Supreme Court of Canada – Double Aspect

#LOLNothingMatters

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold deferential review of administrative decisions that implicate “Charter values” is deeply unserious

I’m a bit late to the debate, I’m afraid, but I did want to say something about the Supreme Court’s decision in Commission scolaire francophone des Territoires du Nord-Ouest v. Northwest Territories (Education, Culture and Employment), 2023 SCC 31, delivered last week. The decision is very significant insofar as it purports to uphold the approach to judicial review of administrative decisions implicating constitutional rights and vibes first outlined in Doré v Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12, [2012] 1 SCR 395, which had been severely criticized by both judges and scholars of administrative law, and whose validity was specifically left in doubt in Vavilov v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 SCC 65, [2019] 4 SCR 653.

Co-blogger Mark Mancini has already explained what was at stake and made many astute observations about the case, in particular about the practical difficulties that are likely to result from it. I will not say much about the substance of the decision, on which I have little to add to my own previous criticism of Doré and its progeny and to Mark’s post, or its consequences. My focus is on SCFTNO’s disregard of legal authority and of the artificial reason of the law on which judges depend for no small part of their authority. Specifically, I will argue that SCFTNO is inconsistent with several important cases or lines of cases, including Vavilov, as well as recent cases on constitutional interpretation and, arguably, even Doré itself. Moreover, Justice Côté’s reasons for the unanimous court do not respond to the academic and judicial criticisms of Doré. In short, they make no effort to integrate the decision into the fabric of Canadian law. They are the work product of a court that does not understand or does not care about law at all.

As most readers will know, SCFTNO was a judicial review of the respondent minister’s refusal to exercise her discretion to allow several children whom section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms did not entitle to attend the applicant’s schools to nevertheless do so. This could have been decided simply enough, by pointing to Vavilov’s admonition that decisions that have very significant consequences for the individual concerned must be thoroughly justified and holding that the Minister’s justification was not sufficient. I think there is a fairly strong case for saying that a decision as to whether children can attend school in the language of their parents’ choice is a important one, calling for substantial justification. The case for holding that the reasons were insufficiently responsive would have been a closer one, but not implausible either. But the Supreme Court did not choose the easy route.

Instead, it held that “the Minister was required not only to consider the values embodied in s. 23 in exercising her discretion … but also to conduct a proportionate balancing of these values and the government’s interests”. [8] This is even though all concerned agreed that section 23 as such did not actually apply. Decision-makers, such as the Minister in this case, must consider “Charter values” and balance them against the government’s aims whether or not the rights associated with these values actually apply. For this proposition, Justice Côté cites Doré itself, as well as Loyola High School v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 12, [2015] 1 SCR 613 and Law Society of British Columbia v. Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 SCR 293. The courts will then review the decision on a reasonableness standard.

For Justice Côté, this is an easy case. “There can be no doubt about” the duty to consider Charter values “because ‘[t]he Constitution — both written and unwritten — dictates the limits of all state action’”. [65, citing Vavilov [56]] There is, moreover, “no reason to depart from [the reasonableness] standard of review”. [60] But for anyone who’s thought seriously about the issues involved, there are very good reasons for departing from reasonableness review and plenty of doubt about the propriety of forcing decision-makers to give effect to “Charter values”. It’s just Justice Côté doesn’t give a flying flamingo.

Start with deference. The same passage from Vavilov on which Justice Côté purports to rely here insists on correctness review for constitutional issues, though it specifically leaves the consideration of the standard applicable to judicial review of discretionary decisions affecting Charter rights to another day. If indeed what is at stake here is constitutional constraint of administrative discretion, the reasons for correctness review are obvious: the meaning of the constitution is a question for the courts, as Vavilov recognizes for every other context and as the Supreme Court had acknowledged long before. For example, as I noted in the article linked to above,

in Re Manitoba Language Rights, [1985] 1 SCR 721, the Court pointed out that ‘[t]he judiciary is the institution charged with the duty of ensuring that the government complies with the constitution’ and any arrangement whereby constitutional compliance is left to the executive’s discretion “would be entirely inconsistent” with this duty. (7, citing Manitoba Language Rights at (754))

There is more. As I pointed out in that article and as Mark has argued in his own work on this subject, Vavilov pulls the rug from under the justification for reasonableness review that was given in Doré. The argument there had been that administrative decision-makers were experts in applying their “home statutes”, and that expertise extended to the application of constitutional values to the legislation. This was consistent with the rationale for broader judicial deference to the administrative state that the Supreme Court had given in the then-leading case, Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190. But Vavilov rejects expertise as a rationale for deference, and endorses an altogether different one, namely legislative intent. It is not crazy (although still wrong) to suggest that the delegation of decision-making power to officials necessarily implies a delegation of interpretive power over the enabling legislation, which it has enacted, to the exercise of which courts can defer; it is in effect a sort of implied Henry VIII clause (*shudders*).

Yet a legislature cannot require, implicitly or explicitly, courts to defer to the executive’s views about the import of the constitution, no more than to its own: nemo dat quod non habet. If deference in constitutional cases is warranted, this can only be for reasons implicit in the constitution itself. It is worth noting that Nova Scotia (Workers’ Compensation Board) v Martin, 2003 SCC 54, [2003] 2 SCR 504, on which Paul Daly relies for the proposition that administrative decision-makers can consider the Charter specifically explained that this would not endanger the constitutional order because their decisions would be subject to judicial review on a correctness standard.

Thus, deference to administrative decisions implicating the Charter does not sit easily, to put it mildly, with Vavilov and with broader constitutional principle. At a minimum, Justice Côté ought to have explained on what basis such deference is now justified. But she could not be bothered. Instead, she went for the cheap rhetorical trick of claiming that her position was self-evidently right. If she did not see that this was not so, she is a much worse lawyer than I thought. If she did, she wrote in bad faith. I’m not sure which of these alternatives is worse.

Before leaving the issue of the standard of review, it is important to note that, as Mark points out, Justice Côté’s approach to reasonableness review is also inconsistent with Vavilov in two important ways. As Mark explains, “remarkably, it may be a requirement for decision-makers to consider Charter values even where not argued” by the parties. And, to quote Justice Côté again (though Mark makes this point too), while “[a]s a general rule, a reviewing court must not, in assessing the reasonableness of a decision, reweigh the factors underlying the decision”, [71] “the Doré approach requires reviewing courts to inquire into the weight accorded by the decision maker to the relevant considerations in order to assess whether a proportionate balancing was conducted by the decision maker”. [72] This is antithetical to any sensible definition of reasonableness review.

In other words, Justice Côté seems to have endorsed ― nay, required ― disguised correctness review when “Charter values” are at stake, while proclaiming that she “cannot see” why anyone would question the applicability of the reasonableness standard. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. This is simply unserious “reasoning”, unless Justice Côté is playing some sort of four-dimensional chess in order to quietly eviscerate deference in the guise of upholding it. More on why she just might be doing that below, but it is worth recalling that, when they play deference chess, judges can only lose, even to themselves.

Consider now the supposedly indubitable administrative duty to consider “Charter values” as part of the executive’s duty of compliance with the “unwritten constitution”. The most obvious thing to note here is that, after Vavilov, the Supreme Court decided Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34, where the majority purported to cut the unwritten constitution down to size. To be sure, what was at issue there was a constitutional principle, not “Charter values”, and the claim was that the principle could be invoked to invalidate legislation, not just an administrative decision. Perhaps these are important distinctions, though to my mind that is not obvious. And of course I have argued here that City of Toronto itself was not at all convincingly reasoned. Perhaps Justice Côté agrees! But if so, she needs to say this. Instead, once again, she simply breezes past the difficulties and does not even begin to explain how she deals with them.

The broader point is one that Mark makes in his post. The idea that “Charter values” can be used to, in effect, expand the Charter’s protections, or at least (and I’m not even sure about that) some toned-down versions of these protections, to people who, by everyone’s admission do not benefit from them according to the Charter’s text is flatly inconsistent with City of Toronto and with the Supreme Court’s other recent decisions. As I have argued (and as others have noted too), the majorities in these cases adopted textualist and sometimes even originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation, according to which courts ― and, one would have thought, administrative decision-makers too ― are to apply the Charter’s text and not an expanded edition incorporating the Supreme Court’s own idea of what our constitution ought to be. Here, at least, City of Toronto, with its explicit rejection of the use of unwritten norms to expand the deliberately chosen wording of Charter rights seems pretty much on point ― and on more solid ground than in its broader attack on written constitutional principles, since in this it follows British Columbia v Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd, 2005 SCC 49, [2005] 2 SCR 473.

