Supreme Court of Canada – Page 2

The Woke Dissent

The thinking animating the dissenting opinion in Ward’s case would destroy freedom of expression in the name of equality and safety

As promised, in this post, I come back to the dissenting opinion in Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse), 2021 SCC 43. I commented (mostly) on the majority opinion in my last post. In that post, I referred to The Line‘s editorial by Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney (possibly paywalled, but you should subscribe!), which addressed the case, and especially the dissent, in some detail. Ms. Gerson and Mr. Gurney write that “[t]here’s an incredible amount of popular modern discourse seeping into judicial reasoning” in the dissent ― that “culled plausible-sounding legalese from Twitter logic”. That’s not a bad way of putting it.

I will put it slightly differently. The dissent is, in a word, woke. And I don’t mean “woke” as a generic insult. Nor do I mean, incidentally, that Mr. Gabriel is a snowflake. As noted in my last post, I think he deserves sympathy on human level, though not the protection of the law for his claim. Rather, what I mean by calling the dissent woke is that it embraces a number of specific tenets of contemporary social-justice ideology, which, if they become law ― and remember that they were one vote away from becoming law ― would be utterly corrosive to the freedom of expression.

For one thing, the dissent erases the line between words and actions, so that disfavoured words are treated as deeds and therefore subjected to vastly expanded regulation. Justices Abella and Kasirer write:

We would never tolerate humiliating or dehumanizing conduct towards children with disabilities; there is no principled basis for tolerating words that have the same abusive effect. Wrapping such discriminatory conduct in the protective cloak of speech does not make it any less intolerable when that speech amounts to wilful emotional abuse of a disabled child. [116]

In what is going to be a theme of my comment, this twists the meaning of words beyond recognition; conduct is conduct and speech is speech. Using words instead the proverbial sticks and stones is not just a disguise. It’s the better part of civilization. The law relies on a distinction between words and actions all the time. This is a principle, and a general one, but it has also been a cornerstone of the law of the freedom of expression in Canada since the early days of the Charter. In my last post, I gave the majority grief for disregarding precedent and doctrine. The dissent does the same, only much worse.

Besides, as I once noted here, the negation of the distinction between speech and conduct often combines with a belief that violence against some politically heretical group or other is permissible into the toxic belief that “[w]hat one says, or does, is expression; what one’s opponents say, or do, is violence”. This, in turn, means that law dissolves into a raw competition for political power, with the ability to decide whose expression will stripped of its “protective cloak” and proscribed as the prize.

Another way in which the dissent is woke is its wilful blindness to the context in which words appear. Like critics dragging a writer for the words of an unsavoury character, Justices Abella and Kariser claim that

Mr. Ward remarked that he defended Mr. Gabriel from criticism only until he found out that he was not dying, at which point he took it upon himself to drown him. This implies that it would be too burdensome for society to accept Jérémy Gabriel in the mainstream permanently and that ultimately society would be better off if he were dead.

No, it really doesn’t. Mr. Ward’s persona is, as The Line‘s editorial puts it, that of That Asshole. He is making an obviously hyperbolic statement, a joke ― not remarks at a political meeting. The joke was in poor taste, to be sure, but in no non-woke person’s mind is it a statement about what is best for society. Insofar as Mr. Ward’s comedy was meant as a social commentary, it targeted taboos around joking about certain people or subjects ― not the supposed burdens, or otherwise, of disabled persons for society.

A further symptom of coddling wokeness in the dissenting opinion is its bizarre insistence that Mr. Ward bullied Mr. Gabriel. Justices Abella and Kasirer claim that “[i]n a 2012 interview, Mr. Ward himself acknowledged the view that his comments constituted bullying”. [196] But this isn’t quite true. They quote the relevant interview passage early on in their opinion: it is the interviewer who suggests that Mr. Ward’s jokes amounted to bullying. Mr. Ward himself says “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a good point.” [126] Not quite an admission, by my lights. But, in any case, the idea that comments about a person whom one has never met and will likely never meet, over whom one has no actual power, with whom, indeed, one shares nothing at all can amount to bullying are just twisting the meaning of this emotionally charged word. Nobody can defend bullying of course, just as nobody can, say, defend racism, and Justices Abella and Kasirer again take a leaf out of the woke playbook to redefine words in a way that makes their decision seem beyond debate.

Now, Mr. Gabriel’s classmates seem to have bullied him, and to have used Mr. Ward’s jokes in doing so. But it is only on a woke view that Mr. Ward can be liable for their behaviour. He did not commission or instigate their actions. He doesn’t even know about their existence. Again this is reminiscent of calls for the “cancellation” of a work of fiction or some scientific article on the basis that, regardless of its author’s intentions, it will contribute to discrimination by others.

Then again, Justices Abella and Kasirer wouldn’t agree that Mr. Ward had no power over Mr. Gabriel. A preoccupation with power hierarchies imagined to run entirely along the lines of “privileged” and “oppressed” demographic categories is perhaps the clearest sign of their opinion’s wokeness. They write that

that there is value in the performance of comedy and in criticizing those in power in society. But in the circumstances of this case, condoning the humiliation and dehumanization of a child, let alone one with a disability, would fly in the face of the very idea of the public interest. … Mr. Ward’s message about Mr. Gabriel, albeit one said in jest, was that he was disposable and that society would be better off without him. Unlike other “sacred cows” targeted by Mr. Ward, Jérémy Gabriel fell victim to a stark power imbalance here. [215-16; paragraph break removed]

This focus on power imbalance explains, I suspect, the seeming inconsistency between the position of the dissenters in Ward and in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34 highlighted by Christopher Bredt. (Recall that the the same four judges dissented in both cases.) The Lawyer’s Daily reports that Mr. Bredt, who was part of the legal team that

represented the intervener Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said he finds it incongruous that the minority in the Ward appeal comprises the same four judges who earlier this month vigorously defended freedom of expression to the extent that they would have struck down the Ontario government’s downsizing of wards during Toronto’s municipal election.

The incongruity resolves itself once you account for the fact that in City of Toronto the “stark power imbalance” ran the other way ― the free speech claimants were the less powerful side, and hence the good side in the moral framework that decides worth according to where a person or group stands in an a priori power hierarchy.

In the real world, power hierarchies are not so neat ― which is one of many reasons why they should not be given nearly as much importance as the woke worldview attaches to them. As The Line editors point out,

this is a kid who became famous in all of Quebec, sang, and was enthusiastically cheered by entire hockey stadiums. He performed in front of some of the most famous people in the world. And we’re to believe that the ugly jokes of one stand-up comedian was enough to undo all of this honour and fame? That Mike Ward is uniquely responsible for a disabled child’s ostracization from his peer group and suicidal thoughts?

Justices Abella and Kasirer insist that a celebrity must be treated like everyone else, and does not lose his rights. That’s true ― in a liberal legal system where everyone has equal rights to begin with. In a system whose starting point is not equality, but people’s relative positions in power hierarchies, insistence that cultural prestige, sympathy, and (in other cases) even wealth are to be disregarded are absurd. But it too is characteristic of the specifically woke take on power and inequality.

Like some others who have written about Ward, I find it frightening that this opinion got four votes at the Supreme Court. Had the dissenters found another colleague to agree with them, it’s not only “edgelord comedians”, in The Line‘s words, that would have come under the potential fire of human rights tribunals. Make a disparaging remark about a member of any of the protected groups that references that membership? There, you’re a law-breaker. Make fun of Greta Thunberg in a way that touches on her Asperger’s and selective mutism ― remember, it doesn’t matter that you’re not targeting her for that? Don’t be surprised if the equality bureaucracy comes calling. (I am grateful to my friend and sometime co-author Akshaya Kamalnath for this example.)

And remember, too, that under Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms “political convictions” are a prohibited ground of discrimination as well. Of course, for the foreseeable future, mockery of literal Nazis is undoubtedly safe. You wouldn’t expect human rights tribunals condemn right-thinking members of society! But that’s only good until the day “common good” conservatives get their chance to appoint these tribunals’ members. Then, I’m afraid, the boundaries of permissible discourse will shift.

But abuse of anti-discrimination law as an instrument of censorship would be only the beginning. If speech can be conduct; if the intent of a speaker doesn’t matter for attributing liability for words; if public criticism or mockery can be bullying; if speech can be censored based on how people over whom the speaker has no control might respond to it, or if the right to be free from censorship depends on one’s place in a dogmatic hierarchy of oppression; then hardly any restriction on freedom of speech cannot be justified. It will all be done in the name of safety and equality of course. But it will be no less the end of the freedom of speech, and of democracy, for all that.

It Ends Well

Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s narrow but seemingly decisive rejection of a right not to be offended

Last week, the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse), 2021 SCC 43. By a 5-4 majority, it quashed an award of damages a human rights tribunal had granted to Jérémy Gabriel, a child celebrity, whom a well-known comedian, Mike Ward, had cruelly mocked. As Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney put it in The Line’s editorial (possibly paywalled, but you should subscribe!)

Ward … decided to become That Asshole, the edgelord comedian who pointed out that the kid wasn’t very good. In a few stand-up bits, Ward called the child ugly, and noted that the performances were tolerable only because he thought the singer’s condition was terminal. Nice guy. (Paragraph break removed)

The tribunal, and the Québec Court of Appeal found that this amounted to discrimination in the exercise of Mr. Gabriel’s right to “the safeguard of his dignity” under section 4 of Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, a.k.a. the Québec Charter. The majority of the Supreme Court resoundingly holds otherwise.

Instead of my usual blow-by-blow summary and comment, I will offer some more condensed thoughts on a few striking aspects of this case. While the most important thing about Ward is what, if anything, it means for the freedom of expression, there are a few other things to mention before I get to that. In this post, I mostly focus on the majority opinion. I will shortly post separately about the dissent.

