanism—it just reads Vavilov differently (in my view, much too narrowly—see Vavilov at para 70, which focuses on the application of its principles in future cases).

These Supreme Court examples only serve to buttress trends in the lower courts. In Portnov, for example, Stratas JA in the Federal Court of Appeal held that the bespoke standard of review analysis for regulations set out in Katz should be foreclosed and assimilated to Vavilov’s reasonableness standard (Portnov, at paras 24-28). And even beyond the grounds of substantive or procedural review, Boivin JA in Ermineskin Cree Nation merged considerations of judicial discretion and cost-expediency in the question of whether a case was moot; in so doing, it tied an important consideration underlying Vavilov’s discussion of remedies on judicial review to the preliminary issue of mootness (see Ermineskin Cree Nation, at para 41; Air Canada, at para 14). What’s more, there is debate in the lower courts, and even at the Supreme Court, about the standard of review on arbitral appeals: whether the standard is reasonableness or the appellate standards, as prescribed by Vavilov (see here).

In all of these examples, we see Vavilov potentially doing a lot of conceptual work. Not only are its principles affecting substantive review (ESA), but also preliminary objections to judicial review (mootness), and further, even in domains not necessarily within the Vavilov Court’s express contemplation (Abrametz). Nonetheless, it appears as if a number of judges on the Court are viewing Vavilov not only as a good encapsulation of accepted administrative law values (primarily, institutional design and the rule of law, but also discretion and cost-effectiveness), but a plausible set of operational rules deduced from those values.

For my own reasons, I think the overall effort in Vavilov was sound. In theory, there are some imperfections in Vavilov. I’d much prefer, for my part, a Chevron-like approach to judicial review of administrative action, which doesn’t start from a presumption of deference, but which asks courts to interpret whether the statutory language can support “more than one answer” in the first place. Nonetheless, I can live with Vavilov because it is a clear rule with clear exceptions, and we get something like Chevron on questions of law when we apply the reasonableness standard (though this does not solve the fundamental issue: see Leonid Sirota here). The presumption of reasonableness is rooted in a plausible, though imperfect, conception of legislative delegation (again, I have my own fundamental objections to it—delegation does not necessarily equal deference). But the “wrongness” of the presumption, in my view, is mitigated by sound exceptions to its application in cases where there is a clear contrary signal “subtracting” from the specific delegation (rights of appeal, concurrent jurisdiction); where the question at issue transcends the legislative delegation (constitutional questions, for example); or perhaps even when it is unclear the delegation extends to the decision-maker at all (see here). And as I say, even on questions where reasonableness applies, we get an approach that takes into account administrative legal errors, statutory language, and which forces more extensive justification to facilitate judicial review on the reasonableness standard.

We live in an imperfect world, and in my view, this old trope extends with even more force to the law of judicial review. So at the end of the day, imperfections in the theory and doctrine do not undermine the workability that Vavilov has achieved. Because selecting the standard of review is categorical, theoretical imperfections aside, the process is much simpler. As I say above, certainty and predictability in the law of judicial review should be built-in, so that citizens can understand how to challenge government action. What I think Vavilov has done is settle the fundamentals, allowing development around the edges, while providing a sound starting point for that development. For this reason, I agree with the overall trend: courts should look to Vavilov’s principles to infuse, to a greater or lesser degree, the doctrine of judicial review where relevant.

ESA II: The Standard of Review and Rogers

In Entertainment Software Association, Stratas JA for the Court set out a number of important comments about statutory interpretation and international law. I dealt with those comments in a previous post. I write again about this case to highlight Stratas JA’s comments on the standard of review. Particularly, Stratas JA was faced with the propriety of the Rogers decision, which held that when an administrative regime contemplates concurrent jurisdiction between a decision-maker and a court, the standard is correctness. While Stratas JA rightly held that the issue should be left for another day, I think there are good reasons to affirm Rogers in light of Vavilov.

Stratas JA started out by noting that “[f]or some reviewing courts, Vavilov wrought a significant change in how reasonableness review should be conducted. But in our Court, at least for the conducting of reasonableness review in a case like this, Vavilov hardly changed anything at all” [23]. This was because one of Vavilov’s innovations (at least at the SCC) was its list of contextual “constraints” that act as indicia of a reasonable decision. For example, and perhaps most importantly, statutory language could be broad or narrow, which would either “liberate or constrain” the decision-maker (Entertainment Software Assoc, at para 24; Vavilov at paras 89, 110). Similarly, other factors (precedent, affect on the individual, etc) could set the context in which reasonableness is defined. In the Federal Court of Appeal, a similarly contextual approach was already known: see particularly the decisions in Farwaha, at para 91; Delios, at paras 26-27). In a way, Vavilov was a full vindication of the Federal Court of Appeal’s approach. No longer, Stratas JA said, would lower courts have to “tip-toe around dicta in Supreme Court decisions like [Edmonton East] and [Wilson].” Despite Abella and Karakatsanis JJ’s (surprising and unexpected, given cases like Saskatchewan Federation of Labour) call to follow stare decisis in relation to these cases, the majority rightly did away with them, leaving them to be read by generations of law students as exotic artifacts of times gone by. And the Federal Court of Appeal’s long-standing approach to these issues, rooted in sound doctrine, was vindicated.

More difficult was the propriety of Rogers. As noted in my previous post, the section of the Copyright Act under interpretation in the case “falls to be interpreted by both the Board and the courts” [14]. Under Rogers, the standard of correctness applied to such cases of concurrent jurisdiction. The question: does Vavilov throw doubt on Rogers?

As Stratas JA notes, Vavilov is exhaustive in that it addresses “all of the situations in which a reviewing court should derogate from the presumption of reasonableness review” (Vavilov, at para 69; see also Vavilov, at para 143 re “holistic revision”). While the Court left open the possibility for future categories of correctness review to be recognized in future cases (Vavilov, at para 70), Rogers clearly did not fit into the Vavilov correctness categories. This is odd, considering Rogers is of relatively recent vintage and the Court was clearly aware of it as a previously-recognized correctness category. My speculation is that, since Vavilov is clearly a compromise judgment.

That said, in my view, a case for Rogers could be made in light of Vavilov. Though Stratas JA left the merits of this argument for another day, he does point out that an organizing premise of Vavilov is legislative intent; specifically, a respect for the “institutional design choices” made by Parliament in establishing an administrative body (Vavilov, at paras 24, 26, 36, and 46). It is this concept that justifies a presumption of reasonableness review. Similarly, it is this concern that justifies one of the categories rebutting that presumption: statutory rights of appeal on questions of law. A respect for these “institutional design choices” (for example, the act of setting up an administrative actor in the first place, and the act of subjecting that administrative actor to a right of appeal on questions of law) might similarly militate in favour of recognizing concurrent jurisdiction as a category of correctness review (see Entertainment Software Assoc, at para 18).

While I find this argument quite convincing, there are three counter-arguments that should be tackled. First, one might argue that since Vavilov did not recognize Rogers, this should be taken as a sign that Rogers is no longer good law. While the Supreme Court in administrative law does have a history of simply ignoring precedents, no one should presume that this is what the Supreme Court decided implicitly in Vavilov. Remember that Vavilov is comprehensive; the Supreme Court took great pains to clarify its pre-Vavilov precedents. It is more likely that Rogers was not included because of the internal politics of keeping the majority together; not an implicit desire to overrule Rogers.

Second, one might argue that the conceptual basis of Rogers itself no longer exists. Specifically, Rogers says that “By setting up a specialized tribunal to determine certain issues the legislature is presumed to have recognized superior expertise in that body in respect of issues arising under its home statute…”(Rogers, at para 11). Similarly, in cases of concurrent jurisdiction, “…it must be inferred that the legislative intent was not to recognize superior expertise of the Board…” (Rogers, at para 15). On these extracts, expertise seems to be doing some conceptual work. Yet Vavilov dispatches with expertise as a reflexive reason for deference. What result?

While expertise is no longer the lynchpin for deference, Rogers still speaks of “legislative intent.” In this case, the relevant legislative intent has simply shifted. We do not go further and ask what legislative intent Parliament had with respect to expertise; we simply ask what Parliament did when it set up a decision-maker, from an institutional perspective. Under this new theoretical basis, and as noted above, there is at least a case that Rogers can fit in quite nicely.

Finally, one might take a page from Abella and Karakatsanis JJ’s disguised dissent and simply argue that concurrent jurisdiction should not necessarily lead to correctness review (the disguised dissent made this point re rights of appeal at Vavilov, para 249). One could argue that nothing should be gleaned from concurrent jurisdiction as a matter of legislative intent; and the presumption of deference should apply.

But the importance that the Vavilov Court attaches to delegation as a tool belies this argument. For the Court, it is the very act of delegation that invites reasonableness review (Vavilov, at para 30). But when Parliament delegates to a decision-maker but carves out jurisdiction for a court to decide the same or similar matters at first instance, the delegation to the administrative agency cannot be construed as “full.” Accordingly, the presumption of reasonableness should not be characterized as “full” either. The exception for courts to exercise original jurisdiction qualifies the delegation, undermining the conceptual basis for reasonableness review.

This is just a sampling of some of the considerations to take into account regarding Rogers. It will be interesting to see how courts deal with that case in light of Vavilov.

The Nero Post: Two Niche Issues in Judicial Review Post-Vavilov

Lest I be accused of fiddling while Rome burns, I wish to note that I approach a pandemic as a time in which we must, subject to social distancing and isolation, proceed as normal as much as possible. Indeed, it is this sense of normalcy that should characterize what we do as much as possible. Because eventually, we will return to a sense of normal; and once we do so, we need to be equipped to handle the new world in which we will experience. Surely, life will be different. But we must be ready to tackle those challenges, and so we can’t close the door on the world. Life must, to the extent possible, go on.

In that spirit, I write today’s post, tackling two niche issues in the law of judicial review, post-Vavilov: the scope of the correctness categories, particularly the “general questions” category, and the effect of Vavilov on the BC Administrative Tribunals Act.