For this reason, I am not persuaded by Professor Daly’s invocation of a “constitutional settlement” that has embraced “the decentralization of the Canadian Constitution”, by which he means the Supreme Court has allowed administrative decision-makers to decide constitution questions. It’s one thing to say that these decision-makers are required to endeavour to comply with the constitution. It is another, as I note above, to take the further step, as significant as it is indefensible, to demand judicial deference to these decision-makers’ views. But it is a further step still, and no part of a “settlement” as I will further explain below, to say that it is not just the actual constitution that has been “decentralized”, but also the vibes that the courts, and perhaps decision-makers too, feel when they dream about the constitution they would like Canada to have.

Be that as it may, Justice Côté again doesn’t deign to say anything about any of this. One thing she does do throughout her judgment is invoke the specialness of section 23 of the Charter. This provision “imposes positive obligations on the state” and “is therefore meant to alter the status quo”. [2] It also grants collective and not merely individual rights. But section 23 is unique in another way too. It is quite obviously the product of a careful political compromise, granting robust protection to some people and withholding it from others (subject, of course, to legislatures adding similar entitlements by statute, or indeed to the executive doing so in exercising statutorily-enabled discretion). As Benjamin Oliphant and I have noted, both early cases on section 23 and some more recent ones (though admittedly not all) have made a point of noting this origin and held that it ought to have consequences for how this provision is to be interpreted. This is consistent with how the Supreme Court has approached other cases involving positive obligations of the state and collective entitlements, such as British Columbia (Attorney General) v Canada (Attorney General), [1994] 2 SCR 41 (the Vancouver Island Railway Case) and Caron v Alberta, 2015 SCC 56, [2015] 3 SCR 511.

Needless to say, expanding the entitlements created by section 23 to (at least some) people not covered by it upsets the compromise the constitution embodies and is inconsistent with those cases that have emphasized its significance. Once again, Justice Côté says nothing about this, though she does note that the Court is not “endorsing freedom of choice of the language of instruction, a model expressly rejected by the framers under s. 23”. [103] Well, if the choice of the framers of section 23 matters to that extent, why doesn’t it matter in full? On a practical note, when parents in Quebec start relying on “Charter values” to get their children into English public schools, it will be time to get out the popcorn. Justice Côté is trying to caveat her way out of this problem, but that won’t be enough. As the Charter’s framers understood, sometimes you need bright line rules. The Supreme Court’s endorsement of “Charter values” undermines this choice too, as well as that which defined the scope of section 23.

It is surely no accident that an opinion so replete with incoherence, self-contradiction, and disregard of authority fails to engage in any sort of dialogue with both academic and judicial opinion on the issues it decides. I have already noted that I have criticized the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence mandating, or purporting to mandate, judicial deference to administrative decisions affecting rights. So has Jonathan Marynuk, here, and Edward Cottrill. Mark has pointed out that this jurisprudence had no justificatory leg to stand on after Vavilov, and I have made this argument too. Of course, it is a bit greedy to expect the Supreme Court’s to respond to one’s criticism of its decisions, if only in substance (I am not so naïve as to hope for citations). But only a bit. After all, Doré itself purported to respond to academic criticism of the Court’s earlier approach to administrative decisions implicating the Charter.

And even if the Supreme Court’s ignoring unruly academics is to be expected, the Doré framework generally and its reliance on “Charter values” specifically have been called into question by judges too. The best-known examples of this are probably the joint opinion of Justices Lauwers and Miller in Gehl v Canada (Attorney General), 2017 ONCA 319 and that of Justice Lauwers, with Justice Miller concurring, in ET v Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, 2017 ONCA 893. In the former, Justices Lauwers and Miller point out that

Charter values lend themselves to subjective application because there is no doctrinal structure to guide their identification or application. Their use injects a measure of indeterminacy into judicial reasoning because of the irremediably subjective — and value laden — nature of selecting some Charter values from among others, and of assigning relative priority among Charter values and competing constitutional and common law principles. The problem of subjectivity is particularly acute when Charter values are understood as competing with Charter rights. [79]

These are compelling, or at any rate very serious arguments. Justice Côté has no answer for them.

And there is another noteworthy judicial critic of the Doré line of cases, as persuasive as any and more important than the others by virtue of her office. It is, of course, Justice Côté herself. This is why I suggested above, if only in bitter jest, that Justice Côté might be trying to undermine Doré while purporting to uphold it. Her joint dissent with Justice Brown in Trinity Western cautioned that rights claims are to be disposed of by applying “legal principles that guide the relationship between citizen and state, between private and public. And those principles exist to protect rights-holders from values which a state actor deems to be ‘shared’, not to give licence to courts to defer to or impose those values.” [265; emphasis removed and added] Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice Rowe, whom Mark quotes in his post, also challenged the legitimacy of the use of “Charter values”.

Hence, I do not think that one can speak of a “constitutional settlement” requiring the use of “Charter values”. It’s not just that the Supreme Court cannot effect a settlement that subverts the one reached by political actors who were amending the constitution in accordance with the relevant rules, though it certainly can do no such thing. But it is also, in addition, simply not the case that there existed ― until, seemingly, now ― a consensus on the Supreme Court itself, let alone within the broader judiciary and the Canadian legal community ― to the effect that such a settlement would be desirable or even defensible.

The Supreme Court’s failure to address any of these issues in a decision on a point of fundamental constitutional importance (and one that, whatever Justice Côté may say, was very much not open and shut), is a serious matter. Supreme Courts, as Justice Jackson famously observed, are not final because they are infallible but only infallible because they are final. If they are to have greater authority than that of ipse dixit, they cannot rely on finality alone. They need to engage in a reasoned dialogue with other courts and even, at least on occasion, with academics. They don’t have to agree with us; that much their finality means. But to act as if no one else had views worth considering on the issues they decide is a conceit that risks being fatal to their credibility. #LOLnothingmatters is the maxim of a troll, not a jurist.

The CSFTNO decision is inconsistent with precedent, as well as with constitutional sense, and instead of explaining itself it affects to be self-evidently correct. It refuses to engage with well-reasoned critiques of the precedents it purports to apply, effectively telling the critics, whether academic or judicial, not to bother engaging with the Supreme Court’s pronouncements. After all, even a Supreme Court judge can flip-flop from being a vigorous critic of an idea to its enforcer and not bother giving an account of her change of heart.

Years ago, I wrote here about a symposium I attended about “the responsibility of doctrine”. I took the occasion to discuss the very different, but nonetheless related, ways in which common lawyers and civilians use that word. The key similarity that unites them despite the differences is this:

The important thing about both is that they are the products of, and indeed very nearly synonymous with, collective thinking about the law. La doctrine, as I already mentioned, is a set of writings, a discourse involving multiple authors. … And doctrine is, of necessity, derived from a multitude of judicial decisions rendered over time. A person can be un auteur de doctrine, and a judicial decision can illustrate a legal doctrine, but doctrine and doctrine are both, fundamentally, ongoing conversations.

Justice Côté’s opinion for the Supreme Court in CSFTNO disclaims its responsibility to be part of collective thinking about the law. It is an exercise of unreasoned power, a flex. No number of roadshows can restore the credibility of a court that behaves in this fashion.

Justice Brown’s Resignation: Now What?

A new podcast episode

In the wake of Justice Brown’s departure from the Supreme Court of Canada, co-blogger Mark Mancini and I have both published op-eds lamenting this event: Mark, with Kristopher Kinsinger, in The Hub, and I in The National Post. We also recorded a podcast episode in which we discuss Justice Brown’s legacy, the events leading to his resignation, and the need to reform the Canadian process for dealing with allegations of judicial misconduct, of the deep deficiencies of which Justice Brown was ultimately the victim. For various reasons, we weren’t able to release the episode right away, but it is now available: have a listen.

Values, Harm, and Free Expression

Reviewing and discussing Camden Hutchison’s great article on the SCC’s freedom of expression jurisprudence

I have not been posting over the last several months, due to overwork and resulting exhaustion. But I have not been altogether inactive, and have managed to have a few things published that I would like to highlight, however belatedly.