The Human Face

Because I will argue that the majority decision is correct, and indeed that it was very important that Mr. Gabriel not win this case, I want to start by acknowledging that he has had it very hard. Mr. Ward’s jokes at his expense were cruel. Mr. Gabriel did suffer, greatly ― we are told that he even tried to kill himself at one point. I think we can wonder whether the connection between these things is all that strong. I’m not persuaded by the dissent’s imputation to Mr. Ward of the full responsibility for Mr. Gabriel’s bullying by his classmates. We can also argue that anti-discrimination law ― perhaps any law ― isn’t the solution. But we have to recognize that a person has been in a lot of undeserved pain, and a person who, even before this case, had not had it easy in life.

The Court

As already noted, the Court is narrowly divided. The Chief Justice and Justice Côté write for the majority, with Justices Moldaver, Brown, and Rowe concurring. Justices Abella and Kasirer write for the dissent, joined by Justices Karakatsanis and Martin. For those keeping score at home, this is the exact same alignment as in the recent decision in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34. Indeed, even the authorship of the opinions overlaps: in City of Toronto, the Chief Justice wrote with Justice Brown, while Justice Abella wrote for the dissenters.

I’m old enough to remember, as they say, how smugly self-satisfied Canadian commentators were, just a few years ago, at the consensus reigning at our Supreme Court, in contrast to the US one always splitting 5-4. To be sure, two cases do not make a trend, but I think it’s pretty clear that on the Supreme Court as it has recently been constituted there is ― though there are always exceptions ― a somewhat cohesive group consisting of Justices Côté, Brown, and Rowe, and perhaps an even more cohesive group led by Justice Abella, with Justices Karakatsanis, Martin, and Kasirer. The Chief Justice and Justice Moldaver are the swing votes. It remains to be seen how, if at all, Justice Abella’s retirement is changing this, but in the meantime, our Supreme Court has been fractured along lines that can be predicted. This is not necessarily bad. But let’s not be smug.

One odd thing to add is that, whereas in City of Toronto majority and dissent were ― by the standards of the Supreme Court of Canada ― at each other’s throats, here they studiously ignore one another. I’m not sure which is better, but the contrast between cases argued and decided just a month apart, by identical alignments, and with overlapping opinion authorships, is striking.

The Case

One uncomfortable question I have is: should the Supreme Court have taken this case at all? Let me take you straight away almost to the end of the majority judgment, where we learn, for the first time, the following

[I]n light of the Tribunal’s finding that Mr. Ward [translation] “did not choose Jérémy because of his handicap” but rather “because he was a public personality” (Tribunal reasons, at para. 86), it must be concluded that the distinction was not based on a prohibited ground. This conclusion on its own is sufficient to dispose of the appeal. [91]

Everything else that the Court has said and that I’m about to discuss ― that’s just obiter dicta. The tribunal made a basic logical mistake, which, as the majority explains, the Court of Appeal then glossed over. That was, of course, unfortunate. But it’s not the Supreme Court’s role to correct basic logical mistakes by tribunals or even courts of appeal. They’re there to develop the law. And develop the law they do ― in a way that, if the majority is right (and I think it is), was pressing and necessary. But also in a way that, by the majority’s own admission, is beside the point in this case.

I think this raises the issue of the Supreme Court’s role in our constitutional system. Where is the line between developing the law in deciding cases, as we expect them to, and developing the law by making big pronouncements that are unnecessary to decide cases? Should a court refrain from doing the latter, or may it properly seize on the opportunities that present itself to it to provide important guidance to lower courts? I have no firm views on any of this, but I think the questions are worth thinking about. (For some related musings, see here.)

Jurisdiction

Back to the very beginning of the majority’s reasons:

This appeal … invites us … to clarify the scope of the jurisdiction of the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse … and the Human Rights Tribunal … with respect to discrimination claims based on the … Quebec Charter. [1]

Clarify the… what? Yes. That word. The majority uses it several times in the course of its reasons. In particular, it speaks of “the distinction that must be drawn with respect to jurisdiction over, on the one hand, an action in defamation and, on the other, a discrimination claim in the context of the Quebec Charter“. [22]

This is odd. A mere two years ago, in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, all of the Ward majority judges signed an opinion that not only eliminated jurisdictional questions as a distinct category of correctness review, but seemed to endorse scepticism at the very “concept of ‘jurisdiction’ in the administrative law context”. [66] Vavilov said that what might previously have been thought of as jurisdictional questions are legal questions like all others, subject to reasonableness review, except when the respective jurisdictions of two administrative bodies must be demarcated.

One recent example of this reasoning is the decision of the Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice in Morningstar v WSIAT, 2021 ONSC 5576, about which I have written here. The Court roundly rejected the argument that, as I summarized it

the jurisdictional boundary between a tribunal and the ordinary courts should be policed in much the same way as, Vavilov said, “the jurisdictional boundaries between two or more administrative bodies”, [63] ― that is, by hav[ing] the court ensure the boundary is drawn correctly.

I thought ― and still think ― that that was a correct application of Vavilov. Ward, though, says that there is indeed a jurisdictional boundary between administrative tribunals and courts. I don’t think this is consistent with Vavilov. Nothing turns on this here because the case gets to the courts by way of statutory appeal rather than judicial review, and ― under Vavilov ― the correctness standard applies to all legal questions in such circumstances. But the tensions inherent in Vavilov, including in its attempt to rid Canadian administrative law of the fundamental concept of the law of judicial review are becoming apparent. (Co-blogger Mark Mancini has made a similar observation in the latest issue of his newsletter.)

Interpretation

One of the things the majority is right about is that Ward is, among other things, a case about interpretation. It requires the courts to make sense of a somewhat peculiar statutory scheme, which protects, among other things, rights to the freedom of expression and to the “safeguard of [one’s] dignity”, says that “the scope of the freedoms and rights, and limits to their exercise, may be fixed by law”, and protects equality in “the exercise and recognition” of these rights, rather than as a general self-standing right. This is not an easy exercise and I won’t go into all the details, but I will make a few comments.

The majority deserves credit for trying to work out an independent meaning for the right to the safeguard of one’s dignity. As it notes, dignity is a very tricky concept ― and the Supreme Court itself has tried to avoid putting too much weight on it in other contexts. But here it is, in the text of the Québec Charter, a statute that binds the courts. It will not to do to simply find violations of dignity when other rights are violated in particularly egregious ways, as Québec courts had done. The Québec Charter makes it a distinct right, and the courts must treat it as such. At the same time, they have to give it defined contours. The majority seeks to do so by stressing the importance of the safeguard of dignity, to which the right is directed:

Unlike, for example, s. 5 [of the Québec Charter], which confers a right to respect for one’s private life, s. 4 does not permit a person to claim respect for their dignity, but only the safeguarding of their dignity, that is, protection from the denial of their worth as a human being. Where a person is stripped of their humanity by being subjected to treatment that debases, subjugates, objectifies, humiliates or degrades them, there is no question that their dignity is violated. In this sense, the right to the safeguard of dignity is a shield against this type of interference that does no less than outrage the conscience of society. [58]

What the majority does is a careful and, I think, pretty convincing reading of the statutory text. Good.

Some things the majority says are not so good. For instance: “the interpretation of this provision must be refocused on its purpose by considering its wording and context”. [55] No, no, no. Interpretation should be focused on text understood in context. Purpose can sometimes help a court understand the words and enrich its understanding of the context, but it should not be the focus of interpretation. And then, there is this:

This Court’s jurisprudence also establishes “that mere differences in terminology do not support a conclusion that there are fundamental differences in the objectives of human rights statutes” … It follows that, as long as this is not contrary to the usual rules of interpretation, symmetry in the interpretation of the various instruments that protect human rights and freedoms is desirable. [68; quoting Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse) v Montréal (City), 2000 SCC 27, [2000] 1 SCR 665, [47]]

What are we to make of this? If usual rules interpretation are to prevail, differences in terminology must make a difference, if not to the objectives then to the effects of human rights as of any other statutes. And the idea that differences in wording don’t matter because objectives are key to interpretation is specifically rejected in the majority opinion in Quebec (Attorney General) v 9147-0732 Québec inc, 2020 SCC 32 ― signed onto by the same five judges who are in the majority in Ward (even as it is endorsed by the concurrence).

Between the jurisdiction issue and this, I cannot help but wonder whether their Lordships remember what they said last year. Or are they trying to say that we are supposed not to? This stream of inconsistent pronouncements ― by the same people! ― reveals, at best, a lack of attention to legal doctrine and craft. It is very disappointing.

Freedom of Expression

I finally come to the meat of the case. Here too, I want to praise the majority for getting things fundamentally right, but also to criticize them for saying things along the way that are doubtful or even wrong in themselves, or inconsistent ― without explanation ― with important precedent.

Let me start with a quick note from the “judges are not philosophers” file. The majority’s discussion of the freedom of expression begins with the assertion that it, “[l]ike the right to the safeguard of dignity … flows from the concept of human dignity”. [59] Perhaps. But in the next paragraph the majority quotes Joseph Raz’s claim that “a person’s right to free expression is protected not in order to protect him, but in order to protect a public good, a benefit which respect for the right of free expression brings to all those who live in the society in which it is respected”. [60] These are two quite different views of the foundations and purposes of the freedom of expression ― one deontological, the other utilitarian. Perhaps nothing turns on which of these is correct in this case, but if so, the majority shouldn’t be making these philosophical declarations at all. And I suspect that in some cases the choice might actually make a difference. The majority’s approach is muddled and unhelpful.