Let’s start first with the general questions category. As a reminder, Vavilov amended this category, a hold-over from Dunsmuir, to exclude considerations of expertise (Vavilov, at para 61). Now, the category reads as “general questions of law of central importance to the legal system as a whole.” If a question falls in this category, it will be subject to correctness review by the reviewing court. The logic behind this category is that certain questions transcend particular administrative regimes and require consistent answers from the reviewing court (Vavilov, at para 59). But the Court, in Vavilov, cautioned against an expansion of this category: questions that merely address issues of wider public concern do not fall in this category, and the simple fact that a question might be “important” in an abstract sense does not satisfy the category. In short, this category is not a “broad catch-all category for correctness review” (Vavilov, at para 61). Indeed, of all the questions so far recognized by the Supreme Court as falling into this category, all have had constitutional dimensions transcending the boundaries of a particular statutory scheme (see Justice David Stratas’ work, here, at pg 37).

Post-Vavilov, courts have largely heeded the call to interpret this category narrowly. For example, in Bank of Montreal v Li, the Federal Court of Appeal held that the issue of waiver of statutory entitlements was not an issue of general importance. The Court held that there was “no constitutional dimension to the question of whether an employee can contract out of a specific provision of a statute” and that the answer to the question posed “will not have legal implications for a wide variety of other statutes” (Li, at para 28). The Court again cautioned that this category is narrowly construed.

Similarly, in Beach Place Ventures, the BCSC also rejected the invitation to label a question as a general question of central importance. The controversy in that case involved whether certain complainants were “employees” under the Employment Standards Act [ESA]. The Court rejected the invitation to characterize this question as one of general importance. While the Court agreed that “what constitutes ‘employment’ is an important societal question,” the employee determination is one cabined by “statutory provisions rather than left to general principles of law” (Beach Ventures, at para 33). Put differently, the employee determination is one that is particular to the ESA, and the fact that the legislature chose to vest this question in the ESA was determinative for the Court.

But there has been at least one case where general questions were recognized. Take College of Physicians and Surgeons v SJO, where the issue was the production of documents in the context of a professional conduct investigation. The subject of the complaint raised an issue of privilege. The Court held that correctness should apply to this question, because “the way the disclosure and production issue has been raised here impacts in a broad way on the operation of the professional regulatory system” (SJO, at para 10).

Overall, I would say that the ground has largely stayed the same post-Vavilov on this ground of questions. Of the three cases cited above, two have recognized that this category is not a broad way to invite the application of the correctness standard. The only case that has recognized such a question, SJO, largely does so on solid ground: indeed, the Supreme Court has already noted that solicitor client privilege is a general question of central importance (see University of Calgary, at para 20). While SJO did not involve solicitor client privilege, it is only a hop, skip, and a jump from solicitor client privilege to other forms of privilege, even those not currently recognized at law. Indeed, the form of privilege asserted by the subject of the investigation in SJO was not recognized at law, but could impact other claims of privilege across the professional regulatory system. This, as I see it, is at least facially supported by existing Supreme Court precedent.

Overall, though, there has been little movement on this ground. And I think this is for the best. The central questions category is one that preserves the Rule of Law, but if it is used liberally, it could eat away at duly-delegated authority over certain questions. In this sense, I see the warning in Beach Place Ventures as apposite: a liberal application of the central questions category arrogates greater power to the courts to overturn decisions that, at least facially, have been delegated to administrative decision-makers. In the ordinary course, the scope of power delegated to a decision-maker, discernible through the ordinary rules of interpretation, should dictate the space available to a decision-maker—the level of deference (see Vavilov, at para 90 for a similar approach in which statutes, among other things, constrain a decision-maker). The ready imposition of an artificial correctness category risks upsetting this ordinary task. While this category should obviously exist, it must be left for questions with truly transcendental impact.

The second issue: the impact of Vavilov on the BC ATA. So far, there are duelling cases out of the BCSC that deal with this issue. In College of New Caledonia, the Court concluded that “Vavilov has not changed the law with respect to the meaning of patent unreasonableness under [the BC ATA]” (College of New Caledonia, at para 33). Meanwhile, in Guevara v Louie, the BCSC concluded that Vavilov’s comments on the reasonableness standard “also apply to a review of reasons on the standard of patent unreasonableness” because common law jurisprudence may impact what constitutes a patently unreasonable decision (Guevara v Louie, at para 48).

Of course, this is a classic problem: what role does the common law play in elucidating statutory guarantees? The Guevara Court cited to Khosa, at para 19, where the Court did say that patent unreasonableness in BC will be interpreted in light of general common law principles of administrative law. But this passage, in my view, should not be taken so far. While patent unreasonableness may receive limited inspiration from common law principles, it is also a distinct standard of review that differs from reasonableness as defined by the Supreme Court. Its distinctiveness comes from the fact that it is a statutory standard of review. As recently confirmed in Vavilov, legislated standards of review such as the patent unreasonableness standard should be given effect (Vavilov, at paras 35-36). This is simply a function of the hierarchy of laws; statutes (explicitly or by necessary implication) trump the common law. The common law cannot override the statutory standard, and I fear that is what happened in Guevara, and what a liberal application of Khosa would entail (just another reason to disfavour Khosa).

Overall, these two niche issues in judicial review will continue to be fleshed out in lower courts. For now, sit back, quarantine, and stay strong.

Tout nouveau, tout beau?

Ce que dit, et ce que ne dit pas, l’arrêt Vavilov, pour nos lecteurs francophones

Ce billet est co-rédigé avec Mark Mancini

L’arrêt Canada (Ministre de la Citoyenneté et de l’Immigration) c Vavilov, 2019 CSC 65 de la Cour suprême a fait l’objet de nombreux commentaires, tant sur ce blogue qu’ailleurs, – mais dans la langue de Laskin, pas celle de Beetz. Nous nous proposons donc de combler ce vide. Ce billet ne saurait reprendre les analyses et les critiques détaillées que nous avons tous deux déjà publiées (dont la liste suit ci-dessous) et celles, peut-être, encore à venir. Il se limite plutôt, d’une part, à offrir à nos lecteurs francophones un résumé des points saillants de l’arrêt et, de l’autre, à attirer leur attention sur les enjeux que risque de soulever la mise en œuvre de celui-ci par les tribunaux.

Ainsi qu’elle l’avait annoncé dans son jugement accordant l’autorisation de pourvoi, la Cour suprême profite de l’affaire Vavilov pour ajuster le cadre d’analyse employé par les tribunaux lorsqu’ils révisent une décision administrative sur le fond. Si les normes de contrôle disponibles demeurent celles que les tribunaux canadiens ont appliquées depuis l’arrêt Dunsmuir c Nouveau-Brunswick, 2008 CSC 9, [2008] 1 RCS 190, et que la présomption de l’application de la norme de la décision raisonnable demeure en vigueur, tant les fondements théoriques de ce cadre d’analyse que les circonstances où la présomption est repoussée sont révisées. De plus, la Cour fournit des explications étoffées sur la façon d’appliquer la norme de contrôle de la décision raisonnable, qui seront sans doute un enseignement tout aussi important, et probablement plus difficile à appliquer, de cet arrêt.

Le principe qui guide le choix de la norme de contrôle appliquée lors de la révision d’une décision administrative est celui voulant que cette norme doit « refléter l’intention du législateur sur le rôle de la cour de révision, sauf dans les cas où la primauté du droit empêche de donner effet à cette intention » [23]. Selon la Cour, cela signifie généralement que, « [s]i le législateur a constitué un décideur administratif dans le but précis d’administrer un régime législatif […] on peut aisément présumer que le législateur a voulu que celui‑ci puisse fonctionner en faisant le moins possible l’objet d’une intervention judiciaire » [24]. Il s’ensuit que c’est la norme de contrôle empreinte de déférence, soit celle de la décision raisonnable, qui s’applique – en principe.

Il faut bien noter que c’est le seul choix du législateur qui dicte cette conclusion. L’expertise réelle ou présumée du décideur administratif n’y est pour rien, à la différence de ce qui a pu être le cas dans la jurisprudence (dont l’arrêt Edmonton (Ville) c Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, 2016 CSC 47, [2016] 2 RCS 293 est un exemple particulièrement frappant). La notion d’expertise n’est pas tout à fait reléguée aux oubliettes – nous y reviendrons –, mais son exclusion de l’analyse quant choix de la norme de contrôle a des conséquences importantes, et pourrait en avoir d’autres, non moins significatives. Nous y reviendrons aussi.

La présomption voulant que la norme de contrôle d’une décision administrative soit celle de la décision raisonnable est repoussée dans deux cas. Le premier est celui où le législateur a lui-même indiqué qu’une autre norme de contrôle est applicable. Il peut le faire en légiférant directement sur le sujet. Il peut aussi, cependant, le faire en créant un droit d’appel – avec ou sans autorisation – à une cour de justice. Lorsqu’elle siège en appel d’une décision administrative, c’est la norme de contrôle qui s’appliquerait à une question équivalente dans un appel d’une décision judiciaire que la cour doit appliquer. Ainsi, « elle se prononcera sur des questions de droit, touchant notamment à l’interprétation législative et à la portée de la compétence du décideur, selon la norme de la décision correcte » [37]. Il s’agit là d’un changement important par rapport à la jurisprudence précédente qui, suivant l’arrêt Pezim c Colombie‑Britannique (Superintendent of Brokers), [1994] 2 RCS 557, recourait généralement, même en appel, à la norme de contrôle de révision judiciaire, en raison notamment de l’expertise supposée des décideurs administratifs. (Notons, cependant, « que ce ne sont pas toutes les dispositions législatives envisageant la possibilité qu’une cour de justice puisse contrôler une décision administrative qui confèrent dans les faits un droit d’appel » [51]. En particulier, l’arrêt Canada (Citoyenneté et Immigration) c Khosa, 2009 CSC 12, [2009] 1 RCS 339 et son interprétation, qui nous semble erronée, de la Loi sur les cours fédérales, ne semblent pas affectés par Vavilov.)

Le second cas où la présomption de l’application de la norme de la décision raisonnable est repoussée est celui où son application serait contraire à la primauté du droit. Vavilov enseigne que celle-ci exige une réponse correcte, et non seulement raisonnable, à trois types de questions. Il s’agit, en premier lieu, de questions de validité constitutionnelle; en deuxième lieu, de « questions de droit générales d’une importance capitale pour le système juridique dans son ensemble » [53]; et, en troisième lieu, de celles concernant « la délimitation des compétences respectives d’organismes administratifs » [63]. D’autres types de questions pourraient, en principe, s’ajouter à cette liste, mais la Cour semble plutôt sceptique à ce sujet.

