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

Canada’s relationship with its First Nations has been in the news a great deal recently, due to the Idle No More protests. Governance is a central issue in current political discourse and it was also at the centre of Gamblin v. Norway House Cree Nation Band Council, 2012 FC 1536. Here, the respondent had approved […] Read more

The majority of the Federal Court of Appeal in Hernandez Febles v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2012 FCA 324 refused to defer to the immigration authorities’ interpretation of Article 1F(b) of the Refugee Convention (as implemented by s. 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act).The question at issue was whether the applicant had properly […] Read more

I was particularly taken by Julia Black’s recent Calling Regulators to Account: Challenges, Capacities and Prospects: Since their inception, public lawyers and political scientists have fulminated at the lack of accountability of regulatory agencies. But, though it may surprise their critics, regulatory agencies do not go out of their way to be unaccountable. The difficulties […] Read more