Provocative post from Michael Greve. A taste: More and more, our administrative state looks like something dreamt up in a late-night meeting between Carl Schmitt and Evita Peron. I’m teaching something called, fraudulently, administrative “law.” Believe you me: nothing in that corpus juris poses any meaningful constraint on government. Read more

Saoirse Brady had a fine op-ed in the Irish Times this week on the problems claimants experience in the Irish social welfare decision-making process: “Social welfare appeals process not fit for purpose“. The report she describes can be downloaded from the website of the Free Legal Advice Centre. Read more

In the context of an ongoing investigation of the embattled engineering firm, SNC-Lavalin, Québec’s securities regulator compelled an executive to produce certain documents. In the same letter, however, the regulator purported to prevent the executive from telling anyone else about the documents (apart from the company’s lawyers). Revealing the existence of an ongoing investigation was […] Read more

Canada’s immigration system is bursting at the seams. One of the backlogs is in sponsorship applications by Canadian permanent residents and citizens of their parents and grandparents. The federal government’s response was to institute, by way of ministerial instructions issued pursuant to s. 87 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, a “temporary pause” in […] Read more

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford won his appeal this morning, as I predicted. You can find my previous posts here: http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-mayor-bias-procedural-fairness-and.html http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/12/municipal-powers-another-look-at-ford.html http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2013/01/mayor-ford-collateral-damage-from.html And a Financial Post op-ed here: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/12/11/divisional-court-should-overturn-flawed-rob-ford-decision/ Read more

Members of Canada’s First Nations have, if they can satisfy the significant evidentiary thresholds, potentially broad rights to engage in traditional practices such as hunting and fishing. At issue in L=Hirondelle v Alberta (Sustainable Resource Development), 2013 ABCA 12 was the administrative structure erected by the province of Alberta to regulate the issuing of fishing […] Read more

Ontario’s human rights legislation allows unsuccessful parties to a complaint to apply for reconsideration of a decision. But what if the adjudicator who already found against the party is the same adjudicator who determines the application for reconsideration: will the party applying for reconsideration really get a fair shake?In Landau v. Ontario (Minister of Finance), […] Read more

I have written quite a bit about the saga surrounding the removal from office of Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford: see here (principally on the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act), here (principally on the City of Toronto Act) and here (an overview of why the Divisional Court should allow Ford’s appeal). Hackland J.’s decision at first […] Read more

Penn’s RegBlog is running an interesting series on Regulatory Breakdown: The Crisis of Confidence in U.S. Regulation (UPenn Press, 2012), edited by Cary Coglianese. The series features short versions of the contributions to the book. Here is a brief taste, from a chapter on housing regulation: Regulatory oversight of the housing finance system became reliant […] Read more

I spent yesterday afternoon in a professional development session at the Department of Justice on the subject of the Canadian Border Services Agency’s “Wanted” list. Here is the abstract of my talk, Canada’s Least Wanted: Two Perspectives of an Administrative Lawyer: Taking a leaf out of a book first written by the FBI, the federal […] Read more