Trois observations s’imposent ici. Premièrement, s’agissant de questions constitutionnelles, Vavilov ne remet pas en cause – à première vue en tout cas – l’arrêt Doré c Barreau du Québec, 2012 CSC 12, [2012] 1 RCS 395. La Cour souligne expressément qu’elle ne se prononce pas sur la validité du cadre d’analyse qui y a été établi. Deuxièmement, s’agissant de « questions d’une importance capitale », cette catégorie se trouve possiblement élargie en comparaison avec le cadre d’analyse de l’arrêt Dunsmuir, puisqu’elle ne dépend plus d’une évluation de l’expertise relative du tribunal et du décideur administratif. Troisièmement, la catégorie de « véritables questions de compétence », retenue dans Dunsmuir et préservée, en ne serait-ce qu’en théorie, dans la jurisprudence subséquente, est abolie par Vavilov, du moins au stade du choix de la norme de contrôle.

Ces ajustements au choix de la norme de contrôle apportés, la Cour se tourne vers la norme de la décision raisonnable. Elle explique que « le contrôle selon la norme de la décision raisonnable a pour point de départ la retenue judiciaire et le respect du rôle distinct des décideurs administratifs » [75]. Ce contrôle vise néanmoins à s’assurer que le décideur administratif tienne compte des « contraintes juridiques et factuelles auxquelles [il] est assujetti » [85] et qu’il explique sa décision à ceux et celles qu’elle affecte.

Les motifs du décideur administratif occupent donc une importance centrale dans le contrôle judiciaire – et ce, même si la Cour suprême reconnaît qu’un décideur n’est pas toujours tenu de les rédiger. C’est le raisonnement du décideur administratif, tel que représenté dans les motifs, qui fait l’objet d’examen :

Une cour de justice qui applique la norme de contrôle de la décision raisonnable ne se demande donc pas quelle décision elle aurait rendue à la place du décideur administratif, ne tente pas de prendre en compte l’ « éventail » des conclusions qu’aurait pu tirer le décideur, ne se livre pas à une analyse de novo, et ne cherche pas à déterminer la solution « correcte » au problème. [83]

La cour de révision ne doit pas, non plus, « élabore[r] ses propres motifs pour appuyer la décision administrative » ou encore « faire abstraction du fondement erroné de la décision et […] y substituer sa propre justification du résultat ». [96] Cependant, les motifs ne sont pas tenus à la perfection et peuvent, le cas échéant, être lus à la lumière du dossier. Les motifs peuvent également permettre au décideur de démontrer son expertise et d’ainsi justifier « un résultat qui semble déroutant ou contre‑intuitif à première vue » comme étant « néanmoins conforme aux objets et aux réalités pratiques du régime administratif en cause » [93].

Appliquant la norme de la décision raisonnable, la cour de révision s’intéresse donc à la fois au raisonnement du décideur et au résultat auquel celui-ci a abouti. Les deux doivent être justifiables et justifiés. La Cour suprême propose une liste, qui se veut non-exhaustive, « de questions qui peuvent révéler qu’une décision est déraisonnable » [101]. Certaines concernent la cohérence du raisonnement du décideur administratif. Une décision irrationnelle, entachée de paralogismes, dont « la conclusion […] ne peut prendre sa source dans l’analyse effectuée » [103] ou celle dont « il est impossible de comprendre, lorsqu’on lit les motifs en corrélation avec le dossier, le raisonnement […] sur un point central » [103] doit être traitée comme déraisonnable.

Tel est aussi le cas d’une décision qui ne tient pas compte du contexte juridique et factuel dans lequel elle est rendue. La Cour souligne que

le régime législatif applicable est probablement l’aspect le plus important du contexte juridique d’une décision donnée. Le fait que les décideurs administratifs participent, avec les cours de justice, à l’élaboration du contenu précis des régimes administratifs qu’ils administrent, ne devrait pas être interprété comme une licence accordée aux décideurs administratifs pour ignorer ou réécrire les lois adoptées par le Parlement et les législatures provinciales. [108]

D’une part, même lorsque le décideur administratif jouit d’un pouvoir discrétionnaire, « tout exercice d’un [tel] pouvoir […] doit être conforme aux fins pour lesquelles il a été accordé » [108]. De l’autre, « un organisme administratif ne saurait exercer un pouvoir qui ne lui a pas été délégué ». [109] La porté du pouvoir délégué ou l’étendue des raisons de cette délégation varie selon le texte législatif applicable. Le contrôle en vertu de la norme de la décision raisonnable exige donc de la cour de révision « de déterminer si […] le décideur a justifié convenablement son interprétation de la loi à la lumière du contexte. Évidemment, il sera impossible au décideur administratif de justifier une décision qui excède les limites fixées par les dispositions législatives qu’il interprète ». [110]

La marge de manœuvre du décideur administratif dépend, en outre, des autres lois ou règles du droit prétorien qui peuvent s’appliquer à la décision. La décision administrative doit, notamment, tenir compte des règles d’interprétation législative, sans pour autant forcément « procéder à une interprétation formaliste de la loi » [119]. Le décideur administratif peut tenir compte de ses connaissances et de son expertise spécialisées, mais « il [lui] incombe […] de démontrer dans ses motifs qu’il était conscient [des] éléments essentiels » [120] de l’interprétation législative, et il ne lui est pas loisible d’ « adopter une interprétation qu’il sait de moindre qualité — mais plausible — simplement parce que cette interprétation paraît possible et opportune » [121].

Par ailleurs, une décision administrative doit aussi se justifier au regard de la preuve, des arguments des parties et de la pratique administrative. Elle doit aussi refléter, le cas échéant, son importance pour la personne visée : « Lorsque la décision a des répercussions sévères sur les droits et intérêts de l’individu visé, les motifs fournis à ce dernier doivent refléter ces enjeux. […] Cela vaut notamment pour les décisions dont les conséquences menacent la vie, la liberté, la dignité ou les moyens de subsistance d’un individu » [133].

Un dernier enseignement en matière de l’application de la norme de la décision raisonnable sur lequel nous voudrions attirer l’attention du lecteur concerne les réparations que peut accorder une cour de révision. La Cour suprême explique que « lorsque la décision contrôlée selon la norme de la décision raisonnable ne peut être confirmée, il conviendra le plus souvent de renvoyer l’affaire au décideur pour qu’il revoie la décision, mais à la lumière cette fois des motifs donnés par la cour ». [141] Cependant, et il s’agit, dans une certaine mesure, d’une nouveauté, la Cour précise qu’ « il y a des situations limitées » [142] où la cour de révision doit elle-même trancher le différend, pour éviter de le prolonger inutilement. C’est notamment le cas lorsqu’une seule réponse est possible a une question d’interprétation, mais d’autres facteurs, y compris ceux concernant les coûts, tant pour les parties que pour l’administration et le système de justice, doivent aussi être pris en compte.

L’arrêt Vavilov promet – pas pour la première fois en droit administratif canadien – « d’apporter une cohérence et une prévisibilité accrues à ce domaine du droit ». [10] Cette promesse sera-t-elle tenue? À certains égards, les enseignements de la Cour suprême sont prometteurs. Notamment, la nouvelle approche au choix de la norme de contrôle, qu’on soit ou non d’accord avec la présomption du choix de la norme de la décision raisonnable ou encore avec l’abolition de la catégorie de questions de compétence, promet du moins une certaine simplification par rapport à l’état du droit avant Vavilov. L’insistance de la Cour sur l’importance des motifs et du respect du cadre législatif par les décideurs administratifs est elle aussi plus que bienvenue.

Plusieurs questions importantes restent toutefois sans réponse. Les cours de révision, et éventuellement la Cour suprême elle-même, devront y répondre pour que l’on puisse véritablement affirmer que le droit administratif canadien est simple est prévisible. En voici quelques unes.

Quelle sera la portée réelle des catégories de questions où la primauté du droit exige l’application de la norme de la décision correcte? En particulier, quel avenir réserve la Cour à l’arrêt Doré?

Comme nous l’avons souligné ci-dessus, l’arrêt Vavilov semble élargir quelque peu la catégorie de questions « d’une importance capitale pour le système juridique », en raison de l’abolition de la référence à l’expertise dans sa délimitation. Or, si la Cour résume la jurisprudence existante à ce sujet et dit que celle-ci « continue de s’appliquer essentiellement telle quelle » [143], ce résumé ne fournit que des exemples, et non de véritables lignes directrices. L’incertitude risque de persister à ce sujet.

Plus grave encore, mais peut-être susceptible d’une résolution plus rapide, est l’incertitude quant à l’avenir du cadre d’analyse posé dans l’arrêt Doré et raffiné ou modifié dans École secondaire Loyola c Québec (Procureur général), 2015 CSC 12, [2015] 1 RCS 613 et Law Society of British Columbia c Trinity Western University, 2018 CSC 32, [2018] 2 R.C.S. 293. La Cour, nous l’avons déjà dit, se garde de se prononcer explicitement à ce sujet. Pourtant, les fondements de cette jurisprudence, qui repose en bonne partie sinon entièrement sur la volonté de respecter l’expertise – réelle ou supposée – des décideurs administratifs, nous semblent incompatibles avec l’exclusion de l’expertise de l’analyse quant au choix de la norme de contrôle dans Vavilov. De plus, nous sommes sceptiques face à l’idée que le législateur puisse dicter, implicitement ou même explicitement, le choix de la norme de contrôle en matière constitutionnelle, qu’il s’agisse de questions de validité ou des celles concernant la constitutionnalité de décisions particulières. La Cour suprême le dit fort bien dans Vavilov : « si un législateur peut choisir les pouvoirs à déléguer à un organisme administratif, il ne peut déléguer des pouvoirs dont la Constitution ne l’investit pas. Le pouvoir constitutionnel d’agir doit comporter des limites définies et uniformes, ce qui commande l’application de la norme de la décision correcte » [56].

Les questions de compétence sont-elles véritablement à oublier?