In this post, I begin with a JOTWELL review of Camden Hutchison’s excellent article “Freedom of Expression: Values and Harms“. In a nutshell ― the JOTWELL post has a more extensive summary, though it is still quite short ― Professor Hutchison argues that the Supreme Court’s reliance on the values of the search for truth, democratic participation, and self-realisation in its freedom of expression jurisprudence has served to limit this fundamental right in a way that is quite at odds with its constitutional importance. He calls for freedom of expression to only be restricted when a meaningful, demonstrable harm would likely result from failure to do so.

I do have some objections to Professor Hutchison, especially to the way in which he applies the notion of harm to hate speech, on which his analysis is focused. As long-time readers of this blog will know, I believe that the harm is not in hate speech at all. Nonetheless, I conclude that

Hutchison’s arguments have the merit of calling attention to the subjectivity of the SCC’s current approach to the justification of limitation on the freedom of expression, and indeed of other rights. His call for a more objective approach is no less important ― perhaps all the more so ― even if there is reason to doubt that his own proposal is objective enough. So is the focus on the costs and benefits to actual people rather than to abstract values. And so too is Hutchison’s insistence on real evidence to support the government’s claim that it has good reason to limit constitutional rights. … Hutchison has done the Canadian legal community, and indeed the Canadian public, a considerable service. He has shown that the SCC’s long-dominant approach to freedom of expression cases is only a pretense of a defense of this right. In truth, freedom of expression in Canada is a privilege for those whom the SCC considers sufficiently inoffensive to the values of which some its judges have openly proclaimed themselves the ultimate guardians.

Co-blogger Mark Mancini also likes the article, so he and I have interviewed Professor Hutchison about it for the Double Aspect Pod. Have a listen, if you haven’t already.

While I’m on the subject of the pod: it should now be available to subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. It should also come out more frequently, if not quite regularly, thanks to the kind help of Keith Pridgen, who has volunteered to be our editor. So subscribe, and don’t miss the next episode, which is already in the works!

Justice Brown Was Not Purged

Concerns about the Supreme Court’s image are a more likely reason for Brown J’s departure than ideology

As some of the readers will already have seen, the National Post has published an op-ed I have written about the retirement last week of Justice Brown from the Supreme Court. As many others, including co-blogger Mark Mancini (with Kris Kinsinger), have said, the whole affair is lamentable, and the lack of transparency about it is especially troubling, albeit unsurprising. What I think my op-ed adds to the conversation is the concern that the powers-that-be ― that is, Chief Justice Wagner and the Canadian Judicial Council (CJC) ― may have overreacted to the complaint about Justice Brown out of an undue concern with the judiciary’s image. I write:

Undue regard for the judiciary’s image risks coming at the expense of the independence of individual judges. The CJC or the chief justice might think that throwing a controversy-embroiled judge under the bus of hostile opinion will serve the greater good by preserving the institution’s public standing. But it will only encourage more complaints by people who are, or affect to be, too easily offended.

Ultimately, this will not save the judiciary’s public standing either: why should the public trust an institution to lawfully uphold the rights of unpopular members of society when it readily submits to passing controversy? The courts sometimes must place themselves on the wrong side of public opinion and media criticism. The courage to do so is a muscle that needs exercising, not saving.

Some readers, though, have written to me, insisting that the Chief Justice must have wanted to get rid of Justice Brown for being insufficiently aligned with the Supreme Court’s progressive philosophy. In their view, what happened isn’t just a well-intentioned but misguided overreaction but an outright purge.

I don’t agree with this for a moment. The facts, some of which I discuss in the op-ed, and others that anyone who follows the Supreme Court will be aware of (though, in fairness, I don’t know whether my correspondents are lawyers), do not support this very serious charge.

Most obviously, although there are certainly important differences between Justice Brown’s judicial philosophy and the Chief Justice’s, they are not all that far apart. Consider, for instance, that they not only agreed on, but actually co-authored the majority opinion in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34, a case that was as sharply divided and politically charged as any in recent years. And this was by no means the only example of their agreeing in an important case, either. (Off the top of my head, I don’t recall co-authorship, but I may be forgetting something obvious.) In short, with Justice Brown’s departure, the Chief Justice loses an ally more than a nuisance, from his perspective.

Indeed, on the whole, the Chief Justice is probably further apart, ideologically, from colleagues such as Justice Abella (when she was still on the court) and Justices Martin and Karakatsanis. He hasn’t purged them, and there is just no reason to accuse him of having purged Justice Brown. For that matter, it’s worth setting the record straight about Justice Brown himself. Even as he was often willing to buck the bien pensant consensus, he was not always at odds with it either. He was part of the unanimous pro-regulatory nightmare in R v Comeau, 2018 SCC 15, [2018] 1 SCR 342 and, more recently, the cheap humanitarianism of R v Bissonnette, 2022 SCC 23. As I say in the op-ed, I think his heterodoxy was invaluable ― even if it was less than full-time. But let’s pay him the homage of treating him as the complex thinker he is, and not an avatar of antiestablishmentarianism.

I’ve written before to argue that the ideology, or judicial philosophy, of Canadian judges matters. But ideology, in the sense of philosophical commitments that bear on the resolution of legal disputes, isn’t all there is to them either. People who claim that Canadian judges are ideological virgins, unlike their dissolute American colleagues, are quite wrong. But it is equally a mistake, which is best left to wannabe-American journalists, to explain everything that happens on Canadian courts through liberal/conservative or woke/anti-woke dichotomies.

All the more when other explanations make better sense of the facts. As I point out in the op-ed, excessive regard for the judiciary’s image, morphing into a pathological desire to avoid any controversy, however undeserved, is probably behind the CJC’s bizarre persecution of Justice Patrick Smith, then of the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario, for having taken up an interim position as dean ― and saviour from crisis ― of Lakehead’s law school. As recounted in the Federal Court’s decision reversing the CJC’s findings of unethical conduct, this was commenced sua sponte, without even a formal complaint having been made, once the CJC became aware of some media controversy, and proceeded in violation of both the law and the requirements of procedural fairness. And Justice Smith isn’t the only example either.

If my conjecture about what happened to Justice Brown is right, then he is not the first victim of the CJC’s trigger-happiness. Partly for this reason, this conjecture strikes me as rather more plausible than that of an ideological purge, which, as I have explained here, is not. If I am right, things are bad enough. Indeed, well-intentioned blindness might be a worse problem, because a more intractable one, than the deviousness my correspondents imagine.

The Metastasis of Charter Vibes

The rigamarole around the notwithstanding clause this week has me thinking about the reach of the Charter, and in particular, a case that will be heard by the SCC early next year: A.B. v Northwest Territories. While there are other issues in the case, at its heart is a stark proposition: is it required for a government decision-maker to consider “Charter values” (or what I call “vibes”) even where it is accepted that a right is not engaged on the facts? One might think—as I do—that the answer to this question is “no.”

But others disagree, and with some precedent in support, and so the Supreme Court will soon hear this case. A.B. involves s.23 of the Charter, which provides the following:

Language of instruction

23. (1) Citizens of Canada

(a) whose first language learned and still understood is that of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province in which they reside, or

(b) who have received their primary school instruction in Canada in English or French and reside in a province where the language in which they received that instruction is the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province,

have the right to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in that language in that province.

Continuity of language instruction
(2) Citizens of Canada of whom any child has received or is receiving primary or secondary school instruction in English or French in Canada, have the right to have all their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the same language.

Application where numbers warrant
(3) The right of citizens of Canada under sections (1) and (2) to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of a province;

(a) applies wherever in the province the number of children of citizens who have such a right is sufficient to warrant the provision to them out of public funds of minority language instruction; and

(b) includes, where the number of those children so warrants, the right to have them receive that instruction in minority language educational facilities provided out of public funds.

As the NWTCA pointed out in the decision being appealed to the SCC, section 23, unlike some other constitutional rights, is rather precise: it delineates who is eligible to enjoy the constitutional right, and so its text inevitably “draws lines of eligibility” that will mean that there will be some “hard cases” that fall on either side of these lines [9]. This is a consequence of the finely-wrought s.23, which could have been phrased more broadly or generously, but isn’t.

As the NWTCA pointed out, this provision requires governments “to provide minority language education to those who have a right to it” [6] but “the government does have the discretion to allow the non-section 23 children to attend the minority language schools” [9]. In the NWT, at the time of the impugned decisions, this process was governed by a Ministerial Directive (and, of course, supplemented by ministerial residual discretion) , which provided that a “limited number” of non-section 23 children could be admitted [10].

