Next up in in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium is Professor Aileen Kavanagh (Wednesday, February 26, 11.30 Ottawa time). She will be discussing her wonderful book The Collaborative Constitution: In this book, Aileen Kavanagh offers a fresh account of how we should protect rights in a democracy. Departing from leading theoretical accounts which […] Read more
On the other side of the border, President Trump is reshaping federal public administration at breakneck speed, asserting control over so-called independent agencies, firing swathes of civil servants and defunding bodies created by statute. Presidents from both parties have expanded executive power in recent decades but the speed and scale of the current changes are […] Read more
On Wednesday at 11.30, my next guest in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium will be Professor Roberto Gargarella. He will be discussing his book The Law as a Conversation Amongst Equals (Cambridge, 2022): In a time of disenchantment with democracy, massive social protests and the ‘erosion’ of the system of checks and balances, this […] Read more
The next guest in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium will be Dr. Paolo Sandro (Leeds) on Wednesday, February 12 at 11.30 (Ottawa time). Dr. Sandro will be discussing his book The Making of Constitutional Democracy: From Creation to Application of Law (Hart, 2022): This open access book addresses a palpable, yet widely neglected, […] Read more
In previous posts, I mused about the possibility of a challenge to Prime Minister Trudeau’s advice to the Governor General to prorogue Parliament from January 6 to March 24 of this year. There is now a challenge and, moreover, it has been expedited by the Chief Justice of the Federal Court: the hearing will be […] Read more
Following on from my previous post, here are some notes on cases involving decisions based on or influenced by political expediency… Padfield v Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food [1968] AC 997 concerned a statute providing that “A committee of investigation shall…be charged with the duty, if the Minister in any case so directs, of […] Read more
I hope to post in the coming week about the challenge to the recent prorogation of the Canadian Parliament. I am speaking at three separate events in February (at uOttawa, the Runnymede Society’s Law and Freedom conference, and the University of Alberta). For now, I have dug out a few pages of old lecture notes […] Read more
I am pleased to say the lineup for this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium has been confirmed. You can register here for the individual sessions and/or join directly from the links below. The theme is “Justifying Judicial Review”: Western constitutional democracies live in turbulent times, buffeted by populism, technological development, globalization and other challenges. […] Read more
Following from my previous post and based on Prime Minister’s Trudeau remarks this morning, I would think the prospects for any successful challenge are low. The Prime Minister announced this morning that he would be resigning both as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and from office as soon as a successor is selected […] Read more
There is an end-of-days feeling around Ottawa at the moment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it seems, is not long for this (political world). He leads a minority administration and, though he has governed in that way since the last election, the opposition parties now say they will vote no confidence at the first available opportunity. […] Read more