Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark decision in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, [2019] 4 SCR 653. 2019 is really a world away. On the afternoon of the release of the decision, I held a dial-in session where I delivered my thoughts into […] Read more

The Federal Court of Appeal recently released an interesting decision at the intersection of constitutional and administrative law in Galderma Canada Inc. v. Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FCA 208 (I was co-counsel for the appellant). The case involved a judicial review of a decision of the Patented Medicines Prices Review Board purporting to regulate an […] Read more

I have a new paper, “Artificial Intelligence and Administrative Tribunals“, prepared for a forthcoming volume edited by Matthew Groves and Yee-Fui Ng. Here is the abstract of a fairly optimistic paper: In this paper, I will examine the implications of artificial intelligence for administrative tribunals. I will briefly set the scene in Part I by describing […] Read more

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Auer case (noted here) confirmed that the standard of review applicable to regulations is reasonableness: the judicial review analysis must be conducted under the Vavilov framework. Auer had a companion decision on discriminatory regulations: TransAlta Generation Partnership v. Alberta, 2024 SCC 37. In this decision dealing with […] Read more

The Supreme Court of Canada handed down its much-anticipated decision on standard of review of regulations in Auer v. Auer, 2024 SCC 36 this morning. I was co-counsel for the appellant, Roland Auer. After the hearing back in April, two things seemed quite clear to me: the Supreme Court would apply the Vavilov framework to […] Read more

I am giving a couple of ‘year in review’ talks in the coming weeks, to the CLEBC Administrative Law Conference in Vancouver on November 21, and the Canadian Bar Association’s Administrative Law, and Labour and Employment Law Conference in Ottawa on November 29. I’ve posted the CLEBC version of the paper to SSRN, “Correctness, Reasonableness […] Read more

Occasionally, cases arises in which the answer given seems intuitively obvious. The only surprise about Re McAleenon, [2024] UKSC 31 is that the case made it to the United Kingdom’s apex court at all (though as we will see there were some unusual aspects to the case that help to explain why the court below […] Read more

To open, a plug for the excellent new “Administrative Court Blog“, run by Anurag Deb, Lewis Graham and Gabriel Tan: this highlights important decisions from the UK on administrative law matters. I have found it invaluable and, indeed, only came across the case described in this post from Anurag Deb’s post. Last year, I posted […] Read more

On the evergreen topic of Charter values, I have a new paper on SSRN (forthcoming in a special edition of the Ottawa Law Review on language rights), entitled “The Charter in Administrative Decision-Making: Defending the Duty to Take Charter Values (or Purposes) into Account“: The Supreme Court of Canada recently reaffirmed that administrative decision-makers are […] Read more

In its 2018 decision in Highwood Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v. Wall, 2018 SCC 26, [2018] 1 SCR 750, the Supreme Court of Canada sought to clarify the approach to the scope of judicial review. Rowe J wrote, for a unanimous court, that “[j]udicial review is only available where there is an exercise […] Read more