Under this process, it was accepted that the A.B. family did not qualify under s.23 [10, 24]. And yet they argued that the Minister, in exercising her discretion and implementing the Directive, were required to consider the values underlying s.23 [28]. The chambers judge named some of the interests that would need to be considered by the Minister under the values-analysis:

…the needs of the linguistic minority and the need to foster the preservation and development of this community, in the exercise of her power over the admission of non-rights holders to minority language schools [28].

At the NWTCA, the majority of the Court rejected this contention. It held that this case did not implicate constitutional rights [59]. Rather, the essence of the claim was that the Minister should have considered values underpinning s.23 in considering whether the Minister properly exercised her discretion not to admit the non-rights holders. But as the Court stated, “[t]he obligations of the provinces and territories to observe and respect the Charter are collateral to the issues that were before the chambers judge” [59]. The point of the majority holding is simple: Charter values cannot be used to extend the protections of the Charter to those who otherwise are not eligible for the specific protections at issue. Rowbotham JA concurred, but would have required the Minister to consider s.23 [136].

In my view, the majority judgment cogently outlines a problem with Charter values—because of the lack of guidance on their scope and application, they can easily metastasize to expand the Charter in unexpected ways. This metastasis can occur in three ways. First, because Charter values are necessarily stated at a high level of abstraction, they can distort the interests protected by a purposive and textual interpretation of specific Charter rights (a concern raised by Rowe J in TWU). Second, a court can align a Charter value with a statutory objective, however broadly-stated, and in the face of a protected right, claim that an administrator can promote that Charter-sanctified statutory objective (as the majority pointed out in TWU, and as explained by Edward Cottrill here). This means that a state objective that otherwise may be directly contrary to an actually-protected right is given the imprimatur of constitutional benediction—that old chestnut. Third, Charter values can be used to “supplement” purported “deficiencies” or perceived lacunae in the Charter text. Because each Charter right delineates and narrows the interests that it protects, it is possible for a Charter value to come into play, even where an individual does not hold the benefit of the right.

A.B. presents this third situation. Like the other cases where Charter values are at play, there is arguably a distortion of the actually-existing Constitution. It would seem odd for there to be a duty on a Minister to consider the Charter where there is no one capable of claiming the right. This means that there is a normative constraint on the decision-maker to consider values (perhaps pale imitations of rights) that may not actually at issue in the case. Should this appear odd, it isn’t necessarily so to those who support Charter values. In Loyola, for example, the plurality seemed to draw an equality between rights and values, such that each are protections that can be claimed in any given case (see Loyola, at para 35). And as one author suggests, perhaps this means that even where a claimant does not have an official Charter right to claim “they ought to have had the protection of Charter values” (see here, at 79).

The key word here is “ought.” What s.23 ought to protect, in the view of one person, is evidently different than the value choices embedded in that provision. I worry, specifically, about the use of Charter values to defeat the choices made in the Charter on this contentious issue. It distorts this Charter—as opposed to some other Charter of values—to ignore the specific choices made in the text, and to judicially-administer an ever-changing constitution of values, which can be raised where the actual Charter does not apply. The creation of two Charters must be avoided, and this should mean putting an end to expansive Charter values arguments that require judicial extension of existing rights.

There are a number of counter-arguments that could be advanced: some relating to administrative law precedent, and some to the specific context of s.23. It is true that the Supreme Court has referred to an administrative duty to consider Charter values. In Baker, the Court noted that “discretion must be exercised in accordance with the boundaries imposed by the statute, the principles of the rule of law, the principles of administrative law, the fundamental values of Canadian society, and the principles of the Charter” (Baker, at para 56). In Doré, the Court noted that administrative decisions are “always required to consider fundamental values” (Doré, at para 35). Even in the NWTCA decision, the Court claims that it is a “truism that public decision makers should always have regard to fundamental societal values, such as liberty, dignity, and equality” [57].

Putting aside that these values may already map onto existing Charter rights, or are otherwise amorphous and contested (they should not lead inexorably to some pre-determined outcome), I do not think these precedents can be marshalled in favour of the expansive proposition that Charter values are independent constraints on administrative discretion. It is obviously true that a decision-maker is required to consider Charter rights when those rights are argued. So, post-Vavilov, courts have found that when claimants do not raise Charter arguments before a decision-maker or only briefly refer to them, there is no concomitant duty on a decision-maker to engage in a Charter analysis (see e.g. Canada (Attorney General) v Robinson, 2022 FCA 59 at para 28). It’s only a small skip to the next step: of course administrators have a duty to consider the Charter, when a right is claimed, but values in the ether should not expand the scope of the Charter to situations where it “ought” to apply.

More specifically, and for good reason, recent precedent of the SCC clamps down on these sorts of arguments: specifically City of Toronto and Quebec Inc. While clarifying that the dominant approach to Charter interpretation is purposive in nature, the Court has finally confirmed that the text remains the starting point to all Charter interpretation. Unwritten principles and values may form a part of doctrinal construction, or construing the scope of a right—but these values must be properly-scoped, and they cannot be used to distort, undershoot, or overshoot the actual rights at hand. This is common sense in many ways, but the simple conclusions from these cases have a great deal of relevance for the continued use of Charter values.

It could also be argued that the specific context of s.23 would permit non-rights holders to act on behalf of the “entire Francophone community” [60]. In this way, the fact that the right is, in part, collective might signal that the Minister should consider s.23 “values.” I think this is wrong. To permit this would be to allow non-rights holders to “piggyback” on those who enjoy the right in question [60]. The collective aspect of a right does not require its extension in this fashion.

People who defend the Charter should be interested in ensuring its scope is limited to the sorts of interests it was meant to protect. The situation we have, these days, with the review of administrative decisions implicating constitutional rights is unsustainable. Most of it distorts orthodox constitutionalism. We have Doré , which can counsel weak review in particular cases when rights are actually advanced; and when rights are not advanced, A.B. brings forward the contention that the Charter applies nonetheless. We have a Charter of Values applying strongly where it shouldn’t, and a Charter of Rights being diluted by a deferential standard of review. This seems odd.

Nothing Doing

Why I’m not moved by the responses to my criticism of O’Bonsawin J’s appointment to the Supreme Court

I recently wrote a post that was sharply critical of the appointment of Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin to the Supreme Court of Canada. The National Post then ran a slightly modified version of it as an op-ed. Rob Breakenridge also interviewed me on my views. Somewhat to my surprise, the responses that have reached me were, on the whole, more supportive than not. While the public reaction to Justice O’Bonsawin’s appointment is almost uniformly positive (except for my post and op-ed, the only other sustained criticism came in The Line‘s editorial, which is more proof that you should subscribe to them), in reality there is a good deal of disappointment, some of it very bitter indeed, within and beyond the Canadian legal community.

That said, of course, quite a few people were also unpersuaded, or worse, by what I have had to say. I don’t think I have seen anyone attempt to rebut my argument to the effect that, considering the limitations of her career so far and the shallowness of the responses on her government questionnaire Justice O’Bonsawin lacks either the accomplishments or the intellectual excellence to be a Supreme Court judge. Instead, what has been put forward is any number of reasons why either my arguments or I should simply be ignored. In this post, I quickly respond to them, in rough descending order of seriousness and good faith.

You’re not impressed now, but Justice O’Bonsawin could still turn out to be great!

This is true, of course. She could. I’m not optimistic as to the likelihood of this, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. That said, I don’t think this is a good response to my criticism of Justice O’Bonsawin’s appointment. It’s a bit like saying that buying a lottery ticket is a good idea because one might end up winning. One might, but the odds are bad enough that it’s still an irresponsible decision. And while I’m content to stipulate that Justice O’Bonsawin’s odds of turning out to be a reasonably good Supreme Court judge (not everyone needs to be great!) are better than those of getting a winning lottery ticket, the cost of a bad choice is also rather more than just a few dollars. Justice O’Bonsawin could hold office for more than a quarter of a century. If she turns out to be a dud, c’est long longtemps as Quebeckers say. Appointments to the Supreme Court are not trifles to gamble with.

And, by the way, it is always important to remember the opportunity costs of decisions: appointing Justice O’Bonsawin means, among other things, not appointing some other, better qualified judge now. Realistically, it may also mean not appointing a better qualified Indigenous judge to the Supreme Court in the near or medium-term future; at the very least, the pressure for such an appointment will now be much less than it would have been otherwise. True, we’ll never hear about these unmade appointments. But the unseen is no less important than the seen.

