This is an excerpt from my paper, “The Scope and Meaning of Reasonableness Review after Vavilov“ As is well known, the Supreme Court’s guidance on reasonableness review prior to Vavilov was extremely limited, a shortcoming that was emphatically addressed in the majority reasons. The General Structure of Reasonableness Review There are three general points to […] Read more

On Thursday, the University of Alberta will host a conference marking the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65. Gerard Kennedy (Alberta) and Mark Mancini (TRU) were the brains of this operation; I carpet-bagged my way onto the organizing committee once […] Read more

Any observer of contemporary politics will tell you that winds of change are blowing across Canada. President Trump’s return to office in Washington DC has disrupted a stable trading relationship, prompting Canadian politicians provincially and federally to focus efforts on eliminating internal trade barriers and promoting large-scale economic development projects with a view to compensating […] Read more

This is an excerpt from my paper, “The Scope and Meaning of Reasonableness Review after Vavilov“ As is well known, Vavilov establishes that the presumptive standard of review for any administrative decision is reasonableness,[1] subject to two sets of exceptions, one based on the rule of law and the other based on institutional design. The […] Read more

This is an extract from my recent paper on bias (available here): Comments made by a decision-maker may give rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias. It is useful to contrast the statements at issue in two Canadian cases. On the one hand, in Newfoundland Telephone Co. v. Newfoundland (Board of Commissioners of Public Utilities),[1] […] Read more

Along with Professors Gerard Kennedy (Alberta) and Mark Mancini (TRU), I am organizing a one-day conference in Edmonton on June 19 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Vavilov decision. My contribution for the conference is “The Scope and Meaning of Reasonableness Review after Vavilov“: This paper, written for the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s seminal […] Read more

In its recent decision in Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights v. Canada (Attorney General), 2025 FCA 82, the Federal Court of Appeal returned to a theme it has mentioned more than once in recent years. What is the posture that an appellate court should take in relation to a first-instance judgment on a judicial review […] Read more

As a matter of general principle, when a statute vests a power or function in an identified person, such as “the Commissioner” or “the Board”, the identified person or entity – and no one else – should exercise the power or function (see, e.g. Canada (Attorney-General) v. Brent [1956] SCR 318; Roncarelli v. Duplessis [1959] […] Read more

This is an extract from my recent paper on bias (available here): In this section, I will draw a contrast between an Australian decision and one from Canada, again to support my proposition that the law relating to bias is best understood in terms of temporal and spatial proximity. At the centre of the tale […] Read more

This is an extract from my recent paper on bias (available here):   I will consider three Canadian decisions in this section. They each relate to the prior relationship between a decision-maker and a party to a matter. The issue in Committee for Justice and Liberty v. National Energy Board[1] was the perceived lack of […] Read more