La catégorie de « véritables questions de compétence » est écartée de l’analyse quant au choix de la norme de contrôle. Pourtant, en affirmant que « certaines questions touchant à la portée du pouvoir d’un décideur […] ne sauraient commander qu’une seule interprétation », et qu’ « [é]videmment, il sera impossible au décideur administratif de justifier une décision qui excède les limites fixées par les dispositions législatives qu’il interprète », [110] la Cour semble tout simplement utiliser une nouvelle étiquette pour la décrire. Par ailleurs, les tribunaux pourraient être appelés à décider une question en est une de compétence en disposant d’appels autorisés par des dispositions législatives qui y font référence.

Comment la norme de la décision raisonnable sera-t-elle appliquée en l’absence de motivation adéquate par le décideur administratif?

Si l’on peut se réjouir du fait que la Cour suprême semble souhaiter mettre un frein à la tendance, qui s’est parfois manifestée dans la jurisprudence, de l’écriture rétroactive des motifs de décision administrative par les cours de révision, on peut se demander jusqu’où sa détermination ira en pratique. La Cour insiste, d’une part, pour dire qu’une décision administrative qui doit être motivée mais ne l’est pas ou ne l’est pas adéquatement sera déraisonnable, mais, d’autre part, elle souligne « qu’une cour de révision doit examiner le dossier dans son ensemble pour comprendre la décision et qu’elle découvrira alors souvent une justification claire pour la décision » [137]. L’équilibre entre ces deux exigences ne nous semble pas évident à trouver.

De la déférence à l’égard du décideur administratif et de la vigilance quant au respect du cadre législatif, laquelle va l’emporter de l’application de la norme de la décision raisonnable?

La Cour offre, à ce sujet, des enseignements qui peuvent sembler contradictoires. Elle affirme, notamment, dans un seul et même court paragraphe, que « [l]e contrôle selon la norme de la décision raisonnable […] tire son origine du principe de la retenue judiciaire », mais aussi que « [c]e type de contrôle demeure rigoureux ». [13] Comment la cour de révision s’y prendra-t-elle pour exercer son pouvoir avec retenue et vigueur à la fois? Comment va-t-elle déterminer si un décideur administratif a respecté les contraintes que la loi lui imposait sans pour autant tenter de délimiter l’ « évantail » des solutions possibles, ou encore vérifier s’il a respecté les principes d’interprétation législative tout en gardant à l’esprit que « La ‘‘justice administrative’’ ne ressemble pas toujours à la ‘‘justice judiciaire’’ » [92]?

Le fondement théorique de l’arrêt Vavilov, soit le respect de la volonté du législateur (circonscrit par le principe de la primauté du droit, mais déterminant dans les limites que celui-ci impose), ne permet pas de résoudre cette tension. S’il est vrai que le législateur confie l’application et donc la première interprétation de la loi au décideur administratif, c’est aussi le législateur qui choisir de limiter le pouvoir discrétionnaire de ce dernier par le texte de loi qu’il adopte. Il faudra donc voir comment les tribunaux, y compris la Cour suprême elle-même, appliqueront la norme de contrôle de la décision raisonnable, et s’ils parviendront à résoudre les tensions présentes dans les motifs de la Cour. Ce n’est qu’en cas de succès, qui n’est pas acquis d’avance, que l’on pourra affirmer que l’arrêt Vavilov a véritablement réglé les problèmes de cohérence et de prévisibilité du droit administratif auxquels la Cour suprême s’y attaquait.

L’arrêt Vavilov sera, évidemment, un jalon important dans le développement du droit administratif canadien. Cependant, ses silences et ses contradictions pourraient s’avérer tout aussi importants que ses enseignements. Aussi important ce jalon soit-il, il est loin de marquer la fin du parcours souvent tortueux de ce domaine du droit.

Voici la liste, mentionnée ci-dessus, de billets que nous avons publiés sur l’arrêt Vavilov et ses conséquences, en ordre chronologique:

Mark Mancini, Vavilov: A Step Forward
Mark Mancini, Canada Post: Vavilov’s First Day in the Sun
Léonid Sirota, Not Good Enough
Mark Mancini, Vavilov: A Note on Remedy
Mark Mancini, Vavilov’s Reasonableness Standard: A Legal Hard-Look Review
Mark Mancini, After Vavilov, Doré is Under Stress
Mark Mancini, CBC v Ferrier, 2019 ONCA 1025: Considering Consideration of the Charter
Léonid Sirota, Chevron on 2

Chevron on 2

The illogic of the Supreme Court of Canada’s approach to deference to administrative interpretations of law

Readers with some salsa experience will probably know that, while most of the world dances it “on 1”, in New York it is danced “on 2”. The steps and moves are more or less the same, but the sequence is different. Another dance that can be varied in this way, as we learn from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, is the notorious Chevron two-step. As with salsa, one can prefer one style or the other. But, for what it’s worth, I find Vavilov’s “on 2” version of Chevron to be rather offbeat.

In Chevron USA Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc, 467 US 837 (1984), the US Supeme Court explained how courts were to review administrative decision-makers’ interpretations of what in Canada are sometimes called their “home statutes”:

When a court reviews an agency’s construction of the statute which it administers, it is confronted with two questions. First, always, is the question whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter; for the court, as well as the agency, must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress. If, however, the court determines Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue, the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation. Rather, if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute. (842-43; footnotes omitted)

The first step, in other words, is to determine whether the statute is so vague or ambiguous as to require an exercise of interpretive discretion by the administrative decision-maker. The second step, taken if―and only if―the statute does call for such an exercise of discretion, is to review the administrative interpretation for reasonableness, and defer to it if it is not unreasonable.

There are some exceptions to this two-step analysis. For one thing, under United States v Mead Corp, 533 US 218 (2001), courts ask whether the administrative agency was meant to conclusively determine questions of law in the first place. This is sometimes known as “Chevron step zero”. For another, following FDA v Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp, 529 US 120 (2000), certain questions are seen as too important for their determination to have been delegated to administrative agencies implicitly; nothing short of explicit Congressional command will trigger deference. But, at least where the administrative decision-maker is seen as authorized to make legal determinations, Chevron dictates ― for now anyway ― the normal approach.

Or, if you prefer seeing and hearing instead of reading, here’s how NYU students explained it a few years ago:

Now, compare this to the Vavilov framework. It begins with a fairly close equivalent to “Chevron step zero”. In cases where the legislature wanted the courts, and not administrative tribunals, to decide legal questions, whether by explicitly providing for correctness review or by creating an appeal from from the tribunal to a court, the courts must not defer. Nor will there be deference on (some) constitutional questions and “general questions of law that are ‘of central importance to the legal system as a whole'” [58, quoting Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190 [62]]. This is somewhat analogous to the “important questions” exception in the United States, although Canadian “questions of central importance” may well be different from the American “important questions”. (I don’t think, for instance, that under Vavilov it is enough for a question to be “of deep economic and political significance [and] central to [a] statutory scheme”: King v Burwell (2015) (internal quotation omitted).)

But then, Chevron‘s two main steps are reversed. Subject to the legislative assignment and central questions exceptions applying, Vavilov says courts are to defer to administrative interpretations of law:

Where a legislature has created an administrative decision maker for the specific purpose of administering a statutory scheme, it must be presumed that the legislature also intended that decision maker to be able to fulfill its mandate and interpret the law as applicable to all issues that come before it. Where a legislature has not explicitly prescribed that a court is to have a role in reviewing the decisions of that decision maker, it can safely be assumed that the legislature intended the administrative decision maker to function with a minimum of judicial interference. [24]

This is, more or less, Chevron‘s step two. At this stage, no factor other than the existence of the administrative decision-maker, the absence of a legislative indication that courts must nevertheless be involved, and the non-centrality of the question at issue are relevant.

But then, Vavilov seems to suggest that, once it embarks on reasonableness review, the court needs to examine the statute at issue more closely ― to engage what co-blogger Mark Mancini has described as a “legal ‘hard look’ review”, including to determine whether there is actually the sort of ambiguity that, under Chevron, justifies deference to the administrative interpretation. Vavilov stresses that “while an administrative body may have considerable discretion in making a particular decision, that decision must ultimately comply ‘with the rationale and purview of the statutory scheme under which it is adopted'” [108, quoting Catalyst Paper Corp v North Cowichan (District), 2012 SCC 2, [2012] 1 SCR 5, [15]] and, further, “with any more specific constraints imposed by the governing legislative scheme”. [108] Crucially, Vavilov insists that

If a legislature wishes to precisely circumscribe an administrative decision maker’s power in some respect, it can do so by using precise and narrow language and delineating the power in detail, thereby tightly constraining the decision maker’s ability to interpret the provision. Conversely, where the legislature chooses to use broad, open-ended or highly qualitative language … it clearly contemplates that the decision maker is to have greater flexibility in interpreting the meaning of such language. … [C]ertain questions relating to the scope of a decision maker’s authority may support more than one interpretation, while other questions may support only one, depending upon the text by which the statutory grant of authority is made. [110]

This, by my lights, is Chevron‘s step one. In some cases, the Supreme Court says, the legislature leaves the administrative decision-maker with the latitude to choose among competing possible interpretations. But not always. To quote Chevron again, “[i]f the intent of [the legislature] is clear, that is the end of the matter; for the court, as well as the agency, must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of [the legislature]”.

I should note that this might not be the only way to read Vavilov. Paul Daly, for example, is quite skeptical of “intrusive reasonableness review” that would occur if courts take too seriously the admonition about there being, sometimes, only one interpretation of administrative decision-maker’s grant of authority. But, as Mark shows, this is certainly a plausible, and at least arguably the better reading of Vavilov. I may return to the debate between these readings in a future post. For now, I will assume that the one outlined above is at least a real possibility.

As already mentioned, this reversal of the “Chevron two-step” makes no sense to me. I find it odd to say that reviewing courts must start from the position that “respect for [the] institutional design choices made by the legislature” in setting up administrative tribunals “requires a reviewing court to adopt a posture of restraint on review”, [24] but then insist that respect for legislative choices also requires the courts to be vigilant in case these choices leave only one permissible interpretation. The view, endorsed in Dunsmuir, that deferential judicial review reflects the inherent vagueness of legal language, was empirically wrong (and indeed implausible, as I argued here), but coherent. The recognition in Vavilov that statutory language is sometimes precise and can have a definitive meaning is welcome, but it is logically incompatible with an insistence on deference and judicial restraint.