Now for some good things. This, especially: “freedom of expression does not truly begin until it gives rise to a duty to tolerate what other people say”. [60] This is the key to so many disputes about freedom of expression. Speech is not harmless. It can hurt. It can propagate falsehoods. It can inflame base passions. But freedom of expression means sometimes having to tolerate such things ― just like freedom of assembly means having to tolerate noisy protests, and freedom of religion means having to tolerate heresy and blasphemy ― even when their cost falls on particular groups or even individuals.

The majority adds that “[l]imits on freedom of expression are justified where, in a given context, there are serious reasons to fear harm that is sufficiently specific and cannot be prevented by the discernment and critical judgment of the audience”. [61] This sets a fairly high bar to limits that will be considered justified. It also acknowledges that the audience has its share of responsibility in appreciating troublesome words. Courts assessing a limit on the freedom of expression should not assume that citizens are, by default, unthinking and gullible playthings for the tellers of tall tales. This is also good and important. Assuming away all critical sense among the citizens would help justify all kinds of restrictions on speech, including, and perhaps especially, in the political arena. It is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a self-governing, responsible citizenry.

But this insistence sits uneasily, to say the least, with the Court’s position in Harper v Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 33, [2004] 1 SCR 827. There, the majority said that

The legislature is not required to provide scientific proof based on concrete evidence of the problem it seeks to address in every case. Where the court is faced with inconclusive or competing social science evidence relating the harm to the legislature’s measures, the court may rely on a reasoned apprehension of that harm. [77]

This is contrast to the Harper dissent’s concern that “[t]here [was] no demonstration that” the limits on “third party” spending at issue were “required to meet the perceived dangers of inequality, an uninformed electorate and the public perception that the system is unfair”. [38] By my lights, Ward‘s insistence on serious reasons to fear specific harm, as well as on audience discernment is much more in tune with the Harper dissent. Because I regard Harper as an abominable decision, I am happy to see Ward go in a different direction. But there is no comment in Ward on how these cases interact. Again, it’s as if the judges don’t remember what the law says, though at least Harper is a much older case that Vavilov and Québec Inc.

All that said, the substance of the majority’s decision is right and reassuring (or it would be reassuring if more than five judges had signed on). The majority insists that the right to the safeguard of one’s dignity most not be “vague” or given “a scope so broad that it would neutralize freedom of expression”. [80] It stresses the objective nature of the test for whether this right is breached and rejects the modified objective standard of “a reasonable person targeted by the same words”, because “[t]hat approach results in a shift toward protecting a right not to be offended, which has no place in a democratic society”. [82] What matters is neither “the repugnant or offensive nature of the expression [nor] the emotional harm caused”, [82] but the effect of the words on listeners: would “a reasonable person, aware of the relevant context and circumstances, … view the expression … as inciting others to vilify [its targets] or to detest their humanity on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination” [83] and would “a reasonable person would view the expression, considered in its context, as likely to lead to discriminatory treatment of the person targeted”? [84]

All this is the more important since the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Québec Charter is very broad and includes “political convictions”. As I have written here, “even if we accept the need to protect vulnerable minorities from hate speech targeting them, I struggle to see what makes it necessary to extend this protection to members of political parties or movements”. Protecting people from mockery, let alone hurt feelings, based on their political views is incompatible with lively democratic debate. However much we can wish for such debate to usually be civil, I think it’s a mistake to insist that it always must be, and certainly a grave mistake to put government officials in charge of deciding whether it is sufficiently civil on any give occasion.

The insistence on the need for objective assessment and the clear rejection of a right not to be offended will, I hope, be the key takeaway from Ward. For them, we can forgive the majority opinion its many flaws. That there can be no right not to be offended in a society that proclaims its commitment to the freedom of expression and to democracy might have been self-evident ten years ago, but it evidently isn’t anymore. The dissent offers us a glimpse of what a world in which this truth isn’t recognized looks like. I will focus on it in a forthcoming post.

The Supreme Court―What Is It Good for?

The Supreme Court is deciding fewer cases; is this a sign of modesty, or boldness?

I’d like to come back to a recent post of Mark’s, the one on the Supreme Court seemingly granting leave to appeal in and hearing ever fewer cases. As Mark notes, “[o]n first blush, the grant of fewer leaves is inconsistent with the role the Supreme Court has given itself over time” ― that of a national institution charged with developing the law, and not merely with correcting the errors that occur in the lower courts. Indeed the idea that the Supreme Court’s role is to develop the law follows logically from the requirement that decide whether to grant leave in a case according to whether it presents questions of “public importance” or “the importance of any issue of law or any issue of mixed law and fact involved”. And this requirement is laid down not by the Court but by Parliament, in s 40(1) of the Supreme Court Act. It might even be an essential characteristic of the Supreme Court and thus a constitutional requirement according to Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and 6, 2014 SCC 21, [2014] 1 SCR 433. Who knows.

Be that as it may, Mark argues that, whether or not it is a dereliction of duty, the Supreme Court’s choice to butt out and let the provincial and federal courts of appeal develop the law isn’t all bad:

There is nothing special in the Supreme Court’s decision-making process that makes it any better suited to decide legal questions—apart from the fact that it provides a final resolution. The finality question is important, but we should not kid ourselves: the law can and does settle without the help of the Supreme Court. This suggests that, perhaps, the question is not whether more or fewer leaves are granted. Rather, the question may be whether the Supreme Court is granting leaves to the right cases. (Paragraph break removed)

I have a somewhat different view on this. For one thing, there is at least some reason to think that the Supreme Court’s decision-making process is in fact more suited to the development of the law. For another, and more importantly, the Supreme Court’s choice to take fewer cases is not exactly innocent.

On the process side, the reason panels expand, while the number of cases courts and individual judges hear shrinks, as one goes up the curial hierarchy is that we expect that more judges devoting more time to any one case are more likely to get it right. In particular, the Supreme Court’s nine-judge bench is sure to be more diverse ― geographically, on a number of demographic dimensions, and ideally intellectually too ― than a three- or even five-judge panel of a court of appeal. To be sure, there can be costs associated with larger panels, especially when they try to conjure up unanimous judgments that need to paper over substantial disagreements. But, at least in the long run, this logic seems sound.

The Supreme Court also benefits, if that’s the word, from inputs into its decision-making that should, in theory, improve it. There are more interveners at that level (including Attorneys General from provinces other than the one whence a case originated), more clerks, and more academics writing about cases before the Court. Perhaps some or all of these do more harm than good. (See, for example, Justice Stratas’ skepticism about interventions in Canada (Attorney General) v. Kattenburg, 2020 FCA 164.) But, to the extent that any do some good, they underscore the benefits of the Supreme Court’s decision-making. Again, the effects, if there are any, only appear in the long run. There are tons of great decisions made by courts of appeal, as Mark notes, and far too many bad ones made by the Supreme Court. But the latter does seem to have an institutional advantage.

More importantly though, I think that the Supreme Court does not grant leave in fewer cases out of some sort of modesty. The issue isn’t whether Court sees itself as having an important role in developing the law ― it certainly does ―, but how it chooses to play this role. Crudely, there are two possibilities: on the one hand, a court might develop the law incrementally by deciding many cases; on the other, it might decide only a few cases, but make significant changes to the law in every one. Of course, this is something of a caricature: how much a case develops the law is a matter of degree, a point on a spectrum. And even the same court might not take the same approach in every case. But you get the idea. Mark writes that “[i[f the Court is granting fewer leaves, it is deciding fewer cases that could ‘settle the law’ in areas that require it”. But deciding many cases isn’t the only way to settle the law.

Now it might seem that the two approaches ― many incremental cases or few big ones ― amount to much the same thing, in the long run: 10 cases developing the law by one unit each, the next always building on the last, or one case jumping ahead by 10 units end up in the same place. One might even think that the few-big-cases approach is preferable insofar as it saves some litigants the expense of ending up at the Supreme Court. It might also enable the Supreme Court to maximize the institutional advantages I have described above. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 is an illustration: it attracted all manner of attention from interveners and academics, and the Supreme Court itself appointed amici curiae to assist it.

Despite this, I think that we should be wary of the few-big-cases approach. It sits uneasily with the judicial role ― even the role of a court mandated to develop the law, and not only to do justice between parties in individual cases. Even when developing the law, a court still does so in the process of deciding cases, in response to the gaps or defects revealed by the disputes before it. It can properly seek to fill the gaps or remedy the defects, but it does not hold a roving commission to reform the law on a grand scale. Again, there are degrees of this, and the line between what is and what is not appropriate is blurry. But it should be apparent that, taken to the extreme, the view that a court can reform large areas of the law at once makes its role indistinguishable from that of a legislature.

There is, perhaps, an additional point. The self-perception of a court may matter: does it see itself as primarily engaged in adjudication or in law reform? This is related to but not quite the same as the vexing question of whether courts make or find law. (I discuss an example of the Supreme Court’s puzzlement at this here.) While a court that thinks of the common law as the product of judicial legislation might be inclined to be less modest than one that thinks of it as the product of judicial discovery, it need not necessarily be so; it might see itself as only properly legislating “in the gaps”. Conversely, a court may not be modest despite claiming not to be making law. The Dworkinian conception of judging is like that ― it is not at all modest, despite ostensibly disclaiming judicial law-making. In any case, the court’s self-understanding may shape its decision-making, at least in subtle ways.

