My post on Febles v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2014 SCC 68 has attracted many comments. Some readers are sympathetic to the Supreme Court of Canada. And, indeed, one may wonder what the practical effect is of standard-of-review discussions that sometimes border on the metaphysical. Should the Supreme Court of Canada not focus on resolving […] Read more

It seems to be, post-Forest Ethics Advocacy Association v. National Energy Board, 2014 FCA 245. First, the facts. The Board conditionally approved a major pipeline project to be completed by Enbridge. There are various challenges to the decision pending before the courts. This challenge concerned a number of matters that could fairly be described as […] Read more

Last calls for the year in review session Stratas J.A. and I are doing in Toronto next week. The event is close to a sell out, I am told, so register here if you are interested in coming along. If there are no seats left, or if you can’t make it to Toronto, there will […] Read more

[76]           Board hearings are not an open-line radio show where anyone can dial in and participate. Nor are they a drop-in center for anyone to raise anything, no matter how remote it may be to the Board’s task of regulating the construction and operation of oil and gas pipelines. So says Stratas […] Read more

* This is a second extract from a forthcoming essay of mine on the policy/operational distinction in Canadian tort law, “The Policy/Operational Distinction — A View from Administrative Law“. Download a draft here. See my first extract, a post on the Imperial Tobacco case, here * An administrative lawyer is comfortable in recommending that the […] Read more

In Canada, judicial review of administrative decision-makers for reasonableness has two aspects: the reasons must be understandable and the decision must fall within a range of reasonable outcomes. This gives rise to a problem. What should a court do where a decision is reasonable, but the reasons contain important inaccuracies or are incoherent? I addressed […] Read more

Matthew Groves passes on a very interesting decision from the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia: WZARH v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2014] FCAFC 137. The issue was simple. A refugee claimant went for an interview with an Independent Merits Reviewer whose task was to reassess a refusal to classify him […] Read more

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