You’re making too much of a silly questionnaire; it’s no basis to assess a future judge!

There’s something to this too. Justice Rowe turned out not to be the “judge unbound” I had expected him to be based on his questionnaire. Clearly, the method of predicting future judicial performance based on this has serious limitations. But while that may be a good argument against relying on it with respect to most appointments, Justice O’Bonsawin’s case is exceptional in that the questionnaire is well-nigh all that we can judge her appointment on. What is more, it is well-nigh all that that the government that appointed her had at its disposal. Unsurprisingly given the shortness of her career on the bench, Justice O’Bonsawin has written few judgments of importance ― few enough that she listed her PhD as one the top five pieces of writing, and that thesis has been hidden from public view. (By the way: I think some people have made too much of this; I wouldn’t expect to find some sort of smoking gun there; it’s probably boring; but having mentioned it as being one of her most significant outputs, Justice O’Bonsawin should not have kept it secret.) She has no academic publications. Her career as an in-house lawyer was also not the sort that leaves a record that lends itself to serious assessment. If we also ignore the questionnaire, we must conclude she is a cypher. Well, I don’t think cyphers are fit for appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Admittedly, some people might disagree.

We shouldn’t even try assessing a newly-appointed judge! Let’s see how their career turns out and pass judgment once they retire.

First, I think it’s worth noting that this argument, which would have applied to every judicial appointment ever, seems to be brand new. Perhaps I have missed it being made in the past ― I’d be grateful if someone pointed me to previous examples ― but anyway I daresay it was not a common one. On the contrary, people were quite happy to criticize, for example, the appointments of Justice Brown to the Supreme Court and of Justices Huscroft and Miller to the Ontario Court of Appeal. People were also happy to praise the appointments of, say, Justice Jamal and indeed that of Justice O’Bonsawin to the Supreme Court, and if it’s too soon to criticize a new judicial appointment, then surely it is also too soon to praise it. I add that the government itself is obviously keen to take credit for its judicial appointments: it evidently doesn’t think that they cannot be assessed until long after it is out of office.

That said, to be sure, an argument isn’t wrong just because it’s new and convenient. But the claim that judicial appointments can only be criticized (or praised) retrospectively is simply wrong on the merits. Courts, and especially the Supreme Court, exercise considerable power. (Richard Albert has suggested that the Supreme Court of Canada might be the most powerful court in the world. Whether or not he is quite right about this, it is surely a very powerful institution.) At the same time, courts are ― by design, and rightly ― not meaningfully accountable for the exercise of their authority. It is, then, very important that the decisions as to whom to appoint to the bench, especially the Supreme Court, be made with a degree of thoughtfulness proportionate to its importance, and that these decisions be subject to meaningful accountability. Criticism of bad appointments, just like praise of good ones, is not only permissible but essential to ensure the government of the day takes this responsibility with all the required seriousness.

Are you saying only appellate judges/judges who have served on both trial and appellate courts should be appointed to the Supreme Court?

I said no such thing (and indeed I specifically got the Post to drop a proposed edit that might have carried that implication), but quite a few people seem to have concluded that I did. So, in case this clarification is useful, no I don’t think there’s a specific amount or sort of judicial, or indeed any other, experience that is mandatory for a future Supreme Court judge. Some of the smartest and most interesting judges in recent decades were appointed directly from the bar ― namely, Justices Sopinka, Binnie, and Côté. An appointment from a trial court is unusual (Beverley McLachlin was the Chief Justice of British Columbia’s Supreme Court, a trial court, when appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, but she had served on the BC Court of Appeal before). But if a Supreme Court judge can lack any judicial experience at all, then having only trial court experience should be no obstacle. What one would want to see in appointee is a track record of excellence ― whether in practice, in the academy, on the bench, or in some mix of these ― and indications of some degree of brilliance. Again, there’s no one right route to this. Justice O’Bonsawin’s record, however, falls far short of what one would expect on the Supreme Court.

Not that this matters, according to some people. Now we’re getting into really silly territory.

Legal skills/qualifications are irrelevant anyway!

This too, I think, is a novel argument. And also a bad one. Even on the view that the law often “runs out” and decisions in hard cases have to rely on judges’ moral sense ― not by any means an uncontroversial view, and one of which I am sceptical (at least in this far-reaching form) but a widespread one ― judicial decision-making has to start with the law, even if it turns out that it cannot end there. If we aspire to anything like a government of laws rather than unaccountable personal rule, we should expect and demand that judges be skilful lawyers, whatever else they might also need to be.

You’re undermining confidence in the Supreme Court!

Sure I am. A Supreme Court one of whose members is not qualified for membership and should not have been appointed deserves less confidence than a court of which this is not true. That was the whole point of the litigation around the appointment of Justice Nadon ― another one which plenty of people thought it was permissible to criticize, by the way, including due to the perceived insufficiency of his credentials (which, whatever one makes of them, were considerably stronger than Justice O’Bonsawin). There is no question that Justice O’Bonsawin’s appointment is legal and constitutional. But, as I said in my original post, it is bad for Canada’s legal system all the same, and nothing requires me or anyone else to be an ostrich about it.

You’re racist/sexist!

We all knew this one coming, didn’t we? Criticizing the appointment of an Indigenous woman to the Supreme Court is, by itself, conclusive evidence of racism and/or sexism in some quarters of what is sometimes mistaken for polite society. Suffice it to say that attacks on, say, a John McWhorter or a J.K. Rowling from the same quarters are not held to be evidence of racism or sexism. The “principle” on which this sort of response to my post is based is just partisan horseshit. Like Pierre Trudeau, I’ve been called worse things by better people.

I think this about covers it. I should say, though, that there was less real horseshit than I had expected. Perhaps people had already decided that I am too much of a heretic to bother about. Perhaps they are quietly taking notes and not telling me. Either way, I suppose I will not be welcome in the “polite society” whence such accusations originate. That’s as well. I have as little time for it as it has for me.

I remain unpersuaded by the responses to my take on Justice O’Bonsawin’s appointment. She is not Supreme Court material, and should not be sitting on that court. And by the way, my saying so is no slight on her personally. There’s nothing wrong with not being Supreme Court material. Most lawyers aren’t. Probably even most judges, let alone most judges who have only spent five years on the bench. One can be a fine person and even a fine judge without this. But appointing someone who is not Supreme Court material to a role for which she is not qualified is a grave fault. We’re hearing much about whether this or that politician will undermine Canadian institutions. Sadly, the Prime Minister’s and the Justice Minister’s choice of Justice O’Bonsawin does just that.

A Little Representation

Justice O’Bonsawin is not qualified to be a Supreme Court judge

Last week, the Canadian government announced the appointment of Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to the Supreme Court. As I had done after the appointment of Justice Rowe, I have read the questionnaire in which she explains her views on her career, diversity, and the role of the Supreme Court and its judges. It brings to mind the notorious argument Roman Hruska, a US Senator from Nebraska, made on behalf of the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the US Supreme Court: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.” Justice O’Bonsawin, I am afraid, is also no Cardozo, and no Frankfurter either, for better and for worse.

Nothing in particular qualifies Justice O’Bonsawin for the Supreme Court. She had a seemingly ordinary career as in-house counsel, first at Canada post and then as General Counsel at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group. I presume she has done good work there ― especially in relation to mental health, with which she seems to have been much concerned, given the nature of her job ― but it is not the stuff of stardom. She has been a Superior Court judge for five years and claims that she has “developed significant knowledge and expertise in our three areas of work: criminal, family and civil litigation”. So, presumably, does any other Superior Court judge, to say nothing of those on the Court of Appeal. Remarkably, Justice O’Bonsawin lists her PhD, for which she did most of the work while on the bench ― and which she has made inaccessible to the public! ―, among the “most significant cases or matters that [she] dealt with while in legal practice or as a judge”. Perhaps I am blasé, but this strikes me as a bit pathetic as a qualification for the Supreme Court, though of course, as Justice O’Bonsawin notes, getting it done while also having a demanding day job is a testament to her work ethic and commitment.