And it is easy to point to decisions of the Supreme Court reflect a legislative, ambitious view of its role. Vavilov is one, of course, and very visibly so. Mark compares it to “an academic essay”, but it is at least as much of a legislative act, albeit one less crisp, though more fully reasoned, than a statute. The majority opinion does not even get to the dispute before the court until Part V, paragraph 146. But Vavilov is only an extreme, not the only example. R v Hart, 2014 SCC 52, [2014] 2 SCR 544, where the Court reformed the law on the admissibility of “Mr. Big” confessions, is a favourite of mine. Justice Moldaver, for the majority, explained that he

propose[d] a solution that … strikes the best balance between guarding against the dangers posed by Mr. Big operations, while ensuring the police have the tools they need to investigate serious crime. This solution involves a two-pronged approach that (1) recognizes a new common law rule of evidence, and (2) relies on a more robust conception of the doctrine of abuse of process to deal with the problem of police misconduct. [84]

And then, of course, there are the constitutional cases. There are those where the Supreme Court re-writes the law and gives “benediction” to rights heretofore unknown to our jurisprudence. But others too, like the notorious R v Jordan, 2016 SCC 27, [2016] 1 SCR 631, also have a legislative feel to them.

Mentioning Jordan brings me to an important caveat: I do not mean to suggest that the Supreme Court should never go big. I have defended that decision, which may well have been the only way the right to a trial “within a reasonable time” could have been made more than a dead letter. Hart may have been the only way the considerable injustices plaguing the use of Mr. Big operations were ever going to be addressed, when one considers the resounding silence of Parliament on this issue both before and since. And even a clean-up on the scale of Vavilov may have been inevitable in administrative law. Justice Scalia, in “The Rule of Law as Law of Rules”, famously argued that judges should confidently lay down rules when deciding cases, to achieve equality before the law and predictability, and to bind themselves and their colleagues to a stable legal framework, including in the face of political pressure. There is something to this.

Nonetheless I think the point still stands: the Supreme Court is not necessarily being cautious or taking a laissez-faire approach just because it is deciding fewer cases. It may well be making a choice to develop the law in bold, big steps rather than incrementally. Bold action may have its advantages, and it may sometimes be necessary, but it runs the danger of being less judicial, and thus injudicious. On the whole, I think I would rather that the Supreme Court decided more smaller cases than fewer big ones. But they won’t ask me.

The Supreme Court’s Leaves (Or Lack Thereof)

The Supreme Court has gone yet another week without granting leave to any cases. I am not an empiricist, and this is not something I’ve been tracking, but I gather that the Supreme Court has granted leave to less cases over time in general (not to suggest that this week is particularly representative of anything). Statistics from the Supreme Court from 2009-2019 suggest a drop-off in leave rates, and I imagine that the rate at which the Court granted leave was higher in the 1980s and 1990s than it is now.

There is good work being done to analyze the Supreme Court’s leave practice, an area that I understand is traditionally understudied. Led by Paul-Erik Veel, Lenczner Slaght’s Data-Driven Decisions project, and its related Leave Project, attempt to understand and predict the Supreme Court’s leave practice. And while I am not an expert on the subject, I gather that there is interest in understanding why the Supreme Court has granted fewer leaves over time, and relatedly, whether it is a good or bad thing.

On first blush, the grant of fewer leaves is inconsistent with the role the Supreme Court has given itself over time. Its granting of a constitutional role for itself in the Nadon Reference suggests a court that sits at the centre of Canada’s system of laws. In Henry, at para 53, the Court said the following:

53 In Canada in the 1970s, the challenge became more acute when this Court’s mandate became oriented less to error correction and more to development of the jurisprudence (or, as it is put in s. 40(1) of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. S-26, to deal with questions of “public importance”). The amendments to the Supreme Court Act had two effects relevant to this question. Firstly, the Court took fewer appeals, thus accepting fewer opportunities to discuss a particular area of the law, and some judges felt that “we should make the most of the opportunity by adopting a more expansive approach to our decision-making role”: B. Wilson, “Decision-making in the Supreme Court” (1986), 36 U.T.L.J. 227, at p. 234. Secondly, and more importantly, much of the Court’s work (particularly under the Charter) required the development of a general analytical framework which necessarily went beyond what was essential for the disposition of the particular case.

This passage packs in a number of points. First, the Court sees itself not only as an appellate authority of error correction, but as central to the development of the jurisprudence on issues of public or national importance. In turn, this could plausibly affect the doctrine the Supreme Court applies in certain areas. The Court is not designed simply to point out appellate errors, but in turn develops overarching doctrinal frameworks that sometimes requires the overruling of precedents. A modern example is the Supreme Court’s decision in Vavilov, which reads (sometimes) as an academic essay rather than a traditional judicial decision.

The fact that the Supreme Court grants fewer leaves, then, suggests a Court that is not living up to its role to develop the jurisprudence. If the Court is granting fewer leaves, it is deciding fewer cases that could “settle the law” in areas that require it. For those who see the Supreme Court’s role as, for example, arbitrating between competing national values, a lower leave rate suggests a less relevant Supreme Court than its members sometimes imagine.

On the other hand, the granting of fewer leaves is not necessarily problematic if one takes a pessimistic view of what the Supreme Court does. For most advocates across the country, the bread-and-butter of law does not occur in the august halls of the Supreme Court. Instead, it is more likely that legal issues are decided by lower courts and administrative actors. The prohibitive costs associated with bringing leave applications and appeals to the Supreme Court creates a built-in incentive for these issues to be finally decided at a lower level of decision-making.

This is just my view, but I do not view this as a bad thing. For one, Canada’s lower court judges are far from bit players in the development of the law. The Supreme Court gets a lot of attention, but the 9 judges on that Court are special only because of their station; not necessarily because they are more likely to come to better or more stable decisions than a lower court judge. The Supreme Court, as Robert Jackson once said, is only infallible because it is final. Our lower court judges are well-equipped to settle the law without high-stakes litigation at the Supreme Court. Vavilov provides another instructive example of this. Prior to Vavilov, the Federal Court of Appeal, led by Justice David Stratas, had attempted to make sense of the Supreme Court’s administrative law doctrine. Its approach to determining and applying the standard of review was, in many respects, adopted in Vavilov: see particularly the Vavilov Court’s approach to reasonableness. The Federal Court of Appeal itself has recently made note of this: Alexion, at para 7. There is an irony here: the Supreme Court, far from settling the law of judicial review in the 2010s, unnecessarily complicated things for lower courts and litigants. Far from stability, the Court actively made things worse. It took lower court judges doing their best to apply the law to make the Supreme Court clean up its own mess, with help from the Federal Court of Appeal.

I am not suggesting that the leave practice of the Supreme Court in recent years is a wholly good thing, but I do not necessarily see it as a bad thing either. There is nothing special in the Supreme Court’s decision-making process that makes it any better suited to decide legal questions—apart from the fact that it provides a final resolution. The finality question is important, but we should not kid ourselves: the law can and does settle without the help of the Supreme Court.

This suggests that, perhaps, the question is not whether more or fewer leaves are granted. Rather, the question may be whether the Supreme Court is granting leaves to the right cases. Vavilov, for example, was an important case on which to grant leave because the doctrine was so unsettled across the country. I am candidly not sure how many such instances exist in various areas of the law. Unfortunately, this suggestion is a non-starter: we will never know what, beyond bromides, members of the Supreme Court take into account when granting leaves.

At any rate, I don’t have the answers here and as I said earlier, there is probably more in the available data to complicate the picture I have drawn here. Nonetheless, I do think more discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of the Supreme Court’s leave practice is desirable.

Still Keeping It Complicated

The Supreme Court tries to bring more rigour to constitutional interpretation and takes a step towards textualism, but won’t admit it

In my last post, I summarized the opinions delivered in Quebec (Attorney General) v 9147-0732 Québec inc, 2020 SCC 32. While the Supreme Court unanimously holds that corporations are not protected from cruel and unusual punishment by section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the majority (Justices Brown and Rowe, with the agreement of the Chief Justice and Justices Moldaver and Côté) and the principal concurrence (Justice Abella, with Justices Karakatsanis and Martin) strongly disagree about the proper approach to constitutional interpretation and to the role in this process of international and foreign legal materials.

As promised, in this post I present my thoughts on these opinions, primarily on their general approach to interpretation, though I’ll say something on the role of international and foreign materials too. I will, once again, begin with Justice Abella’s opinion, which in my view is representative of what I have described as “constitutionalism from Plato’s cave” ― the judicial creation of constitutional law out of abstract ideals favoured by the judges themselves rather than genuine interpretation of a constitutional text. I will then turn to the majority opinion, which repudiates constitutionalism from the cave, but also seemingly rejects what I regard as the best interpretive method, public meaning originalism. I will argue that there is less to this rejection than meets the eye.

One question on which I will say nothing, although the majority and the principal concurrence trade sharp accusations on it, is which of these opinions is more consistent with precedent. As Benjamin Oliphant and I have pointed out in our article on “Originalist Reasoning in Canadian Constitutional Jurisprudence”, the Supreme Court has never been consistent in how it interpreted the constitution, mixing and matching originalist and living constitutionalist approaches in any number of unpredictable ways. (Mr. Oliphant has developed this theme elsewhere too.) Justices Brown and Rowe are right to call for more rigour and consistency on this front; but they are wrong, as is Justice Abella, to suggest that has been any rigour and consistency in the past. Whatever their flaws, neither the majority nor the concurring opinion break with established law, because there is no real law to break with.

As mentioned in my last post, Justice Abella insists that her approach to interpretation is “contextual” and, above all, “purposive”. In truth, it might be better described as authorizing constitution-making by the Supreme Court. It is “the Court” ― following an American usage, Justice Abella does not bother specifying which one ― that “has, over time, decided who and what came within the Charter’s protective scope”. [49] The Supreme Court does not simply decide cases in which the question arose. No, it apparently ruled, as a matter of discretion, on whom the Charter will protect going forward.