If the Vavilov court had wanted to limit deference to cases of genuine interpretive uncertainty, it ought to have followed Chevron in clearly asking courts, first, to identify such cases, and then, and only then, to defer. That, of course, runs the risk of deference being relatively rare ― a risk highlighted by Justice Scalia in a lecture on “Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law“:

One who finds more often (as I do) that the meaning of a statute is apparent from its text and from its relationship with other laws, thereby finds less often that the triggering requirement for Chevron deference exists. It is thus relatively rare that Chevron will require me to accept an interpretation which, though reasonable, I would not personally adopt. (521; emphasis in the original)

Conversely, if the Vavilov court was serious about deference-across-the-board being required as a matter of respect for legislative choice, it should have doubled down on the earlier view that statutory language inherently fails to determine legal disputes. This, in my view, would have been madness, but there would have been method in’t.

The trouble is that, as I said in my original comment on Vavilov, the majority opinion is a fudge. Collectively, the seven judges who signed it probably could not agree on what it was that they wanted, other than a compromise, and so did not want anything in particular. And so we get a judgment that, in a space of three short sentences, requires judicial review to embody “the principle of judicial restraint” while being “robust”, [13] and insists on deference while stressing that there may well be only one reasonable opinion to defer to.

Different people, and different legal cultures, will find their own ways to dance to the same tune of judicial resignation before the administrative state. Perhaps we should regard their different solutions as mere curiosities, objects of wonder but not judgment. But I don’t find this new Canadian hit, Chevron on 2, especially elegant or exciting. Not that I am a devotee of the on 1 original; but its steps at least come in a logical sequence. The on 2 version demands, as it were, that judges step forward and backward at the same time, and, with all due respect to the Canadian judiciary, I am not sure that it ― or, anyone else, for that matter ― is quite capable of such intricate footwork. Toes will be crushed, and partners disappointed if not injured, before someone realizes that the music needs, at long last, to stop.

Not Good Enough

The Supreme Court re-writes the law of judicial review in Canada, but not nearly well enough.

In a return to its sometime tradition of releasing high-profile decisions in the run-up to Christmas, the Supreme Court yesterday rendered its long-awaited judgment in the Great Administrative Law Do-Over, Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65. Co-blogger Mark Mancini has already written about it, but while his post is very good, I disagree with him, and with the Court’s majority, on a number of fundamental issues. Hence the need for this post. In my view, while well-intentioned and an improvement on the status quo, the majority opinion (jointly authored, ostensibly, by the Chief Justice and Justices Moldaver, Gascon, Brown, Côté, Rowe, and Martin) rests on weak theoretical foundations, and is open to future manipulation by courts that do not share its spirit or find it inconvenient in a given case.

The majority holds that when the courts review decisions made by decision-makers in the executive branch of government and other bodies acting pursuant to authority delegated by statute (for example municipal institutions, professional regulators, etc), there is “a presumption that reasonableness is the applicable standard in all cases. Reviewing courts should derogate from this presumption only where required by a clear indication of legislative intent or by the rule of law.” [10] (The presumption also doesn’t apply for issues having to do with the fairness of the procedure followed by the decision-maker.) The majority explains that “[r]easonableness review … finds its starting point in the principle of judicial restraint and demonstrates a respect for the distinct role of administrative decision makers”, [13] but nevertheless goes on to point to a number of “constraints” on administrative decision-makers that such review must enforce, thus ensuring, in the majority’s view, that they do not exceed the bounds of the authority delegated to them.

The presumption of reasonableness applies to most questions of law that administrative decision-makers must resolve. According to the majority, this is because

[w]here a legislature has created an administrative decision maker for the specific purpose of administering a statutory scheme, it must be presumed that the legislature also intended that decision maker to be able to fulfill its mandate and interpret the law as applicable to all issues that come before it. Where a legislature has not explicitly prescribed that a court is to have a role in reviewing the decisions of that decision maker, it can safely be assumed that the legislature intended the administrative decision maker to function with a minimum of judicial interference. [24]

Conversely, however, a legislature might in fact have “prescribed that a court is to have a role in reviewing” administrative decisions, either by legislating a specific standard of review or by providing a statutory right of appeal from these decisions (rather than relying on the background constitutional requirement that judicial review of administrative decisions be available). In such cases, its prescription is to be obeyed. The standard of review on appeal from an administrative decision is to be the same as on appeal from the decision of a court, which means that, on questions of law, decisions are reviewed for correctness, rather than reasonableness.

The other cases where the correctness standard will be applied are those where it is required by the principle of the Rule of Law, which according to the majority are questions of constitutional validity, “general questions of law of central importance to the legal system as a whole”, and questions of jurisdictional conflict between two administrative decision-makers. The first category remains as it was prior to Vavilov. In particular, the majority pointedly refuses to comment on the implications of its decision for the line of cases originating in Doré v Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12, [2012] 1 SCR 395, which have urged deference to administrative decisions applying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to particular disputes (as opposed to the validity of legislative provisions). By contrast, the second category expands, because it was previously supposed to limited to cases outside the administrative decision-maker’s expertise. Here and elsewhere, the majority rejects the role of expertise in determining the standard of review. (More on this below.) The majority also holds, however, that the Rule of Law does not require jurisdictional questions to be reviewed on a correctness standard.

With reasonableness thus asserted as the presumptive and dominant standard of review, the majority goes on to explain what it means. In cases where reasons are given by the administrative decision-maker, these become the focus of the analysis, which must be concerned not only with the outcome the decision-maker reached, but also with the reasoning process that led to it. The reasons must be read in context, however (notably “in light of the record” [96]). At this stage, contextual elements excised from the initial standard of review analysis, such as expertise, re-appear. While the majority insists that “reasonableness remains a single standard”, [89] of review, it also seeks to

account[] for the diversity of administrative decision making by recognizing that what is reasonable in a given situation will always depend on the constraints imposed by the legal and factual context of the particular decision under review. These contextual constraints dictate the limits and contours of the space in which the decision maker may act and the types of solutions it may adopt. [90]

In any case, however, the majority emphasizes the importance of the justification for the administrative decision being apparent from the reasons (and perhaps record) that support it. The justification cannot simply be added later, on judicial review.

The majority suggests that there are two main ways in which an administrative decision can be so flawed as to deserve to be qualified as unreasonable: “a failure of rationality internal to the reasoning process”, or “a decision … in some respect untenable in light of the relevant factual and legal constraints that bear on it”. [101] The first category points to requirements of logic and coherence. The second, to the principle that “[e]lements of the legal and factual contexts of a decision operate as constraints on the decision maker in the exercise of its delegated powers”. [105] These include, but are not limited to,

the governing statutory scheme; other relevant statutory or common law; the principles of statutory interpretation; the evidence before the decision maker and facts of which the decision maker may take notice; the submissions of the parties; the past practices and decisions of the administrative body; and the potential impact of the decision on the individual to whom it applies. [106]

Without fully summarizing the majority’s explanations of these points, I will note that it insists that administrative interpretations of law must not be permitted to “disregard or rewrite the law as enacted by Parliament and the provincial legislatures”. [108] The discretion permitted by these laws might be narrow in some cases and broad in others, but never unlimited: “[r]easonableness review does not allow administrative decision makers to arrogate powers to themselves that they were never intended to have, and an administrative body cannot exercise authority which was not delegated to it”. [109] Moreover, administrative decision-makers, no less than courts, are required to follow the “modern principle of statutory interpretation”, because

[t]hose who draft and enact statutes expect that questions about their meaning will be resolved by an analysis that has regard to the text, context and purpose, regardless of whether the entity tasked with interpreting the law is a court or an administrative decision maker. [118]

At the same time, the majority insists that reasonableness review on questions of law remains deferential; indeed it is no different from review “reviewing questions of fact, discretion or policy”, [115] and one should not expect “administrative decision makers … to apply equitable and common law principles in the same manner as courts in order for their decisions to be reasonable”. [113] Even “questions relating to the scope of a decision maker’s authority may support more than one interpretation”, [110] although this will not always be so.

To repeat, I do not share the widespread view that the majority opinion represents a great achievement for Canadian administrative law. To me, it is a dubious compromise that can and likely will be applied in contradictory ways. Justice Stratas has compared Canadian administrative law to “a never-ending construction site where one crew builds structures and then a later crew tears them down to build anew, seemingly without an overall plan”. (1) The latest structure is built on theoretical sand, and I would not bet on its long-term stability.

Most fundamentally, the majority’s justification for doubling down on the “presumption of reasonableness” that emerged over that last decade is weak. As I explained here, in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190, the Court had articulated three rationales for deference: legislative intent, the expertise of administrative decision-makers, and the absence of determinable answers to legal questions. The Vavilov majority explicitly repudiates expertise as a justification for judicial deference, and renounces the (always implausible) claim that legal questions always lack determinate answers that courts can discover. It is left with, and doubles down on, legislative intent.

But its understanding of legislative intent is essentially made up. There is no actual evidence that legislatures intend the courts to defer to administrative decision-makers, at least in the absence of privative clauses which often purport to oust judicial review completely, and to which Canadian courts have long refused to give full effect, treating them instead as signals for deference. The majority doesn’t even discuss privative clauses, or any other indications (short of enacting standards of review by statute) that a legislature actually intended the courts to defer, including on questions of law. It just assumes it knows what the legislatures want. Yet legislatures might delegate powers to administrative tribunals for any number of reasons, ranging from a confidence in their technical expertise, to a desire to politicize a particular area of the law, to rank protectionism. It’s far from obvious to me that all of these entail a presumption of deference. Besides, although it commendably chooses to give way to legislative intent in holding that statutory appeals must be treated as, well, appeals, the majority doesn’t quite give up on imposing its own view of statutory language, insisting that section 18.1 of the Federal Courts Act is nothing more than a procedural provision that tells the courts nothing about the standard of review. This perpetuates the misbegotten holding of Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v Khosa, 2009 SCC 12, [2009] 1 SCR 339, which Mark quite understandably listed as one of the worst decisions of the last half-century.