Justice O’Bonsawin’s answer to the question about her “insight into the variety and diversity of Canadians and their unique perspectives” is perhaps the most interesting one of the whole questionnaire, albeit for what it says about the “diversity” discourse more than about her. Tellingly, Justice O’Bonsawin speaks more about her various identities ― “as a francophone First Nations woman, a parent, a lawyer, a scholar and a judge” ― than about “the variety and diversity of Canadians”. I’m not criticizing Justice O’Bonsawin here. Of course a single person’s experience of “the variety and diversity of” soon-to-be 40 million people is limited. But her answers hold up a mirror to the way that diversity talk is usually more about oneself than it is about the diversity of one’s fellow-citizens. Another characteristic point: back when she was first applying to the bench, Justice O’Bonsawin simply said that she had grown up off-reserve. Now, she speaks of “[t]he colonial separation of my family from my First Nation”. To me this feels rote rather than heartfelt. But again, that’s what the diversity discourse requires.

That said, to her credit, Justice O’Bonsawin isn’t entirely down with the programme. She writes that “[a]s Canadians, we must stop focusing on our differences and embrace diversity in order to move our country forward in a progressive manner”. While this ― like much else in Justice O’Bonsawin’s answers ― is more about the feeling than the meaning, the idea that embrace of diversity is compatible with, and even requires, a little less narcissism of small differences is a pretty good feeling to have.

Sadly, I have little positive to say about Justice O’Bonsawin’s answers about the role of judges and of the Supreme Court. While they are banal, and no more “unbound”, to use the word I’d applied Justice Rowe, than might be expected of a generic judge appointed by the Liberal government, they are remarkably shallow. A very average first-year law student might have written something quite similar, and received a very average grade for the effort. This applies, by the way, to Justice O’Bonsawin’s writing style (and indeed grammar), though as I said about Justice Rowe, one should not be judged too harshly on the prose with which one fills a government form.

The first sentence sets the tone. The soon-to-be Supreme Court judge informs us that “The role of a judge in a constitutional democracy requires them to always apply impartiality, act independently and with integrity, and remain cognizant of the pillars of the Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms”. I’m not sure how one “applies impartiality”, or what “the pillars of the constitution and the Canadian Charter” are. I’m also not sure whether Justice O’Bonsawin actually thinks the constitution and the Charter are two different things ― this is by no means the only place in her questionnaire where she uses this sort of phrasing.

Another puzzler, from a bit later on: Justice O’Bonsawin writes that “[t]here is a fine balance between constitutional and legislative powers”. Does she mean constitutional rights (she might, because that’s what she is talking about just before). Or some kind of powers that aren’t about legislation? And another one, from the discussion of the Supreme Court’s relationship with its various “audiences”: “Decisions from the Supreme Court of Canada guide litigants through the legal system. This guidance must assure litigants proceed with legal claims well founded in fact and the law.” How can guidance from on high provide this assurance? Does Justice O’Bonsawin mean that it must help litigants formulate sound claims? That would be a sensible thought, but one can only hope that Justice O’Bonsawin’s opinions will be clearer than this, if indeed they are to guide anyone.

Let me now discuss some substantive issues that arise from Justice O’Bonsawin’s answers. First, her thoughts on the constitution. She explains that “[a] judge must continuously interpret the Constitution as a living and breathing document that is reflective of the beliefs and aspirations of generations since its original implementation.” I don’t know what a “breathing document is” ― by my lights, a living one is ghoulish enough, but that’s a minority view. But even apart from that, I’m not sure, about this “generations since” business. What if the “beliefs and aspirations” of the generations that have succeeded one another since 1982, never mind 1867, are not in agreement? Justice O’Bonsawin adds that “[t]he Constitution should not be used as an impediment to individual rights”. Does that mean that when the constitution doesn’t protect a right it ought to be ignored and the right be given “benediction”, Justice Abella-style, by the courts? Conversely, when the “generations since” the constitution’s enactment aspire to impede individual rights ― as they do on a pretty regular basis, which is precisely why rights are protected by constitutions placed out of majoritarian reach ― should judges give way to their views?

The issue of the judge’s relationship with public opinion arises more broadly throughout Justice O’Bonsawin’s answers ― and she tries very hard to have it both ways. On the one hand, “a judge must remain independent from influence or pressure”. On the other ― in the very next paragraph ―, “[a] recurring and oft heard criticism of the judiciary is that judges are out of touch. In an ever-changing climate, a judge must adapt to respond to these changes.” We are not told what changes exactly judges must adapt to, but telling the judges to evolve with the zeitgeist is not so easy to reconcile with their remaining independent from external influence. On the one hand, Supreme Court judges “do not react strategically to external political pressures”. On the other ― in the very next sentence ―, the reason for not reacting strategically is that “[t]his maintains the legitimacy of the Supreme Court of Canada’s standing and its decisions”. Is this not a strategic consideration? The worst of it is that I am pretty sure Justice O’Bonswain isn’t being sneaky ― I really don’t think she realises what a maze of self-contradiction her answers are.

One more beat on the issue of external influences. Justice O’Bonsawin warns that “[a] constitutional democracy will face threats, not only from within its borders, but also from abroad which is further facilitated with social media.” This would have been music to the government’s ears, what with its worries about foreign interference, and bodes ill for the prospects of Justice O’Bonsawin standing up its ongoing attempts to censor online communications. Justice O’Bonsawin adds that “[b]eliefs in other areas of the world should not influence or affect how our Constitution is interpreted and applied to all Canadians, absent the pressure of external forces”. Again I don’t know what to make of the last bit ― should beliefs in other parts of the world influence how the constitution is interpreted if external forces are exerted? Let’s just pretend it’s not there. The idea that the courts should pay little or no attention to “beliefs in other areas of the world” is in line with recent Supreme Court decisions such as Quebec (Attorney General) v 9147-0732 Québec inc, 2020 SCC 32, though not with the open-minded self-image that is dear to many Canadian lawyers. But then, Justice O’Bonsawin explains that Canada “must strive to be a beacon for others as to how a constitutional democracy should be protected and fairly applied to all”. So Canadian judges ought not to be influenced by foreign thought, but those foreigners will be oh-so-lucky to learn from us. This too is not new. The majority in Frank v Canada (Attorney General), 2019 SCC 1, [2019] 1 SCR 3 took just this approach. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like now.

Lastly, let me return to the issue of rights. What does Justice O’Bonsawin have in mind? She specifically mentions equality, which she explains “is not treating everyone the same but treating everyone with fairness and equity taking their differences into account”. As it happens, I recently urged students to drop the word “fairness” from their vocabulary, because it means nothing in particular and tends either to hide a lack of thought given to the subject or to paper over disagreement. Justice O’Bonsawin, who is a prolific user of the f-word, should do the same. Alongside equality, she also mentions language rights, specifically s 16 of the Charter. And that’s it. Freedom of religion? Freedom of expression? Presumption of innocence? Not that one should necessarily expect a would-be Supreme Court judge to name-check every Charter right in their questionnaire, but the exclusive focus on equality is sadly characteristic of a certain kind of thinking about the law that strikes me as quite impoverished.

There would be still more to say, but none of it more positive than what I have already said. Let me quote just one more passage:

Charter values, such as substantive equality, dignity, fairness and human rights, are beacons for a Supreme Court of Canada Justice’s reasoning. Respecting these values support the public interest in ensuring all Canadians are treated fairly and equally for all rights protected and shared by all. They ensure national equality before the law, which is a core value of our judicial system.

Again, some of it plain silly ― Charter values include human rights! Some, incomprehensible ― national equality before the law? Is that equality before the law with Canadian characteristics? None of it is interesting or thoughtful.

I repeat my verdict: Justice O’Bonsawin is a very average lawyer who is out of her depth when it comes to the big-picture questions that a Supreme Court judge is forced ― by no means in every case, but with some regularity ― to turn his or her mind to. I’m sure she is a good and well-meaning person; she may, for all I know, have been a competent trial judge; but neither her career nor her thinking come close to qualifying her for the Supreme Court. Her appointment is transparently political, and it does a disservice to the Court that will have to welcome her, and to the Rule of Law in Canada.

Undignified

The Supreme Court holds that life imprisonment without parole is unconstitutional. Its reasons are unconvincing.

In R v Bissonnette, 2022 SCC 23, the Supreme Court unanimously finds unconstitutional the provision of the Criminal Code that, in effect, allowed persons found guilty of multiple murders to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The Court holds that the denial of a chance at release to all those on whom such sentences are imposed makes their imposition cruel and unusual, regardless of the nature of the crimes leading to it, and so contrary to section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In my view, the Supreme Court is wrong.

