An Update on Administrative Law: the Supreme Court of Canada in 2022

It is the Fall and as the leaves fall so too are forests felled to print the annual ‘year in review’ papers. I have posted my annual update on the Supreme Court of Canada’s administrative law jurisprudence to SSRN:

This paper focuses on the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2022 administrative law jurisprudence.

This year marked Canada’s apex court’s return to the administrative law scene after a couple of years of relative silence.

The most significant decision of the year came in Abrametz: the analysis there of “undue delay” is considered below in detail in Part 1.

Abrametz also featured discussion of the standard of review, of questions of procedural fairness; and in Entertainment Software Association, a majority of the Court added glosses to the Vavilov framework. The long-term implications of these decisions are considered in Part 2: frankly, these are difficult to determine, though two upcoming appeals are likely to shed further light on the long-term future of substantive review in Canadian administrative law.

In Part 3, I consider three decisions which touch on the place of administrative tribunals in Canada’s legal order: Entertainment Software Association provides guidance on the use of international law; whilst the decisions in Sullivan and Bissonnette indicate that the constitutional status of Canadian administrative tribunals is on the rise.

Regular readers will not see much new here, as the document mostly just collects my posts on the Supreme Court’s decisions, but it may be useful to have them all together in one place.

Download it here.

This content has been updated on October 18, 2022 at 14:09.