It would be much better to start with non-deferential correctness review as a default, and put the onus on the legislatures to indicate otherwise, ideally by legislation specifically addressing the standard of review or, perhaps, by privative clauses. That’s assuming that such indications are even constitutional, of course. I am yet to be persuaded that this assumption is warranted. I’m not persuaded of the contrary either, but I have my doubts. As I have explained here, Joseph Raz’s analysis of the Rule of Law seems to imply that administrative decision-making must be founded on correct application of stable legal rules by officials and, in order to ensure such correct application, review of their decisions by independent courts. In Vavilov, the majority (rightly, I think) implies that the principle of the Rule of Law can override legislative intent. That’s why constitutional and other centrally important questions trigger correctness review, whatever a legislature’s wishes. But the majority does not give nearly enough consideration to what the Rule of Law requires in the context of judicial review of administrative decisions.

In particular, while pretty much everyone from Justices Abella and Karakatsanis in the concurrence to Mark in his post cheers the abolition of the category of jurisdictional questions, I find it puzzling. Jurisdictional questions are supposed to be hard to identify and therefore a source of unnecessary confusion. Yet the truth is, everyone knows that such questions exist. The Vavilov majority itself mentions “questions relating to the scope of a decision maker’s authority”, [110] which is a plain-language definition of jurisdiction. In the companion case, Bell Canada v Canada (Attorney General), 2019 SCC 66, there was a statutory appeal right “on a question of law or a question of jurisdiction”. The concern really seems to be not so much that questions of jurisdiction are elusive and mysterious, but that, properly understood, this category is much broader than most people are comfortable with. It arguably includes most question of law. But that’s not a reason for pretending such questions don’t exist. If anything, it’s another reason for making correctness the default, if not the sole, standard of review on questions of law. The Rule of Law cannot permit the administrative state to expand its power just because courts shy away from the task of policing its boundaries.

The majority thinks it can address the concerns about the expansion of administrative power to which its embrace of reasonableness review gives rise by providing guidance on what such review requires. And there are genuinely commendable statements there, as Mark has observed. It is good that the majority recognizes, as some recent cases such as West Fraser Mills Ltd v British Columbia (Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22, [2018] 1 SCR 635 did not, that the powers or discretion of administrative decision-makers cannot be unlimited. It is good that it recognizes, contrary to Dunsmuir, that questions of law can, at least in many cases, be given definitive answers. And it is good that the majority instructs courts to be skeptical of the gaps in administrative decision-makers’ reasons, instead of filling them with “reasons that could be given” in support of their decisions.

I must admit, though, that I am puzzled by the attempt to square this recognition with the insistence on reasonableness review. Back in Dunsmuir, the Supreme Court said

[t]hat Reasonableness is a deferential standard animated by the principle that … certain questions that come before administrative tribunals do not lend themselves to one specific, particular result. Instead, they may give rise to a number of possible, reasonable conclusions. [47]

And of course in Vavilov itself the majority speaks of reasonableness being grounded in judicial restraint, which points to the same understanding of this concept. To me, talk of reasonableness review with only one reasonable outcome is blank prose. But perhaps that’s just an idiosyncratic understanding that I have.

More seriously, in addition to their conceptual problems, I think the reasons of the Vavilov majority contain a number of contradictions that undermine their attempt, if that’s what it is, to confine the excesses of the administrative state. For example, for all its insistence on a “robust” reasonableness review, the majority starts from the position that it is grounded in judicial restraint. Quite apart from my doubts about the usefulness of the term “judicial restraint”, I struggle to see how a standard of review can be robust and restrained at the same time. Or consider the majority’s warning that “[a]dministrative decision makers cannot always be expected to deploy the same array of legal techniques that might be expected of a lawyer or judge” and that “‘[a]dministrative justice’ will not always look like ‘judicial justice'”. [92] This seems to contradict the majority’s acknowledgment, elsewhere in its reasons, that the Rule of Law is undermined when the outcome of a legal dispute depends on the identity of the person resolving it.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the insistence that administrative decision-makers cannot “arrogate powers to themselves that they were never intended to have” [109] is not easily reconciled with the refusal to impose correctness review on jurisdictional questions. The majority holds that, subject to a requirement of justification, “a decision maker’s interpretation of its statutory grant of authority is generally entitled to deference”. [109] To my mind, this means that the administrative state is still the arbiter of its own authority, whenever a legislature fails to use sufficiently precise language ― or where a court thinks that a legislature has so failed.

Much will depend, then, on which strand of the somewhat schizophrenic majority opinion future judges decide to implement when they follow Vavilov. This is, I suppose, the price to pay for cobbling together a seven-judge majority (and getting all seven to not only agree but also sign on to this majority’s reasons), but I’m not sure that the result was worth it.

No doubt, Vavilov is an improvement over the status quo ante. Some of the wildest excesses of judicial deference to the administrative state, for example the refusal to give effect to statutory appeal provisions and the practice of making up reasons not actually given by administrative decision-makers the better to defer to them have been condemned. Some of the theoretical problems of the previous jurisprudence, notably its reliance on a fictional account of administrative expertise, have been overcome.

At the same time, the future is still difficult to predict. For one thing, Vavilov leaves some questions unanswered. For example, its guidance on questions of central importance, a seemingly expanded category of correctness review, doesn’t amount to much more than “you know it when you see it”. Perhaps more importantly, there is contradictory language in the majority opinion that can be pressed in the service of more or less deferential review, and it remains to be seen what future courts will do with it.

And, fundamentally, Vavilov is still unsatisfactory because, like the pre-existing administrative law jurisprudence, it is built on foundations that mix a fictional account of legislative intent with a tendency to favour, if not as much as before, the power of the administrative state at the expense of the judiciary. The responsibility of the courts, which are independent and whose sole commitment is supposed to be to law, not policy-making, to say what the law is is an essential safeguard for freedom and the Rule of Law. By perpetuating judicial abdication, covered up as “restraint” and deference”, in the face of the administrative state, Vavilov fails to live up to the judiciary’s constitutional role.

Because It’s (The End of) 2019: Focusing on Legislative Meaning in Judicial Review

For Canadian legal watchers, specifically administrative law aficionados, 2019 has been a year of frustration and “confusion and contestation.” On one hand, we await guidance from the Supreme Court in Vavilov and Bell/NFL regarding the standard of review of administrative action. In other ways, we have seen interesting trends from the Supreme Court on other issues, including statutory interpretation more generally. And what’s more, we have also seen developments in other administrative law topics that have evaded general commentary.

While I cannot review all of the developments here, I want to focus on three sets of cases that bring to bear interesting debates over the role of interpretive principles in Canadian administrative law. Each case or set of cases, in their own way, demonstrate that much of the law of judicial review is fought on the terrain of statutory interpretation; or at least, that is the way it should be. Normatively, I think these cases and their circumstances demonstrate that the Supreme Court, in its upcoming review of Dunsmuir, should be focusing on giving effect to the legislature’s meaning in particular provisions when it delegates power to administrators. Right now, the doctrinal mechanisms employed by the Court fail to focus on what the legislature actually meant when it delegates power; for example, they fail to give effect to signs that the legislature might have intended a broader curial review, instead presuming deference. This is a problem from the perspective of the hierarchy of laws. Court-made tests can be ousted by the legislature. It is this hierarchy that the Court has ignored.

On to the cases:

Vavilov and Bell/NFL

I have summarized and analyzed Vavilov and Bell/NFL in a series of posts over the last year: see Vavilov, Bell/NFL, and further analysis. My general take on these cases is that they have been built up to be far more than what they turn out to be. This is true for a number of reasons. First, the Court is institutionally ill-positioned to affect broad change to all of the problems plaguing Canadian administrative law. The problems are wide-ranging, and could be implicated by the facts of the various cases, but it is unlikely that a deeply-fractured court will agree on these matters. Think about it: all under the auspices of the standard of review, the amount of discord in the court’s cases outline the range of problems courts will have to address. Will the Court follow on cases like Tervita and Rogers, giving more weight to legislative signals implying that the legislature wanted broader curial review? Or will the Court double down on the presumption of reasonableness, entrenched in Edmonton East and CHRC? What about the role of reasons—will the Court hold fast to Newfoundland Nurses and Agraira (at paras 57-58) which permit supplementation of reasons where they are non-existent, or will it go further than Delta Airlines, where the Court held that lower courts cannot cast aside decision-maker reasons in favour of their own?

This plethora of interpretive problems poses a larger problem for the Court: how will it deal with its own precedent? As I note here, the Court seemed reticent to revisit its own precedents. But to my mind, this was the entire point of calling for submissions on the nature and scope of the judicial review superstructure. And if adherence to precedent is an issue for the Court, it should consider that two common exceptions to stare decisis include workability and reliance interests. In truth, it is hard to rely on something unworkable. Most would agree that Canada’s current approach to judicial review of administrative action is unworkable. The Court should not stand on precedent in dealing with this mess.

Perhaps most difficult of all the issues is the role of statutory interpretation principles in combination with a regime of deference. I have written about this issue before, but to my mind, this is the core issue raised by Vavilov et al. The dominant approach, as of now, is that courts should defer to interpretations of law, regardless of the grant of authority passed from the legislature to particular decision-makers.

This, to my mind, is a mistake. Courts should be carefully parsing statutory grants of authority, according to the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation, to determine the range of options open to the decision-maker at hand. Each grant of authority will be different; so the range of options may be different in each case. Sometimes, the range of options will be just one: McLean. Justice Stratas’ opinion in Hillier outlines this approach well: see paras 13-17. Other cases have outlined different approaches: see Mason and Simon Fraser. The point is that, ultimately, the interpretive task—focusing on what the legislature meant when it delegated power to the administrator– must be first and foremost when courts are determining the extent of deference owed. Courts should not be focusing on “expertise,” “access to justice,” or other policy considerations in determining the amount of deference owed to a decision-maker. Instead, as I noted in my paper Two Myths of Administrative Law:

The answer goes back to the fundamental basis of the administrative state, namely, its genesis in statute. Considerations that are not rooted in statute could point to an answer on the standard of review that undermines what the legislature specified in statute. For example, if expertise is considered a reason for deference, but there is no indication of expertise rooted in statute…a court could apply a deferential standard of review where the legislature impliedly indicated that it preferred a less deferential standard of review.

2) Telus v Wellman/ Rafilovich

The Supreme Court’s recent statutory interpretation cases also have a bearing on administrative law. If, as I advocate (and as affirmed by Stratas JA in Hillier) the Court indeed focuses on the rules of statutory interpretation as the methodology by which we conduct reasonableness review–to determine the range of options–then it matters what the Court actually says about statutory interpretation.