Judicial rulings in constitutional cases are not, for Justice Abella, mere workings out of the constitution’s meaning. Indeed, the constitutional text plays no special role in interpretation for her. This is unsurprising, because Justice Abella embraces the view that co-blogger Mark Mancini recently described as “linguistic nihilism” ― the idea “that language is never clear, or put differently, hopelessly vague or ambiguous”, so that “the task of interpretation based on text is a fool’s game”. (Of course this is of a piece with Justice Abella’s commitments in administrative law.) It is also unsurprising, then, that her discussion of international materials suggests that text does not really matter at all, and a variety of differently-worded provisions all stand for the exact same principles, without any meaningful inquiry into the relevance, if any, of their language. In fact, Justice Abella is openly disdainful of the possibility that textual nuance ― such as “the presence of a comma” [75] ― might make a difference in interpretation.

Another reason for Justice Abella’s refusal to be bound by constitutional text is that this ” could unduly constrain the scope of [constitutional] rights”. [75] This reflects the conviction, common among living constitutionalists, that judicial re-writing of constitutions is a one-way ratchet unfailing causing rights to expand. This view is belied by experience. But, quite apart from that: “unduly” by what standard? If not by reference to text, how do we know what is the due scope of constitutional rights? This ambiguity is of a piece with Justice Abella’s insistence that section 12 “is meant to protect human dignity and respect the inherent worth of individuals. Its intended beneficiaries are people, not corporations.” [51] Is meant… by whom? Intended… by whom? And how do we know?

As Mr. Oliphant and I noted in the paper linked to above, “[m]arks on paper have no will or agency and thus can have no ‘purposes’ or ‘intentions’ that are independent of willful actors”. (537) One possibility, as we suggested, is that this language becomes an opening for an inquiry into the intentions of the Charter‘s framers. But Justice Abella isn’t very interested in that. Unlike the Supreme Court in some cases, she doesn’t consider the Charter‘s drafting history or the views of its framers, beyond a passing reference to Pierre Trudeau’s general comments about the Charter‘s raison d’être.

Justice Abella’s use of ambiguous language and the passive voice, like her refusal to be bound by text or to commit to any hierarchy of interpretive sources, suggest that she believes herself to have has complete discretion in deciding what the Charter is to mean. Her own sense of justice is the only standard of who is “due” protection under the constitution, and what protection they are “due”. This is unsurprising, of course, from someone who professes impatience with the Rule of Law and prefers a “rule of justice”. Constitutional purposes, as she conceives of them, are Platonic abstractions, which the wise ― she the wisest ― must interpret for the rest of us.

As I have said a number of times in the past, “constitutionalism from the cave” is not real constitutionalism. It is antithetical to the Rule of Law. Ultimately, it undermines the foundations of judicial review: if the constitution means whatever unelected judges preoccupied with international approval more than with the law or the commands of the constitution’s framers say it means, there is no particular reason why the political branches would comply with these judges’ musings. It is good that this view is dealt a defeat by the Supreme Court’s majority.

In contrast to Justice Abella, Justices Brown and Rowe emphasize the importance of constitutional text. It is not, I think, merely a matter of the text being chronologically the first consideration for a court engaged in constitutional interpretation: “constitutional interpretation” is “the interpretation of the text of the Constitution”. [9] The text is its focus and overriding constraint; it has “primacy” over other considerations. [10, citing Caron v Alberta, 2015 SCC 56, [2015] 3 SCR 511 at [36]]

One way in which the text matters is, of course, through the ordinary meaning of its words and the inferences that can be drawn from it. Here, since the word “cruel” refers to the infliction of human suffering, it stands to reason that section 12 does not protect corporations. But the significance of the text goes further. The history of the text and the changes it underwent are relevant too, as Justices Brown and Rowe show by pointing ― in language that, as I noted in my last post, closely mirrors that of my comment on the Court of Appeal’s decision in this case ― to the contrast between the language of section 12 and that of its predecessors in Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1688. Other provisions on the text are relevant too.

To my mind, this ― so far as it goes ― is a sound approach to constitutional interpretation, and I am happy to see it forcefully stated by a majority of the Supreme Court. If I were to put a label on it, it would be “textualism”. Consider the definition of textualism given by then-Judge, now Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a lecture I reviewed here:

Textualism … insists that judges must construe statutory language consistent with its “ordinary meaning.” The law is comprised of words—and textualists emphasize that words mean what they say, not what a judge thinks that they ought to say. For textualists, statutory language is a hard constraint. Fidelity to the law means fidelity to the text as it is written. (856; footnote omitted)

This is what Justices Brown and Rowe are doing: insisting that the object of interpretation is words, text, and focusing on their ordinary meaning, which is a hard constraint on interpretation.

Yet Justices Brown and Rowe reject the label of textualism. To their mind, what they are doing is purposive interpretation. Judge Barrett, as she then was, saw purposivism as the opposite of textualism, though in my post I cautioned that “many approaches to interpretation and construction, including ones that respect the primacy and constraint of the text, might properly be described as purposive”. Perhaps this is what Justices Brown and Rowe are advocating ― a sort of “purposivism”, if that’s what they prefer to call it, but one that has a great deal more in common with textualism as defined by Judge Barrett than with “purposivism” as defined by Justice Abella.

So maybe the moral of the story here is that we all should be less hung up on labels. But in my view there is a real cost to the lack of clarity that the labels used by the Supreme Court generate. I wrote about this here when I commented on R v Stillman, 2019 SCC 40. In that case, similarly to here, the majority and the dissent both claimed to be engaged in purposive interpretation. But the majority, I argued, was in effect following a public meaning originalist (and hence textualist) approach, while the dissent was doing constitutionalism from the cave. As I said then, to pretend that textualist interpretation is really purposive generates unnecessary detours. Here, the majority’s references to human dignity as the purpose of section 12 do no real work, and unnecessarily burden the reasoning with what is, by the Supreme Court’s own well-known admission in R v Kapp, 2008 SCC 41, [2008] 2 SCR 483, “an abstract and subjective notion”. [22] And, as I also said in my comment on Stillman, mislabeling an originalist or textualist interpretation as purposivist makes it possible for the partisans of an entirely different version of purposivism to invoke cases that go directly against their views as support for them. Justice Abella does precisely that here (at [73]).

Worse still, from my perspective, than the mere confusion about labels is the seeming rejection by Justices Brown and Rowe of the substance of public meaning originalism, under the label of “new textualism” which they borrow from Aharon Barak’s Harvard Law Review Supreme Court Term Foreword, “A Judge on Judging”, where it stands as a shorthand for Justice’s Scalia’s interpretive approach. This is the idea, as President Barak put it, “that that the Constitution and every statute should be understood according to the reading of a reasonable reader at the time of enactment”. (82; reference omitted) Justices Brown and Rowe claim that this approach is “not remotely consistent” [12] with theirs. If they are right, this would be the first rejection of public meaning originalism by the Supreme Court. As Mr. Oliphant and I have shown, until now, the only versions of originalism that had been clearly rejected were those, disfavoured by originalists themselves, that focus on original expected applications and outcomes.

Yet it will take more than this opinion of Justices Brown and Rowe to make me give up on originalism. Let me note, first, that Justice Brown himself was a co-author of the Stillman majority opinion (and that its other co-author was Justice Moldaver, who agrees with Justices Brown and Rowe here). I described that opinion as “perhaps the most originalist, and specifically public-meaning originalist, in a constitutional case since that of the majority in Caron“. And yes, Caron ― which Justices Brown and Rowe repeatedly cite ― was a public-meaning originalist judgment, as I explained here. Both Stillman and Caron focused on ascertaining the meaning of the constitutional provisions at issue there by reference to how they would have been understood by “a reasonable reader at the time of enactment”, over dissents that favoured, respectively a more policy-infused approach and one based on the alleged intent of the framers. If Justices Brown and Rowe really meant to reject public meaning originalism, would they be relying on these cases? That seems implausible.

No less importantly, consider what Justices Brown and Rowe say elsewhere in their opinion. When they discuss the use of international and foreign materials, they draw an “important distinction … between instruments that pre‑ and post‑date the Charter“. [41] The former “clearly form part of the historical context of a Charter right and illuminate the way it was framed”, whether or not they were binding on Canada. The latter, only matter if they bind Canada, and even then subject to only a presumption that Canadian constitutional law conforms to them, and to the principle that international law does not automatically become part of Canadian law. This isn’t quite originalism: an originalist would be warier still of materials that post-date the Charter, although, as I am about to explain, without necessarily rejecting their relevance in all cases. But it’s pretty close. Originalists believe that constitutional text must be interpreted in context as of the date of its enactment, and reference to international materials available to Canadian framers is certainly a legitimate part of ascertaining the context in which the Charter‘s original meaning should be established. The fact that Justices Brown and Rowe draw a dividing line at the moment of the Charter’s enactment suggests that they are, in fact, open to something like originalist thinking.

All in all, my point is not that Justices Brown and Rowe are originalists. However, they are textualists, which is a big part of originalism, and their approach has at least some significant affinities with public meaning originalism. It is unfortunate that their self-misunderstanding muddies the waters. But if we focus on what they do rather than on what they say about what they do we can see that their opinion, despite its flaws, is an important step in the right direction, and by far preferable to Justice Abella’s.

I turn, finally, to the issue of international and comparative materials. I agree with the majority’s calls for care and discernment in the way such materials are used. Partly this is a matter of legal and intellectual rigour. Partly, as Justices Brown and Rowe say, of “preserving the integrity of the Canadian constitutional structure, and Canadian sovereignty”. [23] Justice Abella’s concerns about whether foreign scholars and courts will pay attention to Canadian constitutional law are beside the point. Ultimately, the Canadian constitution means what it means, and not what some international treaty, let alone foreign constitutional text, might mean ― a matter on which Canadian courts often could not pronounce. I would, however, add two further observations, which I already made here in discussing similar issues that arose in the Supreme Court’s decision in Frank v Canada (Attorney General), 2019 SCC 1, [2019] 1 SCR 3.

