With a new Prime Minister set to take office on Monday morning once the Liberal Party of Canada has determined who should succeed Justin Trudeau as its leader, it is quite possible that a general election will be called early next week or that Parliament will be recalled forthwith. Accordingly, the lawfulness of the Trudeau […] Read more
The Canadian debate about the relationship between statutory rights of appeal and applications for judicial review continues to rumble on. In Best Buy Canada Ltd. v. Canada (Border Services Agency), 2025 FCA 45, Stratas JA for a unanimous Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal and judicial review application that “adopts the submissions made in the […] Read more
It is early in 2025 but already we have a contender for the most significant public law decision of the year. In Kebaowek First Nation v. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, 2025 FC 319, Blackhawk J held that, in principle, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (incorporated into domestic law by the United […] Read more
Next up in in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium is Professor Aileen Kavanagh (Wednesday, February 26, 11.30 Ottawa time). She will be discussing her wonderful book The Collaborative Constitution: In this book, Aileen Kavanagh offers a fresh account of how we should protect rights in a democracy. Departing from leading theoretical accounts which […] Read more
On the other side of the border, President Trump is reshaping federal public administration at breakneck speed, asserting control over so-called independent agencies, firing swathes of civil servants and defunding bodies created by statute. Presidents from both parties have expanded executive power in recent decades but the speed and scale of the current changes are […] Read more
On Wednesday at 11.30, my next guest in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium will be Professor Roberto Gargarella. He will be discussing his book The Law as a Conversation Amongst Equals (Cambridge, 2022): In a time of disenchantment with democracy, massive social protests and the ‘erosion’ of the system of checks and balances, this […] Read more
The next guest in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium will be Dr. Paolo Sandro (Leeds) on Wednesday, February 12 at 11.30 (Ottawa time). Dr. Sandro will be discussing his book The Making of Constitutional Democracy: From Creation to Application of Law (Hart, 2022): This open access book addresses a palpable, yet widely neglected, […] Read more
In previous posts, I mused about the possibility of a challenge to Prime Minister Trudeau’s advice to the Governor General to prorogue Parliament from January 6 to March 24 of this year. There is now a challenge and, moreover, it has been expedited by the Chief Justice of the Federal Court: the hearing will be […] Read more
Following on from my previous post, here are some notes on cases involving decisions based on or influenced by political expediency… Padfield v Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food [1968] AC 997 concerned a statute providing that “A committee of investigation shall…be charged with the duty, if the Minister in any case so directs, of […] Read more
I hope to post in the coming week about the challenge to the recent prorogation of the Canadian Parliament. I am speaking at three separate events in February (at uOttawa, the Runnymede Society’s Law and Freedom conference, and the University of Alberta). For now, I have dug out a few pages of old lecture notes […] Read more