Both Rafilovich (which I first analyzed here) and Telus v Wellman (which I first analyzed here) present a defensible approach to statutory interpretation that should be deployed in administrative law cases. The basic idea is this: when courts are interpreting statutes, under the dominant “purposive” approach to interpretation, courts must be careful not to use purpose to override clear text (see Hillier, at para 25; Cheema, at paras 74-75). This means that the selection of the appropriate purpose matters. As I wrote in my piece “Statutory Interpretation from the Stratasphere” Adv Q., courts must be careful not to select a purpose at a higher level of abstraction, or that is far removed from the interpretive provision at hand, when interpreting statutes. In Telus, the issue was whether a general principle of access to justice should lead to one interpretive outcome over another; Moldaver J for the Court held that a rarefied idea of access to justice should not “be permitted to distort the actual words of the statute, read harmoniously with the scheme of the statute, its object, and the intention of the legislature, so as to make the provision say something it does not…the responsibility for setting policy in a parliamentary democracy rests with the legislature, not the courts…[i]t is not the role of this Court to re-write legislation” (Telus v Wellman, at para 79). In Rafilovich, the Court was faced with two duelling purposes stated at the same level of abstraction. The Court chose the purpose most local to the text that had to be interpreted; not some overall, abstract purpose that might have a greater bearing on other parts of the statute. In analyzing Rafilovich, I wrote:

In this case, the most local purposes to the dispute at hand were the purposes speaking of access to justice and the presumption of innocence, assuming these purposes were identified correctly. Why must these purposes be prioritized over the general purpose? Because of the principle of democracy. The use of different language to express Parliament’s law in the legal fees provisions should lead to different interpretive outcomes. By this, I mean that ensuring crimes does not pay may be an overall purpose of the proceeds of crime provision, but Parliament clearly used different language and a different approach in the legal fees provisions. This different approach must, consequently, reflect different legislative purposes, as the legislative history in the case outlines (see para 39 et seq—though I cringe at the reliance on legislative history writ large). The court must give “purpose and meaning to each provision” (at para 20).

Why does this matter for administrative law? If courts use the principles of statutory interpretation to discern the scope of deference owed to a particular decision-maker in the context of a particular legal provision, the selection of the wrong purpose may distort the range of deference owed. For example, if a court selects a highly abstract purpose to interpret particular text, the range of reasonable outcomes may actually be greater for a decision-maker than what the text of the statute might allow. As I wrote in my Stratasphere piece.

If a court abstracts a statutory purpose which is not substantially reflected in text, a broader foundation for deference may result. Because the text, context, and purpose of a statute control the range of reasonable outcomes available to a decision-maker, a purpose which is excessively broad will permit more reasonable options for a decision-maker, beyond what the actual text of the statute provides. In an extreme example, if a court claims that a statute is designed to affect the “public interest,” almost any interpretation rendered by the decision-maker would satisfy the reasonableness standard, because the term “public interest” permits many reasonable outcomes, as defined by the court. Characterization of purpose at this level is contrary to the comments in Williams and Cheema, which ask courts to identify the range of reasonable outcomes defined by the legislature. Otherwise, courts put the cart before the horse. Text is the method by which purpose is achieved by the legislature; purpose defined by the court does not dictate text.

Taken together, Rafilovich and Telus v Wellman pull back on the more extravagant interpretive approaches endorsed by the Supreme Court in its administrative law cases. A classic example is West Fraser. On land owned by West Fraser, a worker employed by an independent contractor suffered a fatal accident. The British Columbia Workers’ Compensation Board [Board] fined West Fraser for breach of a regulation it created, according to a broad statutory power under the British Columbia Workers Compensation Act to create such regulations for health and safety purposes. The legal basis for the fine was a provision of the Board’s enabling statute, which allowed the Board to “impose on an employer an administrative penalty” for breach of regulations. Whether the Board could impose a fine on an owner, when the relevant provision of the statute only indicates that employers could be fined, was a key question on appeal.

The majority opinion, written by then-Chief Justice McLachlin, held that the Board was entitled to extend the fine to West Fraser as an owner. This conclusion flowed directly from the framing of the enabling statute’s purpose at a high level of abstraction. Chief Justice McLachlin wrote that the statute was “meant to promote workplace safety in the broadest sense.” In light of this broad purpose, the Chief Justice also addressed external factors to the statute, including the reason the regulation was adopted: as a “response to a concern in the province about the growing rate of workplace fatalities in the forestry sector.” In whole, Chief Justice McLachlin’s opinion implicitly said that any interpretation with some connection to a “health and safety” purpose would be reasonable.

This seems wrong, in face of what Telus v Wellman and Rafilovich teach. At the very least, there is a tension in the case law. In my view, the tension should be resolved in favour of what Telus v Wellman and Rafilovich have to say. This simply follows on what I said above; administrative law is really just a specialized branch of statutory interpretation, nothing more or less (Bibeault, at para 120). If that is the case, the legislature is the keeper of the keys, and the court’s job is to survey the bounds of this delegated power. Focusing on the text and properly-interpreted purpose is the key issue, particularly because the principles of interpretation—used to ascertain what the legislature meant—are the only tools we have for the job (see Mason, at para 20).

3) The Court of Quebec

The need to focus on legislative meaning does not just arise in the abstract. Indeed, it also influences specific problems in administrative law in different jurisdictions. Consider the case of the Court of Quebec. The Court of Quebec is a statutory court, with appeal powers over various administrative decision-makers in the province of Quebec. In what I call the Quebec Reference, the issue facing the Court was whether it was unconstitutional for the Court of Quebec, sitting in direct appeal of these decision-makers, to apply the principles of deference—the argument was made that doing so usurps the s.96 powers of the superior courts.

The Court ultimately held that there was no constitutional problem with the application of deference. It did so, in part, because of Supreme Court precedent which held that the Court of Quebec is required to apply principles of deference (Proprio Direct, at para 20), and more generally, that rights of appeal do not mean that broader curial review should follow (Dr. Q, at para 34; Saguenay, at para 38). But as I argued here (and as I will argue in an upcoming CJALP piece in 2020), the jurisprudential requirement of deference removes a “core” part of the superior court’s jurisdiction—the “exercise of a superintending and reforming power over the provincial courts of inferior jurisdiction and provincial bodies” (MacMillan Bloedel, at paras 34-35). The jurisdiction is abrogated, because if the Court of Quebec applies deference, then the task of the Superior Court is merely to determine whether the Court of Quebec’s decision is reasonable. This creates a “double deference” problem: see Prof. Daly’s post, here. Under these circumstances, the court jurisdiction of the superior court is imperilled.

There are a number of solutions to this problem. One, advocated by Professor Daly, is to treat the Court of Quebec as a generalist, appellate tribunal—under such circumstances, it would not apply the principles of judicial review. But this runs directly into Supreme Court precedent that treats the Court of Quebec as a judicial tribunal required to apply principles of deference (see Proprio Direct, at paras 17-20; not to mention existing jurisprudence at the Quebec Court of Appeal).

In my view, the Court of Quebec saga illustrates the problems with the Supreme Court’s failure to give effect to the legislature’s intent when it created the Court of Quebec. This is a recurring problem in the Court’s administrative law jurisprudence writ large; as I noted above, the same problem occurs when the Court applies the standard of review of administrative action. When a legislature creates a statutory court, and nourishes it with rights of appeal, it does so for a reason; one can impute an intent to the legislature that it intended to supply the relevant standard of review. In such cases, there is no reason to apply the common law position of deference because statutes override the common law. This was basically the position of Rothstein J, in Khosa. In that context, the Supreme Court majority held that the ordinary principles of judicial review apply when the Federal Court reviews decisions of federal decision-makers. But the Court gave no effect to the Federal Courts Act, which establishes certain grounds of review that could also be said to imply standards of review (see s.18.1(4)). Rothstein J noted that “a common law standard of review analysis is not necessary where the legislature has provided for standards of review” (Khosa, at para 99). Instead, where the legislature has done so, the common law idea of deference melts away. It is for the legislature, not the court, to evaluate expertise by including a privative clause if it sees fit to mandate deference.

Had Rothstein J’s position been adopted, we would have no problem with the Court of Quebec, because it would not be applying principles of judicial deference—it would apply appeal principles. For this reason, the saga of the Court of Quebec actually illustrates the perversity of the Supreme Court’s reversal of the hierarchy of laws. Because of its failure to give effect to legislative meaning, it has presumed a standard of deference that apparently goes across all decision-makers, failing to take account of the statutory contexts of each particular decision-maker. This, for the reasons I’ve outlined above, seems plain wrong.

Conclusion

While I cannot survey every development in administrative law/interpretation in this post, and while I barely scratched the surface of the topics I did cover, I have tried to showcase three groups of cases that outline a core difficulty in the Canadian law of judicial review: the failure of the Supreme Court to give effect to legislative meaning. This problem stretches across areas of administrative law. One hopes that the Trilogy will solve this problem, but my hopes are decidedly low.

Upcoming Canadian Talks

Save the dates!

In a couple of weeks, I will be hopping on to a 13-hour transpacific flight and heading to Canada to give a series of talks. Here are the dates and topics. I don’t have all the details about the exact time and location yet, so if you are based at or near one of the host institutions, keep an eye out ― or get in touch with me or my hosts closer to the day.

