Like many Canadian law faculties, the University of Ottawa has been delivering a significant amount of its teaching virtually or bi-modally during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been teaching administrative law in a flipped classroom format for the last two years: students consume recorded lectures beforehand and participate via Zoom in small- and large-group class […] Read more

Teaching term is over and exam season is upon us. Here is this year’s exam for Administrative Law. You have six hours… In the fictional Canadian province of Lower Canada, there occurred in 2020 an outbreak of a highly contagious and extremely dangerous flu-like disease known as VICOD. In Lower Canada, the Public Health Act […] Read more

The few historically oriented discussions of public administration in Canada tend to take the regulation of railways in the 1850s as their starting point.  But there were early pre-cursors to the administrative state. The dominant theory of Canadian economic development is that the country was built on the production and export of various ‘staples’. From […] Read more

In a draft book chapter I am working on with co-author Kseniya Kudischeva, we discuss the increased importance of factual assessments in public law. Here is the first of four substantive parts. Comments and thoughts welcome. Common law judges have traditionally been highly reluctant to interfere with factual assessments made by administrative decision-makers. This reluctance […] Read more

The remarkable decision in Acadian Society of New Brunswick v Canada (Prime Minister), 2022 NBQB 55 deserves comment, especially for its treatment of justiciability and remedy. Here, DeWare CJ declared that the appointment of a unilingual Anglophone Lieutenant-Governor for the bilingual province of New Brunswick was unconstitutional as it violated a variety of New-Brunswick-specific provisions […] Read more

The application of the principles of restitution/unjust enrichment to overpayments of tax in Canada is in a muddled state. The problem arises where a taxpayer overpays on the basis of a mistake of law or a mistake of fact, a capacious set of categories which can include mistakes about the lawfulness or applicability of a […] Read more

In my post on “Unreasonable Bilingual Interpretations of Law“, I mentioned that the Supreme Court would have the opportunity in Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Mason, 2021 FCA 156 (leave granted) to say more about the methodology of reviewing administrative interpretations of law. Mason raises other issues as well, one of which also arose in […] Read more

In its decision in MZAPC v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2021] HCA 17, the High Court of Australia ventured once again into the murky territory of materiality in administrative law (a topic I address in detail in this paper). The issue in this case was who bears the onus of establishing materiality, the […] Read more

In “One Year of Vavilov“, I observed that “some portions of Vavilov are liable to become battlegrounds between different factions of judges, those who favour more intrusive review on questions of law in one camp, their more deferential colleagues in the other” (at p. 15). One of those portions is the one on judicial review […] Read more