I teed up Febles v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2014 SCC 68 a couple of days ago. The decision was released this morning. Here are the extracts in which the Court addressed the standard of review of questions of international law:                 I am sorry to have got […] Read more

I have a long-standing interest in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Doré v. Barreau du Québec, [2012] 1 SCR 395, 2012 SCC 12, in which the Court endorsed a deferential approach to administrative decisions infringing fundamental rights. See this paper, for example. One of the most intriguing issues post-Doré is what the Court […] Read more

On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada will release its decision on the appeal in Hernandez Febles v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2012 FCA 324. I summarized the Federal Court of Appeal decision here. Here is a primer on one of the issues: whether courts should defer to administrative decision-makers on interpretations of international law. […] Read more

* This is an extract from a forthcoming article, “The Policy/Operational Distinction — A View from Administrative Law“. Download a draft here. * The uninitiated might look at the Supreme Court’s recent decision in R. v. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., 2011 SCC 42, [2011] 3 S.C.R. 45 and suggest that the policy/operational distinction is no longer […] Read more

An interesting question, answered in Edmonton (Police Service) v Alberta (Law Enforcement Review Board), 2014 ABCA 267. A complaint was made against a police officer but dismissed by the Chief of the Edmonton Police Service after an internal review. The complainant appealed to the Board. A report of the internal review was made available for […] Read more

Regular readers will know that I have no fondness for the idea that the “common objective” of courts and administrative decision-makers is the proper application of the principles of statutory interpretation. In part, my position is that it is unrealistic to expect administrative decision-makers to apply these principles. Some empirical doubt is cast on that […] Read more

Canadian courts are to take five factors into account in determining the content of procedural fairness in any given case. One of these factors is whether the applicant had any legitimate expectation about the procedure to be followed. I have always found this unusual. Surely once an applicant establishes that a legitimate expectation has been […] Read more

The Centre for Constitutional Studies’ Constitutional Forum has published a special issue on cooperative federalism and the gun registry case heard by the Supreme Court of Canada last week. My contribution (in French) is on the relevance of unwritten constitutional principles to the resolution of the case. There are also papers from my colleague Jean-Francois […] Read more

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court of Canada hears a challenge to the federal criminal law prohibition on assisted suicide: Carter v. Canada. This law was upheld narrowly in 1993 (Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney General), [1993] 3 SCR 519), but the Court is being asked to take a fresh look in light of changed circumstances. For […] Read more

Readers may remember my post late last year on an Ontario case refusing judicial review of a school’s decision to expel a student, with the knock-on consequence that the student was unable to graduate: Setia v. Appleby College, 2013 ONCA 753. They may also be interested in suggesting how one can reconcile that case with […] Read more