The Supreme Court of Canada’s most recent entry in its standard of review catalogue is Ontario (Attorney General) v. Ontario (Information and Privacy Commissioner), 2024 SCC 4. Here, the Commissioner had ordered that mandate letters issued by the Premier of Ontario to his cabinet ministers should be released under the Freedom of Information and Protection […] Read more

Readers will no doubt have noticed Justice Mosley’s decision last week in Canadian Frontline Nurses v. Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 42, holding that the invocation of the Emergencies Act by the federal government in 2022 was unlawful, both because the reasons given lacked justification given the constraints of the Act (and the facts) and […] Read more

I am honoured (and a little bit intimidated!) to have been invited to participate in the ‘cycle de conférences‘ of the Chaire Jean-Louis Baudoin at my old stomping ground, the Université de Montréal, on Friday. I’ll be talking about the civil-law style in administrative law and how to reconcile it with the approach of common […] Read more

I have been working on a ‘year in review’ publication for the Energy Regulation Quarterly, which should be published open-access in English and French in the not-too-distant future. To whet your collective appetite, here are some opening thoughts… Canadian administrative law is, at present, in a relatively settled state. The years since the seminal Supreme […] Read more

A rare defeat for a regulator on an issue of procedural fairness occurred in Alta Link Management Ltd v. Alberta Utilities Commission, 2023 ABCA 325. At issue here were a series of decisions made by the Commission relating to the recovery, through rates, of expenses incurred in Alberta’s transmission and distribution network. To be more […] Read more

In an interesting recent decision, the Federal Court of Appeal grappled with the scope of the ‘open court’ principle. In Canadian Broadcasting Corporation v. Canada (Parole Board), 2023 FCA 166, the CBC sought judicial review of the Board’s refusal to release copies of the audio recordings of parole hearings of three offenders, amongst them Paul […] Read more

There is a remarkable editorial in the latest issue of the Journal of European Competition Law & Policy by a group of female scholars. Here is an extract: Small informal meetings with fellow academics painted a gloomy picture. People shared their experiences: from gender-based discrimination to outright sexist, racist or otherwise bigoted comments, to persistent […] Read more

In one of the most interesting scholarly works of the past decade, Professor Peter Cane offered, in Controlling Administrative Power: An Historical Comparison (CUP, 2016), an institutional explanation for divergence between jurisdictions. He identified the “similarities and differences” in the “systems of government” (at 2) as an explanatory device and went on over the course […] Read more