First, international and foreign materials may be more relevant and persuasive to courts engaged in constitutional construction, and in particular (but not only) in the demarcation of reasonable limits on rights under section 1 of the Charter, than in cases such as this one, which concern the interpretation of the Charter‘s text. When courts develop legal doctrine, they have more reason to look to international experience ― including international experience post-dating the Charter‘s enactment ― than when they seek to discern the meaning of the Charter‘s words ― an exercise to which, as Justices Brown and Rowe recognize, international and foreign materials post-dating the Charter are unlikely to be relevant. The majority’s unwillingness to seriously engage with public meaning originalism causes it to seemingly lump all constitutional questions together and so to lose sight of this nuance.

Second, when and to the extent that international and foreign law is relevant, judicial consideration of it should, as I wrote in my comment on Frank, “not be partial ― either in the sense of having a pre-determined result in mind, or in the sense of being incomplete”. I’m not quite sure what Justices Brown and Rowe mean by saying that such materials should be kept to “providing support and confirmation for the result reached by way of purposive interpretation”. [22; emphasis in the original] But it would not be intellectually honest for a court to only consider materials that agree with its conclusions and deliberately discard others. If the court considers foreign and international sources, it should address those that it does not find persuasive.

The court should also be careful not to misunderstand or mischaracterize these sources. Justice Abella’s invocation of the “judges in the majority” in Furman v Georgia, 402 US 238 (1972), as having “definitively discussed” the purpose of the Eighth Amendment is an example of such dangers. There was no unified majority in Furman; the two judges whom Justice Abella quotes, Justices Marshall and Brennan, were in fact the only ones who took the position they took, which was that the death penalty was necessarily cruel and unusual punishment. Three others took a more limited view that opened the door to the re-imposition of the death penalty, which was given the green light in Gregg v Georgia, 428 US 153 (1976), in effect reversing Furman. If judges are to refer to foreign law, they need to understand and be honest about it.

Overall, the Supreme Court, and specifically the majority opinion of Justices Brown and Rowe, brings a welcome dose of rigour to the task of constitutional interpretation in Canada. The primacy of constitutional text as the object of interpretation is affirmed, while freewheeling discretion to make the constitution the best it can be in a judge’s opinion is rejected. There is also a more rigorous approach to the use of international and foreign materials in constitutional interpretation. Compared to the alternative vividly illustrated by Justice Abella, this is all very welcome (and all the more so if, as I hypothesized in my last post, Justice Abella’s opinion was originally intended to be the majority one).

But the majority opinion is very far from perfect, and it will perpetuate much of the confusion that afflicts constitutional interpretation in Canada. Even as it adopts the methods of textualism and is largely compatible with public meaning originalism it disclaims the former and purports to reject the latter. This messiness is the sad consequence of a lack of serious thought about constitutional interpretation in Canada. One can only hope that this gap will be filled in the years to come.

Immuring Dicey’s Ghost

The Senate Reform Reference and constitutional conventions

In its opinion in Reference re Senate Reform, 2014 SCC 32, [2014] 1 SCR 704, the Supreme Court notoriously relied on a metaphor that had previously popped up, but played no real role, in its jurisprudence: “constitutional architecture”. Notably, the court was of the view that moves towards an effectively elected Senate would modify the constitution’s architecture, and such modifications required formal amendment under Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982, just as much as changes to the explicit provisions of the constitution’s text. Yet the court’s explanations of just what this architecture was were short and cryptic, and haven’t been elaborated upon ― judicially ― in the intervening years.

To fill in this void, an academic cottage industry sprang up to speculate about the meaning of the architectural metaphor and about what other constitutional reforms it might block. For example, Kate Glover Berger suggested that “action taken to dismantle or undermine the administrative state could be deemed unconstitutional” because the administrative state is built into the architecture of the Canadian constitution. Lorne Neudorf invoked architecture in the service of an argument to the effect that courts can read down or indeed invalidate vague delegations of legislative power to the executive branch. Michael Pal speculated that the first-past-the-post electoral system might be entrenched as part of the constitutional architecture.

All this while, I have been working on my own contribution to this genre, called “Immuring Dicey’s Ghost: The Senate Reform Reference and Constitutional Conventions”, which is finally going to be published by the Ottawa Law Review later this year. In a nutshell, I argue that “architecture” is really just code for “conventions” ― those supposedly non-legal but fundamentally important constitutional rules, arising out of political practice and morality, which courts have long said they could not possibly enforce. And I argue, further, that the Supreme Court should have squarely addressed the fact that it was relying on conventions, instead of playing confusing rhetorical games.

A draft is now available, for your reading pleasure. Here is the abstract:

Although the metaphor of “constitutional architecture” had appeared in some previous opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada, it took on a new importance in Reference re Senate Reform, where the Court held that amendments to constitutional architecture had to comply with the requirements of Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982. However, the Court provided very little guidance as to the scope of this entrenched “architecture”. As a result, the metaphor’s meaning and implications have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate.

This article contributes to this debate by arguing that “constitutional architecture” incorporates (some) constitutional conventions. It further takes the position that, instead of relying on this confusing metaphor, the Court should have candidly admitted that conventions were central to its decision by acknowledging that the text of the Canadian constitution cannot be fully understood without reference to conventions.

Part I reviews, first, the Supreme Court’s opinions in which the notion of constitutional “architecture” has been mentioned, focusing on this concept’s place in the Senate Reform Reference, and then some of the scholarly commentary that has endeavoured to make sense of it. Part II sets out my own view that constitutional “architecture”, as this concept is used by the Supreme Court, is concerned primarily if not exclusively with constitutional conventions. Part III considers whether it is possible to determine precisely which conventions are encompassed by the notion of constitutional architecture, examining the conventions’ importance, and their relationship to the constitutional text as possible criteria, and concluding that neither allows precise determinations. Part IV sets out what would in my view have been a less confusing way of addressing the significance of conventions to the questions the Court was facing in the Senate Reform Reference: frankly recognizing that conventions were relevant to the interpretation of the applicable constitutional texts. Part V examines two objections to the incorporation of conventions (via “architecture” or through interpretation) into the realm of constitutional law, arguing that this incorporation is not illegitimate, and that it will not stultify the constitution’s development. Part VI concludes with an appeal for greater transparency on the part of the Supreme Court.

The last thing I mention here is that this paper begins the project of bringing together two subjects on which I had mostly been writing separately: constitutional conventions on the one hand, and originalism on the other. As explained here, Canadian originalism has to grapple with the fact that some of our most important constitutional rules are unwritten. This paper, although it doesn’t make a case for originalism, begins to outline what that an originalist approach to conventions will look like.

Tout nouveau, tout beau?

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

Ce billet est co-rédigé avec Mark Mancini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Les questions de compétence sont-elles véritablement à oublier?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 10: Bruce Ryder

Riding the waves of ascendant normative currents

Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

All judicial opinions are directed to adjudicating disputes and to the clarification and development of the law. Majority and dissenting opinions reach different conclusions of course; they also speak to different points in time. Dissenting opinions imagine and bring into view more distant legal futures. The dissenter hopes to have an impact on the development of the law further down the road, when anticipated injustices fostered by the majority’s position have been revealed.

Because the value of a dissent emerges over time, we ought to be cautious about lauding or condemning dissents early in their lifetimes. After a few decades have passed, we can ask: what impact has the dissent had on the development of the law? has the dissent shifted or ignited professional, judicial and scholarly debates about what the law ought to be?

The best dissents expose flaws in majority opinions and where they will take us. They deftly catch and ride the waves of ascendant normative currents in the law. They pose better questions, open new debates, and expand our critical imaginations about what a just future might look like. They invite us to dissent, not just from the majority, but also from the dissent itself. And by doing so they remind us that the best dissents are the ones that have not yet been written.

The three dissents I have chosen to highlight in the Supreme Court of Canada’s public law jurisprudence are Justice Beetz’ in the Anti-Inflation Reference, [1976] 2 SCR 373 , Justice La Forest’s in the Provincial Judges Reference, [1997] 3 SCR 3, and Justice McLachlin’s in Shell Canada Products Ltd v Vancouver (City), [1994] 1 SCR 231. Each has had an important impact on the subsequent development of the law, has advanced debates in professional and scholarly circles, and has invited us to pursue further critique beyond where the dissents themselves ventured.

Justice Beetz and the POGG Power

In his dissent in the Anti-Inflation Reference, Justice Beetz began by explaining in precise detail why the federal Anti-Inflation Act interfered with provincial jurisdiction “in a frontal way and on a large scale”. His concerns about federal interference with provincial autonomy resonated with the times – the Parti Québécois would be elected for the first time four months later. He explained why inflation was not a subject-matter that could be allocated to the national concern branch of POGG. To do so, he wrote, would “destroy the equilibrium of the constitution” since inflation lacked “a degree of unity that made it indivisible, an identity which made it distinct from provincial matters and a sufficient consistence to retain the bounds of form”.

Justice Beetz then turned to the emergency branch of POGG, describing its distinct contours, as he had with the national concern branch, with new conceptual clarity. The emergency power, he wrote, temporarily accords to Parliament all legislative powers necessary to deal with a crisis, including “concurrent and paramount jurisdiction” over matters that fall within (ordinarily exclusive) provincial jurisdiction. Resort to the emergency power, he said, “amounts to a temporary pro tanto amendment of a federal Constitution by the unilateral action of Parliament.”

The majority judges were willing to allow Parliament to rely on the emergency power despite the absence of any indication in the legislative history that it was doing so. Justice Beetz stood firmly against sanctioning such a cavalier approach to federalism and democratic deliberation. He insisted that “Parliament cannot enter the normally forbidden area of provincial jurisdiction unless it gives an unmistakable signal”. In the absence of such a signal, “[i]t is the duty of the courts to uphold the Constitution, not to seal its suspension”.