The case concerns a man who, executing a premeditated plan, entered a mosque “and, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol, opened fire on the worshippers. In less than two minutes, he caused the death of six innocent people” [11] and injured others. The prosecution sought to have him sentenced to serve the mandatory periods of parole ineligibility for each of the murders consecutively, amounting to a total of 150 years. But the Superior Court and the Court of Appeal both found that doing so would be unconstitutional. The former re-wrote the law to impose a 40-years ineligibility period. The latter simply struck it down and imposed the default sentence for a first-degree murder, life imprisonment and parole ineligibility for 25 years.

Writing for the Court, the Chief Justice draws on its recent decisions in Quebec (Attorney General) v 9147‑0732 Québec inc, 2020 SCC 32 and Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse), 2021 SCC 43, to hold that section 12 of the Charter protects human dignity, which “evokes the idea that every person has intrinsic worth and is therefore entitled to respect”. [59] A punishment may contravene section 12 in two distinct ways. The more familiar one, which is involved in cases on mandatory minimum sentences that make up the bulk of section 12 jurisprudence, involves punishment that is grossly disproportionate to the particular offence for which it is imposed. To decide whether a given punishment is contrary to section 12 on this basis, the court must consider the offence. But there is a separate and logically prior category of section 12 breaches. It concerns punishments that are “intrinsically incompatible with human dignity”. [60] Here, the question of disproportionality does not arise at all; the punishment is simply not one that may imposed, no matter the offence. This category is “narrow” [64] but its contents “will necessarily evolve” along with “society’s standards of decency”. [65]

A punishment that belongs to this category “could never be imposed in a manner consonant with human dignity in the Canadian criminal context” because it “is, by its very nature, degrading or dehumanizing”, taking into account its “effects on all offenders on whom it is imposed”. [67] The Chief Justice adds that “the courts must be cautious and deferential” [70] before concluding that a punishment chosen by Parliament is of such a nature. However, once they reach this conclusion, because the imposition of such punishment is categorically forbidden, it can no more be discretionary than automatic, and it will not be mitigated by the existence of a prerogative power of mercy.

With this framework in mind, the Chief Justice considers whether effective life imprisonment without parole, which is what a parole ineligibility period of 50, let alone 75 or more years amounts to, falls into the category of punishments that “degrading or dehumanizing” by nature. In his view it is. There seem to be two somewhat distinct though no doubt mutually supportive reasons why this is so. On the one hand, such a punishment denies the important of rehabilitation as a part of the sentencing process. On the other, it is especially harsh on those subject to it.

On the issue of rehabilitation, the Chief Justice argues that life imprisonment without parole is incompatible with human dignity because “it presupposes at the time of its imposition, in a definitive and irreversible way, that the offender is beyond redemption and lacks the moral autonomy needed for rehabilitation”. [81] Rehabilitation is inextricably linked to human dignity, and “negat[ing] the objective of rehabilitation from the time of sentencing” “shakes the very foundations of Canadian criminal law”. [84] Even if rehabilitation seems unlikely, “[o]ffenders who are by chance able to rehabilitate themselves must have access to a sentence review mechanism after having served a period of incarceration that is sufficiently long to denounce the gravity of their offence”. [85] Rehabilitation can take the back seat to denunciation and deterrence, but not left by the wayside, as it were. The Chief Justice adds that “the objectives of denunciation and deterrence … lose all of their functional value” after a point, “especially when the sentence far exceeds human life expectancy”, which “does nothing more than bring the administration of justice into disrepute and undermine public confidence in the rationality and fairness of the criminal justice system”. [94]

As for the harshness of life sentences without parole, the Chief Justice quotes descriptions of this sort of punishment as tantamount to a death sentence and writes that “[o]nce behind prison walls, the offender is doomed to remain there until death regardless of any efforts at rehabilitation, despite the devastating effects that this causes”, [82] such as “the feeling of leading a monotonous, futile existence in isolation from their loved ones and from the outside world”, [97] which can even lead some to suicide. But the Chief Justice is clear that this does not foreclose each and every sentence that would have the effect of “dooming” the offender to remain in prison until death: “an elderly offender who is convicted of first degree murder will … have little or no hope of getting out of prison”. [86] This is nonetheless acceptable “since it is within the purview of Parliament to sanction the most heinous crime with a sentence that sufficiently denounces the gravity of the offence”. [86] What matters is that the existing 25-year parole ineligibility period does not “depriv[e] every offender of any possibility of parole from the outset”. [86]

The Chief Justice then considers comparative materials, reviewing the laws and some case law from a number of countries, as well as some international jurisdictions. I will not say much about this to avoid overburdening this post, though the Chief Justice’s comments about the way in which such materials can and cannot be used, which echo those of the majority in Québec Inc, are worth considering. I will note, however, that the most pertinent comparative source of them all, the sentencing judgment in the New Zealand case of R v Tarrant, [2020] NZHC 2192, about which I have written here, is simply ignored. This isn’t entirely the Chief Justice’s fault, since, so far as I can tell, the factums for the prosecution and the Attorneys-General of Canada, Québec, and Ontario also fail to mention it. Yet I find the omission striking, and culpable on the part of both the lawyers and the Supreme Court.

Finally, having found a breach of section 12 of the Charter, and in the absence of any attempt by the government to justify it, the Chief Justice considers the remedy to grant. I will not address this issue here, but stay tuned ― there will be more on it on the blog in the days or weeks ahead.

The Chief Justice’s opinion does not persuade me. For one thing, it sits uneasily with precedent. The Chief Justice duly quotes his predecessor’s judgment for the unanimous Supreme Court in R v Safarzadeh-Markhali, 2016 SCC 14, [2016] 1 SCR 180, to the effect that sentencing principles, “do not have constitutional status. Parliament is entitled to modify and abrogate them as it sees fit, subject only to s 12 of the Charter“. [71] This includes both the principle of proportionality and “other sentencing principles and objectives” [Bissonnette, 53] That would seem to include rehabilitation, which the Chief Justice enumerated in the discussion sentencing principles that precedes this passage. And yet it follows from the rest of his judgment that rehabilitation is in fact constitutionally protected. It has a special relationship with human dignity, and cannot be excluded, contrary to the suggestion in Safarzadeh-Markhali, which, however, is not overruled or indeed even discussed at this point in the Chief Justice’s reasons. This is a muddle, which is not helped by the Chief Justice’s disclaimer of any “intent … to have the objective of rehabilitation prevail over all the others”. [88] If rehabilitation, alone among the sentencing objectives and principles ― even proportionality ― is constitutionally entrenched, then it is indeed put on a different plane.

The Chief Justice might think that his disclaimer holds up because, as we have seen, he insists that rehabilitation only needs to be available to those offenders who have “served a period of incarceration that is sufficiently long to denounce the gravity of their offence”. But he does not consider whether ― and, despite his professed commitment to deference, does not consider that Parliament may have concluded that ― in some cases, “no minimum period of imprisonment would be sufficient to satisfy the legitimate need to hold [the offenders] to account for the harm [they] have done to the community [or] denounce [their] crimes”. [Tarrant, 179] If that is so, then the same reasons that prevent rehabilitation from, say, abridging the sentences of elderly murders ought to prevent it from standing in the way of life imprisonment without parole. But it does so stand, because of its alleged special connection with dignity.

Note that dignity itself is a judicial add-on to section 12 of the Charter; it’s no apparent part of the provision. As Maxime St-Hilaire and I pointed out in our comment on the first instance judgment in this case

the Supreme Court struggled for the better part of a decade to integrate human dignity into its equality jurisprudence, and gave up ― recognizing in R v Kapp, 2008 SCC 41 [2008] 2 SCR 483 that “human dignity is an abstract and subjective notion”, “confusing and difficult to apply”. [22]

Something, I suppose, has changed, though the Chief Justice no more bothers to tell us why Kapp was wrong than he does explaining his apparent departure from Safarzadeh-Markhali. And note, moreover, that the alleged violation of human dignity that results from life imprisonment without parole is also the fruit of a judicial say-so. The Chief Justice asserts that such a sentence amounts to denial of an offender’s capacity to rehabilitate him- or herself. But it is at least just as ― in my view more ― plausible to see it as Justice Mander did in Tarrant: as expressing the view that nothing less will adequately denounce the crime. The offender may repent it; he or she may become a saint; but still denunciation will demand nothing less than continuing imprisonment. This is not am implausible view ― again, a thoughtful judgment of the New Zealand High Court has taken it ― and the Chief Justice never confronts, let alone refutes, it.