September 26, University of Victoria, Faculty of Law (Runnymede Society): “The Road to Serfdom, 75 Years On”. I take it that this will be inaugural Runnymede event at UVic, and I am very honoured to be part of it.
September 30, Université de Sherbrooke, Faculty of Law: « Route de la Servitude: fermée pour travaux (de démolition)… depuis 75 ans ». This will be the French version of the UVic talk; I’m afraid I’m a bit puzzled by the title, but I didn’t to choose it.
October 2, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law (Runnymede Society): “An Election Is No Time to Discuss Serious Issues. Really?” This will be discussion of the regulation of civil society participation in election campaigns, which has been much in the news in recent weeks.
October 4, University of Waterloo (Freedom of Expression in Canada Workshop): “A Conscience- and Integrity-Based Approach to Compelled Speech”. The workshop is being organized by Emmett Macfarlane, who has just told it is full… but there is apparently a waitlist. My paper builds, of course, on what I have had to say about things like the citizenship oath, the Law Society of Ontario’s “statement of principles”, and Ontario’s anti-carbon-tax stickers.
October 9, Université du Québec à Montréal, Département des sciences juridiques: « Les élections sont-elles une occasion de se taire? ». This will be the French version of the Toronto talk, with a discussion of the Québec legislation thrown in.
October 11-12, Ottawa (Workshop on the Royal Prerogative): “The Royal Prerogative in New Zealand”. This is the first meeting of a group put together by Philippe Lagassé to carry out a SSHRC-funded research project on the prerogative in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Professor Lagassé also tells me the workshop is “pretty much full”. Are you seeing a theme here? Yep, I’ve managed to get myself invited to really cool workshops.
October 16, McGill University, Faculty of Law (Runnymede Society): a discussion with Paul Daly on administrative law. If the Supreme Court co-operates, we will, of course, discuss the Vavilov and Bell/NFL cases, in which the Court may, or may not, completely change the Canadian law of judicial review. If the decisions are not released, it will be a more general conversation. Either way, I am looking forward to
October 18, Université de Montréal (Symposium of the Journal of Commonwealth Law): “Unholy Trinity: The Failure of Administrative Constitutionalism in Canada”. I will be presenting a paper arguing that the Supreme Court’s disgraceful decision in Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 SCR 293 and the companion Ontario case illustrate the problems that plague “administrative constitutionalism” ― the view that administrative decision-makers’ decisions bearing on constitutional rights are entitled to judicial deference.

I am grateful to the people who have invited me and/or organized these events. (A special shout-out to my co-blogger and president of the Runnymede Society, Mark Mancini!) If you are able to make it to one (or more) of the talks, please say hello. It is always a pleasure to meet some of my readers in person. See you soon!

The New Administrative Law II: Why Defer?

Part II of a two-part series on administrative law

In Part I of this series on administrative law, I set out the reasons why the Progressive mode of thinking about the subject has lost force in the 21^st century. The basic point was that the Progressives—who thought agencies could be staffed by expert, well-intentioned people to achieve progressive goals—assumed too much. In today’s day and age, deferring to agencies on the basis of expertise or their particular substantive goals would mean drawing a consistent rule that applies to inexpert agencies and those who do not hold progressive goals.

In truth, though, this tells us nothing about what sort of judicial review doctrine should be adopted by courts—what the posture of courts should be on judicial review. The only reason I needed to write the first post in the series is because the Progressives, who are the architects behind today’s administrative state, made these weak reasons for deference the basic building blocks. The Progressives made it so political appreciations of agencies justified a deferential posture. The problem with these assumptions, though, is that they require a constant justification according to empirical facts, and a costly court-led investigation into the reasons for deference in every case. The assumptions must be true. And if they are not true, the reasons for deference melt away.

More importantly, these functional reasons for deference are not legal reasons for deference. As Justice Scalia said, they are not reasons for motivating a court to refuse to take an independent view of an agency decision.

So, the first post in this series was not a post I wanted to write, because expertise and the political goals of an agency should be wholly irrelevant to judicial review. But it was a post I had to write, because these reasons for deference need to first be put aside before embarking on a far more ambitious task: describing a defensible doctrine of judicial review.

In the spirit of the Court’s upcoming administrative law trilogy decisions, I invite readers to take a step with me into a world where there is no administrative law doctrine—but there are courts and administrative agencies. Let’s say that there is no court-made law governing the relationship between courts and agencies. All we have is our Constitution and the principles that animate it, and statutes

Luckily for us behind this veil of administrative ignorance, the Constitution itself gives some thought to how Parliament and courts should interact. When Parliament passes law, absent constitutional objection, its law binds because of the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. Putting aside thorny issues of an unconstitutional delegation of power or other constitutional challenges to administrative discretion, most administrative issues are just ordinary, hum-drum stuff involving an exercise of discretion or the interpretation of a statute.

When an administrator is delegated power under Parliament’s law to make determinations, issue rules and regulations, or adjudicate disputes, its power is confined by the statute that creates it. The administrator cannot make a decision forbidden to it by statute. Traditionally, in the common law, it was the job of the courts to interpret the limits of statutory bounds and say when a decision-maker took a decision that was not prescribed by statute. In other words, courts interpret statutes to give effect to legislative meaning regarding agencies. Courts do not invent standards to govern those agencies.

In this way, the concept of jurisdiction at common law was an attempt to synthesize parliamentary sovereignty with the rule of law. Of course, jurisdiction became a problematic concept, for the same reason that the Progressive approach to administrative law is problematic. It read a judicial conservatism into the statutes adopted by Parliament, just like Progressives wanted judges to read labour-friendly standards of review into the law. But the concept that jurisdiction was getting at—the “statutory authority” of the decision-maker—was basically sound. The idea, expressed in Bibeault, that all of judicial review is fundamentally a matter of statutory interpretation is the simple reality of the matter.

This raises the question: when does a court defer under this arrangement? In my view, the only legal and constitutional basis for deference is when a legislature expressly or implicitly says so. I have already expressed why functional or policy reasons for deference are underwhelming reasons for a court to take a hands-off approach in the interpretive process. They are empirically doubtful, and do not legally bind, because it is Parliament, not the courts, that prescribe the level of deference.

When Parliament expressly provides in a statute for the standard of review, the issue is easy. Parliament’s law binds. The trickier question exists, in the vast number of cases, where Parliament or legislatures do not expressly provide for a standard of review, and courts must do the best they can with the statute in front of them.

This moves us from the world of abstract principles in the technical, doctrinal question of judicial review: which doctrinal tools should courts use to approximate legislative meaning on standard of review when there is no clear legislative meaning available? There are any number of options, but one can divide the world into two different types of legal doctrines: rules and standards. A standard might look something like the Dunsmuir factors, in which courts are asked to look to the various indicia like the expertise of the decision-maker, the nature of the question at issue, or the existence of a privative clause or a statutory right of appeal; the former a non-binding sign that courts must defer, the latter a sign that legislatures contemplated a more searching standard of review. The goal of the standard is to take into account “context” to approximate all of the conditions under which deference could exist.

One could also imagine a rule. This has been the approach adopted by the Supreme Court as of late. In both Edmonton East and CHRC, the Court went to pains to explain that its preferred approach was a presumption of deference, based on the expertise of the “tribunal” as an “institution.” To the Court, a strong-form presumption of deference is designed to simplify the standard of review analysis and “get the parties away from arguing about the tests and back to arguing about the substantive merits of their case” (Alberta Teachers, at para 36, citing Dunsmuir, at para 145).

There are costs and benefits to both rules and standards, the complexities of which I cannot explore here. But, in at least one respect, the costs of standards cut hard in the direction of rules when it comes to administrative law: that is, the costs of “compliance” with a standard are likely exponential in a world where administrative agencies take different forms, carry different legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and take on varying policy tasks in complex regulatory environments. It is difficult for litigants to approximate the standard of review under the current scheme, because they cannot be sure with any degree of regularity what the standard will be in their case. There is also a kernel of truth in the Court’s reasoning about deferential presumptions: at the very least, they focus the parties in on the merits at the expense of the rather abstract standard of review.

But the standard of review, nonetheless, is integrally important in a world where government action is confined by law. It prescribes the conditions under which unelected judges can interfere with the actions of delegated actors, acting under authority delegated to them from elected actors. It is important to get the question right, as a matter of the rule of law. But it is also important to stabilize the law, also as a matter of the rule of law.

How do we balance these considerations? I favour a rule of interpretation similar to the one advanced by Martin Olszynski: there should be a presumption of correctness review. That presumption would operate under the well-supported idea that the legislature must affirmatively—explicitly or implicitly—speak before a court will infer deference. In other words, deference does not accrue to administrative agencies from the heavenly font of judicial chambers. It does not exist in the ether because of some expertise-worship or the desires of progressives; after all, experts should be “on tap, not on top.” Deference is, in reality, only a legal matter—only prescribed by legislators—and must be fairly interpreted to exist by courts.

The rule can be slightly relaxed when we come to understand under what conditions deference should operate. A privative clause, within constitutional limits, should bind courts and be a sign of deference—it should operate as a statutory “clear statement rule” that deference was intended by the legislature. In less clear cases, such as when statutes delegate power in broad terms (the classic “public interest” delegation is an example), courts should also defer, on the grounds that legislatures would have spoken more specifically if it wished the agency to have a more limited range of factors to consider in making a decision. Where a legislature uses a “statutory recipe,” deference should be very narrow, perhaps non-existent: if an agency has a list of factors to consider, it must consider that list, nothing more or less.

Of course, what I have said here is open to criticism (Professor Daly, for example, wrote a piece a few years back criticizing this line of thinking; I responded to Professor Daly’s piece, here). And nothing in here is necessarily new. Justice Stratas, for example, has written decision after decision at the Federal Court of Appeal level along these lines. Nonetheless, the contribution I seek to make here must be read in light of my previous post. My conclusions can be summarized as follows:

Legislatures are sovereign within constitutional limits.
This means that when legislatures delegate power, within constitutional limits, courts (as unelected actors) should respect the will of elected actors. This is a simple corollary of the English Bill of Right
On that logic, it is for the legislature to tell courts just how far courts can go. In the state of nature, courts must fairly interpret those boundaries.
Courts should not read progressive (or conservative) justifications for deference into the law. Courts should not presume expertise where it does not exist. Courts should not presume that agencies are owed deference because they are part of the “social welfare” state. In the latter part of the 20^th century, the courts swerved in the direction of leftist politics rather than law. That tendency should be guarded against, not only because it is wrong as a matter of law, but also because it is empirically untrue. But so should the tendency to shift in conservative directions.
The best rule, with this in mind, is a presumption of correctness review, with the onus on the legislature to stipulate if it wishes more deference in the context of particular statutes, using either (a) privative clauses/statutory rights of appeal or (b) broad language, implying that the legislature did not wish to limit the considerations an agency can take into account in carrying out its tasks.

The methodology here is not perfect, the considerations are not complete, and there is more that can be said. But at the very least, in this series of posts, I hope to have inspired a re-evaluation of the existing reasons why we defer to agencies. I also hope to have encouraged readers to reflect on the real reasons why we should ever defer at all.