The Court has not had an opportunity to revisit the emergency power since 1976. Justice Beetz’ opinion on the required form of its exercise remains the dissenting view. But the force of his position is undeniable. It is, like all the best dissents, a law in the becoming, an imminent law set to bloom. It would be foolhardy for Parliament to attempt to invoke the emergency power by stealth ever again.

Justice Beetz’ comments on the national concern branch of POGG were powerful obiter dicta that later became the law when they were adopted by the Court in R v Crown Zellerbach Canada Ltd, [1988] 1 SCR 401 (1988) a decade later. The criteria Justice Beetz articulated – and whether those criteria need to be adjusted to give greater weight to the importance of national responses to problems of the scale and urgency of global warming – will be at the heart of the references on the validity of the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act to be heard by the Supreme Court in March 2020. The new emphasis Justice Beetz gave to provincial autonomy in 1976 will continue to shape the evolution of the POGG power and Canadian federalism jurisprudence more generally.

Justice La Forest and Unwritten Constitutional Principles

Chief Justice Lamer’s extended obiter dicta in the Provincial Judges Reference, locating a guarantee of judicial independence applicable to all courts in the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867, were a startling and self-serving expansion of judicial power.

Justice La Forest’s dissenting opinion was a lacerating critique of the majority’s overreaching dicta. He emphasized that if judicial review is not grounded in the provisions of the text of the constitution, the courts lack a democratically legitimate basis for placing limits on the powers of the executive and legislative branches of government. “The express provisions of the Constitution are not, as the Chief Justice contends, ‘elaborations of the underlying, unwritten, and organizing principles found in the preamble”, he wrote. “On the contrary, they are the Constitution. To assert otherwise is to subvert the democratic foundation of judicial review.”

Remarkably, Justice La Forest’s powerful critique failed to pry any of his colleagues loose from the majority opinion. The Court has adopted Chief Justice Lamer’s dicta in a series of rulings on judicial independence. Nevertheless, Justice La Forest’s dissent has had a large influence. Much of the scholarship commenting on the Court’s use of constitutional principles has echoed his concerns. Apart from the Secession Reference, [1998] 2 SCR 217], the Court over the last two decades has rebuffed many attempts to use unwritten principles to fill gaps in the constitutional text. In British Columbia v Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd, 2005 SCC 49, [2005] 2 SCR 473, for example, Justice Major wrote that “protection from legislation that some might view as unjust or unfair properly lies not in the amorphous underlying principles of our Constitution, but in its text and the ballot box”.

The opinions in the Provincial Judges Reference and the Secession Reference stand, but otherwise the Court appears to have drawn a line in the sand on the gap-filling deployment of unwritten principles. The power of Justice La Forest’s dissent has played an important role in halting any further reliance on a methodology that raised serious questions about the legitimacy of constitutional judicial review.

Justice McLachlin, Racism, and Municipal Government

At issue in Shell Canada Products Ltd v Vancouver was the validity of a resolution of the Vancouver City Council refusing to do business with Shell until the company “completely withdraws from South Africa”. The municipal boycott of Shell was motivated by “moral outrage against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa”. Justice Sopinka’s majority opinion found that the resolution was not adopted for municipal purposes and also amounted to unauthorized discrimination against Shell. For these two reasons, he concluded that the resolution was beyond the scope of the city’s statutory powers.

Justice McLachlin’s dissent rejected the majority’s parochial approach to local government. She aligned herself instead with “the weight of current commentary” that supports “a more generous, deferential approach” to the exercise of municipal powers. A healthy respect must be given, she wrote, to “the democratic responsibilities of elected municipal officials and the rights of those who elect them”. The welfare of the city’s residents included their moral welfare. Moreover, the city’s power to enter into transactions necessarily entailed a power to discriminate between companies. She thus departed from the majority’s perverse expression of greater concern about discrimination against Shell than it did about the oppression of African peoples.

While the majority’s insistence on a strict separation of municipal purposes and global concerns has yet to be overruled, the approach outlined in Justice McLachlin’s dissent has had a strong influence on the development of municipal law over the past quarter century. Citing her opinion on multiple occasions, the Court has embraced a broad and purposive approach to the interpretation of municipal powers.

The opinions in Shell participated in a long-standing Canadian tradition of managing to say nothing about racism in cases about racism. Neither opinion mentioned the inter-relationships between forms of colonialism and racism across the British Commonwealth. Nor did the Vancouver resolutions have anything to say about the connections between racism at home and abroad, and the need to address the impacts of racism and settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples in the city. Future dissents – and majority opinions – are less likely to leave these issues unspoken.

Day Nine: Leonid Sirota

The Roads Not Taken

Sometimes, as other contributors to the symposium have discussed, dissenting opinions chart the law’s future course. But at other times, they are only signposts for alternative paths which the law passes by, perhaps for the better. And sometimes, they point to the lost straight road, from which the law tragically deviates, never to return. The three dissents below belong to this last category.

1. Justice Beetz in Slaight Communications v Davidson, [1989] 1 SCR 1038

Slaight was an unjust dismissal case, in which a labour arbitrator sided with the former employee. The issue at the Supreme Court was the arbitrator could, consistently with the Charter, require the former employer to provide the employee with a recommendation letter bearing the employer’s signature but actually entirely dictated by the arbitrator, and further to refrain from saying anything else about the former employee. The majority held that he could. After all, there was a power imbalance between employer and employee that needed to be rectified, and anyway the employer was only required to state true facts, as established by the arbitrator.

Justice Beetz saw things differently. To force a person to state “facts in which, rightly or wrongly, he may not believe” is tantamount making him “tell a lie”. The outcome of an official fact-finding process cannot be equated with an objective, all-purpose truth, let alone be elevated into a dogma everyone must believe in. The state has no more authority to make a person proclaim what it, but not he, believes to be true facts than to make him proclaim what it, but not he, believes to be true opinions. Such an order “is totalitarian in nature and can never be justified under s. 1 of the Charter. It does not differ, essentially, from the command given to Galileo by the Inquisition to abjure the cosmology of Copernicus.”

Justice Beetz also rejected the arbitrator’s order that the former employer not say anything other than what the arbitrator required about the former employee. He pointed out that “one should view with extreme suspicion an administrative order or even a judicial order which has the effect of preventing the litigants from commenting upon and even criticizing the rulings of the deciding board or court”. Finally, while condemning the former employer, Justice Beetz pointed out that “under the Charter, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are guaranteed to ‘everyone’, employers and employees alike, irrespective of their labour practices and of their bargaining power.”

All these points are important, and Canadian law is the worse for not having taken them more seriously. Most disturbingly, of course, we have seen in recent years recurring attempts to impose official dogma on dissenting individuals, whether by the Law Society of Ontario or by the governments of Canada and Ontario. But we also now have an asymmetrical Charter jurisprudence, notably in the realm of freedom of association, against which Justice Beetz correctly warned. And, while fortunately we have not seen attempts to stifle criticism of the judiciary or the administrative state by law, too many Canadian lawyers are intolerant of critiques of their judicial heroes.

2. Justice McLachlin (as she then was) in R v Keegstra, [1990] 3 SCR 697

Before she became, allegedly, the “Conscience-in-Chief” of Canada, or at least of the Central Canadian establishment, and a Chief Justice somewhat notorious for strong-arming colleagues into consensus, Justice McLachlin, as she once was, authored a number of important dissents. Famously, the one in Rodriguez v British Columbia (Attorney-General), [1993] 3 SCR 519 eventually, in effect, became Supreme Court’s unanimous position. The one in Keegstra did not. Even Chief Justice McLachlin, as she became, eventually resiled from it. That’s too bad.

In Keegstra, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the Criminal Code‘s proscription of hate speech. The four-judge majority upheld it as a reasonable limit on the freedom of expression. Justice McLachlin wrote for three (on the freedom of expression issue) dissenters. Her opinion is, perhaps, a little fastidious, and contains little in the way of memorable language, but it is thoughtful and deserves to be considered even by those who do not ultimately agree with her. Indeed, having argued the substantive case against the criminalization of hate speech elsewhere on this blog (and Emmett Macfarlane having discussed them in his contribution to this symposium), it is the more general or procedural points that I would like to highlight here.

For one thing, Justice McLachlin was fundamentally skeptical of content-based regulation of speech, and much sympathetic to the American approach, the views all such regulation with great suspicion. For another, Justice McLachlin firmly rejected the attempt to equate hate speech with violence. Violence, she stressed, involved the use of physical force, not words, even hurtful words. Furthermore, Justice McLachlin refused to read down the Charter‘s protection of freedom of expression in the name of equality: “it seems a misapplication of Charter values to … limit the scope of that individual guarantee [of freedom of expression] with an argument based on s. 15, which is also aimed at circumscribing the power of the state”. Compare this to the use of “Charter values” to impose egalitarianism on private actors and eviscerate religious freedom in Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 SCR 293!

Last but not least, consider Justice McLachlin’s insistence on the need for evidence to justify limitations on the freedom of expression. While acknowledging the appropriateness of some deference to the government on this issue, Justice McLachlin nevertheless wrote that, in order to avoid trivializing the justification of limitations on rights, “in cases … where it appears that the legislation not only may fail to achieve its goal but may have a contrary effect, the Court is justified in finding that the rational connection between the measure and the objective is absent”. Good intentions are not enough ― nor is the sort of ill-informed speculation, camouflaged as “common sense”, that has all too often sufficed in subsequent Supreme Court decisions.