Even if you disagree with me on this, it remains the case that the Chief Justice’s reasons suffer from a serious logical flaw on their own dignitarian terms. Again, he accepts that some, perhaps a not inconsiderable number of, people will be imprisoned without any realistic prospect of being able to apply for parole, as a consequence of their age at sentencing and the duration of a fit sentence (or indeed a mandatory ― but constitutional ― one). He claims that this acceptable because such a sentence “does not exceed constitutional limits by depriving every offender of any possibility of parole from the outset”. [86; emphasis added] But that’s not how human dignity works. Dignity, if it means anything at all, is personal. Elsewhere, the Chief Justice shows he understands this, for instance when he writes that “rehabilitation is intimately linked to human dignity in that it reflects the conviction that all individuals carry within themselves the capacity to reform and re-enter society”. [83; emphasis added] In other words, because we are separate and distinct individuals, your dignity is not upheld if I’m being treated in accordance with dignitarian requirements. Yet that is exactly what the Chief Justice’s approach presupposes. Because some people get a chance at parole, those who don’t are treated with dignity. It’s a dodge, and a very clumsy one.

Finally, although I do not think that the court’s role is “to weigh fundamental values in our society”, [2] I agree that the courts do not operate in a moral vacuum. Yet they should not seek to fill this vacuum with what Professor St-Hilaire, in our comment on the Court of Appeal’s decision in this case, and I have described as “abstract, and ultimately soulless, humanitarianism”. Sadly, this is exactly what the Supreme Court is doing here. It is striking that almost nothing about the crime that led to this case, beyond describing it as an “unspeakable horror” [1] behind which were “hatred, racism, ignorance and Islamophobia”. [10] Perhaps I being unfair here, but to me this sounds like empty slogans or, to repeat, soulless humanitarianism. By contrast, the Chief Justice’s description of the suffering of those condemned to life imprisonment without parole, which I partly quote above, is specific and vivid. I do not suppose that the Chief Justice is really more moved by this suffering than by that of the victims of the offender here. But, in his otherwise commendable determination to reject vengeance and uphold the rights of the justly reviled, he writes as if he were.

To be clear, rejecting pure vengeance as the basis of sentencing policy is right. So is the empowering the courts to check Parliament’s excesses in this realm. The politicians calling for the section 12 of the Charter to be overridden at the next opportunity are wrong, because they are opening the door to abuse and casual disregard of the rights it protects. But that does not mean that the Supreme Court is necessarily right when it protects these rights, and it isn’t right here. Bissonnette is legally muddled, logically flawed, and morally blinkered. It is not a dignified judicial performance.

Mischief and the Chief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://t.co/Z2jEkSmzzp

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

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

Jurisdiction and the Post-Vavilov Supreme Court: Part I

What does “jurisdiction” mean, anyways?

As I wrote in my newsletter last week, the Supreme Court has an awkward relationship with the concept of “jurisdiction.” There is no more tortuous concept in Canadian administrative law. Vavilov, apparently, was the end to the concept of jurisdiction in Canadian administrative law. Vavilov basically said two things about jurisdiction: (1) it is difficult to identify a jurisdictional question, which sheds doubt on the entire enterprise (Vavilov, at para 66); and (2) as a result, “[w]e would cease to recognize jurisdictional questions as a distinct category attracting correctness review” (Vavilov, at para 65). Taken together, it was a fair assumption that jurisdictional questions, if they existed at all, would not be recognized in the law of judicial review.

Easier said than done. The Supreme Court in two recent cases have gone back to the well and drawn from the waters of jurisdiction. In both Ward and Horrocks, the various opinions continue to draw on jurisdiction as a concept without interrogating it. Underneath this technical issue of administrative law is a broader, conceptual difference on the Court that remains post-Vavilov.

In this post I’ll address what I think “jurisdiction” means post-Vavilov. In a future post I’ll address Horrocks and what it might mean for post-Vavilov administrative law splits on the Court.

***

In Ward, under a heading titled, “Jurisdiction Over Defamation and Discrimination,” the majority discusses the “jurisdiction” of the tribunal in that case [28]. In the same paragraph, the Court chastises the Tribunal for indirectly extending its “limited direct jurisdiction.” In Horrocks, on the other hand, the whole dispute concerned the jurisdictional boundary between a labour arbitrator and a human rights tribunal.

The entire setup of these cases is based around the idea of jurisdiction. In Ward, the term was thrown around rather willy-nilly to describe the statutory authority—the grant of power—given to the Tribunal. In Horrocks, the term was used as contemplated by Vavilov, as a category attracting correctness review. But in both cases, jurisdiction looms large.

Before continuing, it’s important to note the various ways that “jurisdiction” has been used in Canadian administrative law. There are at least 3 different uses of the term:

Jurisdiction as a preliminary question: this category concerns “neat and discrete points of law” that arise, for example, in a decision of a human rights commission to refer a case to a human rights tribunal (Halifax, at para 27). In Halifax, the Court overturned previous precedents and held that such questions are reviewable on a reasonableness standard (Halifax, at para 38).
So-called “true questions of jurisdiction”: these questions were said to arise “where the tribunal must explicitly determine whether its statutory grant of power gives it authority to decide a particular matter” (Dunsmuir, at para 59). An example of such a question was provided in Dunsmuir: “whether the City of Calgary was authorized under the relevant municipal acts to enact bylaws limiting the number of taxi plate licences” (Dunsmuir, at para 59). Note, here, that this question trades on the same idea of “jurisdiction” as the preliminary questions doctrine, but there is a difference: ostensibly, this brand of jurisidictional questions concerns an issue that goes to the merits. Vavilov did away with this concept of jurisdictional question, to the extent that such questions attract correctness review.
“Jurisdictional boundaries between two or more tribunals”: this is the category of review at issue in Horrocks. Vavilov retained this category as attracting correctness review.

What is immediately clear is that “jurisdiction” is a morass.

What sense should we make of this? In my view, Vavilov left the door of “jurisdiction” open a crack. The result, as Paul Daly presciently observed the day after Vavilov was rendered, is that jurisdiction is still around—a “stake through the heart” will be the only thing to kill it. In the meantime, we must make sense of what is left of jurisdiction. As I noted above, one option is to read Vavilov rather broadly: jurisdiction is dead, and we killed it. But this does not explain (in a satisfying way) what the Court is doing in both Ward and Horrocks. Why mention a concept that is dead?

Instead, I think “jurisdiction” (or, as I shall say, hopefully a better label) remains an important concept in Canadian administrative law. This version of jurisdiction—as used in Ward and Horrocks—is not akin to the concept of jurisdiction known to administrative law history (ie) Anisminic. It is not the “preliminary questions” doctrine put to rest in Halifax. This conception of jurisdiction is basically co-extensive with any number of formulations that describes the authority delegated to an administrative decision-maker. The Supreme Court of the United States describes this as “statutory authority,” which is a good a term as any. This is because, fundamentally, any time an administrative decision-maker acts, it is explicitly or implicitly dealing with the boundaries governing it by statute. Whether this is “jurisdiction,” or “statutory authority” does not matter much. It’s all the same thing.

Now, what is true about jurisdiction is that there are different types of legal questions. Some legal questions could be said to be “preliminary.” An example might be a legal condition precedent to the exercise of another legal power under the same statute. But the difference that Vavilov introduces is simply about the standard of review, not about the existence or not of jurisdictional questions understood in this sense. In other words, to the extent that Halifax and Vavilov dispatched with various types of jurisdictional questions, they only did so to the extent that it matters for the standard of review. Vavilov tells us that questions of jurisdiction, as they were previously known, are hard to identify: and in that sense, they shouldn’t be treated differently than any other legal questions. So whether the question is “preliminary” or on the merits, it’s a legal question that is assimilated to the Vavilov framework.

Why does any of this matter? There is a clarity reason and a substantive reason. For clarity’s sake, the Court should probably not refer to “jurisdiction” anymore. The concept itself, as it is now used, is simply referring to a type of legal question, not a category of review. The Court should adopt some concept of “statutory authority” to describe all the types of legal questions that arise in a typical judicial review proceeding, including anything that might be considered “jurisdictional.” This has nothing to do with the standard of review: all of the questions will be presumed to be reviewed on reasonableness review. On the substantive side, and as we shall see from Horrocks, there are good reasons to take statutes—and the boundaries they set up—seriously. As Vavilov says, the discarding of jurisdiction as a category of review should not lead to the arrogation of administrative power.