For some time, I have wanted to write about the prevalent tendency to describe the judicial method in public law cases as one of ‘weighing’ or ‘balancing’ competing interests. It seems to me that reference to weight and balance captures only a part of the judicial task in complex cases. In fact, there is a […] Read more

My administrative law students will sit their final exam on Friday. So some of them having been coming to see me with questions about the finer points of Canadian administrative law doctrine. Often, my answer is: “Je ne sais pas”. And, unfortunately, the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), […] Read more

A quick note on McCormick v. Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, 2014 SCC 39, an interesting case about whether law firm partners can be required to retire at 65. Short answer: yes (in British Columbia). The BC Human Rights Tribunal found that Mr. McCormick was an employee of the firm, a finding which would have entitled […] Read more

The Supreme Court of Canada has granted leave in National Gallery of Canada v. Canadian Artists’ Representation, 2013 FCA 64. This has the potential to be a very interesting administrative law case. I think that the majority of the Federal Court of Appeal was wrong and hope that the Supreme Court will favour the approach […] 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

Williams v. British Columbia (Superintendent of Motor Vehicles), 2012 BCSC 1976 featured an unsuccessful argument that the respondent, the statutory decision-maker who follows up on road-side penalties administered by the provincial police force, had jurisdiction to grant Charter remedies. The applicant complained that his right to counsel had been violated because he had not been […] Read more

Section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides that any infringement of a Charter right must be “prescribed by law”, a requirement that must be satisfied by the government before an application of the proportionality test. The jurisprudence on section 1 is very messy and has been criticized. Indeed, the Supreme Court of […] Read more

In its 2010 decision in Telezone, the Supreme Court of Canada took a relatively relaxed approach to private law actions against the federal government in provincial court. The difficulty is that in some of these cases a court will have to adjudicate on the lawfulness — as a public law matter — of actions or […] Read more