Had just one vote gone the other way, and this opinion become the law, our constitution may well have been in much better shape than it is, far beyond the narrow issue of hate speech. As things stand, Keegstra has to count as one of the more significant missed opportunities in the Charter‘s history.

3. Justice Moldaver in Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss 5 and 6, 2014 SCC 21, [2014] 1 SCR 433, a.k.a. l’Affaire Nadon

In l’Affaire Nadon the Supreme Court was asked to opine on the eligibility of the judges of federal courts for appointment to the Supreme Court itself, and especially that of judges of the federal courts from Québec for appointment to one the Supreme Court’s Québec seats. It was, as readers will recall, a very high-profile and controversial case (more on which in a forthcoming book by Michael Plaxton and Carissima Mathen). The sort of case, in other words, in which the Supreme Court not infrequently issues unanimous opinions “by the court”. But Justice Moldaver’s dissent prevented the majority from giving itself this ultimate institutional imprimatur.

The majority held that, while judges of the federal courts were, as former lawyers, eligible for non-Québec seats on the Supreme Court, only current lawyers or current judges of the Québec’s superior courts could take one of the Québec seats. In doing so, the majority relied heavily on the idea that judges from Québec had to be not only experts in the civil law, but also representatives of Québec’s “social values”. This, they could not do without being current, not merely former, judges of Québec’s courts or members of the Québec bar.

For his part, Justice Moldaver dissected each of the majority’s arguments, and found them empty. In particular, as a matter of text, the two provisions governing eligibility for appointment ― the general one requiring judges to be or to “ha[ve] been” judges or lawyers of at least 10 years’ experience, and the specific one providing that Québec judges are to be chosen “from among the judges of the Court of Appeal or of the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec or from among the advocates of that Province” ― are “inextricably linked”. If the 10-year rule applies to Québec seats, as the majority accepted, so must the eligibility of former lawyers.

As for purpose, Justice Moldaver rejected the majority’s claim that the eligibility criteria had anything to do with the representation of Québec’s alleged “social values”. Indeed, “[i]mporting social values — 140 years later — is unsupported by the text and history of the [Supreme Court] Act”. The majority’s interpretation leads to the absurd result that judges not only of the federal courts, but also of Québec’s provincial court, are ineligible for appointment, while a lawyer who has done no more than pay his fees to the Québec bar while not engaging with the law at all could be appointed; so could a former judge who rejoined the Québec bar for a single day. While Parliament might have chosen such absurd criteria for eligibility and said so, “when interpreting a statute to determine what the relevant criteria are — i.e. what Parliament intended them to be — absurd results are to be avoided”.

As I have said here before, the majority opinion was not only wrong but pernicious; in particular, its linchpin, the concept of “social values”, was just self-important twaddle. Justice Moldaver deserves credit for exposing its vacuity. Rumour has it that he did it at some cost to himself. His fortitude, then, is to be commended as much as his legal acumen.

Honourable mentions: Justices Brown and Côté in Law Society of British Columbia v. Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 S.C.R. 293, which I described here as “probably the best opinion to come out of the Supreme Court in a long while”, and Justices Martland and Ritchie in Re: Resolution to amend the Constitution, [1981] 1 SCR 753, a.k.a the Patriation Reference, which I plan on discussing further in a post on unwritten constitutional principles in a not-too-distant future.

Day Eight: Anna Su

University of Toronto

There are many reasons for judges (especially at the highest court) to write separate dissenting opinions. The first, in my view, is that it sets forth clear positions on the major legal issues of the day, ready to be taken on anew in a future judgment. In that sense, it is the Supreme Court that becomes the venue for important legal debate, especially for novel constitutional questions. It should not only be the task of academics to recognize and reflect on these significant controversies and to lead the intellectual discussion. A second, more canonical, reason for dissents is that some judge might perceive its truth somewhere down the road and it becomes law in the future. Of course, it might not always happen. But at the very least, at that moment, the possibility that judges can dissent can somewhat improve the majority opinion. Or at least one would hope. I chose these three opinions because they 1) clearly identify a recurring debate in constitutional law, and 2) I hope they could be a prompt for future justices to reconsider how they look at cases in that particular subject.

Justices Binnie and Lebel in Chaoulli v Quebec (Attorney General), 2005 SCC 35, [2005] 1 SCR 791

“This does not mean that the courts are well placed to perform the required surgery.”

In their joint dissent in Chaoulli, Justices Binnie and Lebel emphasized a minimalist role for the judiciary in deciding the question of whether the prevailing single-tier health care system in Quebec was compliant with the s.7 guarantee under the Charter. Both justices would have upheld the Quebec prohibition on private health insurance as they questioned the appropriateness of the court passing judgment on what constitutes “reasonable health services”. The dissent is persuasive in holding the dispositive effect of the phrase “principle of fundamental justice” – the bread and butter component of s.7 litigation – under close scrutiny. Indeed, as the dissent went, a legislative policy cannot be deemed arbitrary just because we may disagree with the decision. The dissent acknowledged that the existence of waiting times is certainly a public concern and that a two-tier health care system would have a negative impact on the integrity, functioning and viability of the public system, but it expressed skepticism that this is within the purview of courts to evaluate.

Over the course of its s.7 jurisprudence, the SCC has given the phrase “principles of fundamental justice” substantive content by defining them as principles against arbitrariness, vagueness, overbreadth and gross disproportionality. Arbitrariness in particular, refers to the relationship between the means adopted and the policy objective. The dissent shows the indeterminacy of this standard. In contrast to the characterization of the majority, the dissent showed an equally plausible and clear relation between the prohibition against private health insurance and the preservation of access to a health system based on need.

There will be many more cases to be litigated under s.7. A prominent one in the offing is the recently filed suit by minors against the federal government for violating their s.7 rights to life, liberty and security of the person for, among others, its failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions that is incompatible with a stable climate system. The question of whether courts are the right venues to seek relief thus remains evergreen. The broad themes of the Chaoulli dissent illustrate the limitations and possibilities of s.7 case law.

Justice Abella in Alberta v Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, 2009 SCC 37, [2009] 2 SCR 567

Justice Abella’s spirited dissent began with a succinct encapsulation of what the s.2(a) doctrinal framework is about. Freedom of religion is an important constitutional value. Accordingly, there is a high threshold to be met by any infringing measure. It is a very good illustration of what it means to take freedom of religion seriously in a pluralistic society, regardless of the final outcome. In this case, the controversy was whether the Hutterites were entitled to an accommodation from the mandatory photo requirement in drivers’ licenses on the grounds that their religion forbade them from having their photos willingly taken. Justice Abella laid out the drastic harm to the constitutional rights of the Hutterites, absent such exemption, since it would not allow them to maintain the autonomous and insular nature of their communities without any driving privileges.

This point is greatly appreciated especially in juxtaposition with how the majority opinion disposes of this argument, which suggested that the Hutterites could avail of third-party transport for necessary services. In his landmark essay Nomos and Narrative, the late legal scholar Robert Cover wrote about the jurispathic function of courts—that is, their ability to quash other commitments and forms of interpretation when they are incompatible with national norms. Religious freedom cases brought before courts often highlight this ability. In such cases, courts assert one law, often the state’s, to the rejection of all others. I am always reminded of this when I read opinions that make short shrift of the constitutional promise to celebrate pluralism and its guarantee to protect religious liberty. Justice Abella’s dissent in Hutterian is not one of them.

The dissent also fleshes out what proportionality stricto sensu in the Oakes test looks like. As the majority points out, this stage has not often been used in Charter cases.

Justice L’Heureux-Dubé in R v Van der Peet, [1996] 2 SCR 507

The dissent by Justice L’Heureux-Dubé in Van der Peet offers an explanation of why the ideal of legal reconciliation (one of the many dimensions of reconciliation) between Canada and its indigenous population remains an aspiration, rather than reality. Professor John Borrows, for instance, still criticizes the originalist framework for proving aboriginal rights that Van der Peet has ushered in and urges lawyers and academics to reject history as the sole determinant of legal analysis under s.35. But in 1996, Justice L’Heureux-Dubé already rejected the frozen rights approach she saw the majority opinion to be taking, and emphasized that “the notion of aboriginal rights must be open to fluctuation, change and evolution, not only from one native group to another, but also over time.”

In particular, her approach to interpreting aboriginal rights rejects the reliance

on the proclamation of sovereignty by the British imperial power as the “cut-off” for the development of aboriginal practices, traditions and customs overstates the impact of European influence on aboriginal communities. Taking British sovereignty as the turning point in aboriginal culture assumes that everything that the natives did after that date was not sufficiently significant and fundamental to their culture and social organization. This is no doubt contrary to the perspective of aboriginal people as to the significance of European arrival on their rights.

Moreover, “crystallizing aboriginal practices, traditions and customs at the time of British sovereignty creates an arbitrary date for assessing existing aboriginal rights”.

And finally, Justice L’Heureux-Dubé writes:

the “frozen right” approach imposes a heavy and unfair burden on the natives: the claimant of an aboriginal right must prove that the aboriginal practice, tradition or custom is not only sufficiently significant and fundamental to the culture and social organization of the aboriginal group, but has also been continuously in existence, but as the Chief Justice stresses, even if interrupted for a certain length of time, for an indeterminate long period of time prior to British sovereignty. This test embodies inappropriate and unprovable assumptions about aboriginal culture and society. It forces the claimant to embark upon a search for a pristine aboriginal society and to prove the continuous existence of the activity for “time immemorial” before the arrival of Europeans.

Dissents in Canadian constitutional law opinions are far from being nasty “body slams,” as Dahlia Litwick describes dissenting opinions in the US Supreme Court, but they fulfill similar functions. At the very least, they enhance the legitimacy of judicial institutions since they reinforce the impartiality and independence of judges. There should be more of them.