Recent Posts

On March 8, 2019, ARL filed its factum at the Supreme Court of Canada in Stillman v. The Queen and R. v. Beaudry. We have previously written about how these military justice appeals offer the Court a rare opportunity to provide guidance on the doctrine of horizontal stare decisis. ARL’s factum proposes a framework that we hope will assist the ...

In Ancient Greece, travelers from far and wide descended upon the Oracle at Delphi. Known collectively as the Pythia, these priestesses or women of Delphi, over generations, provided advice and counsel to anyone wishing to seek it. The Pythia were thought to channel the god Apollo. As the mythology of the Pythia grew, with kings, leaders, and leaders of armies ...

As has been widely reported, the PMO has been embroiled in a scandal over the last two weeks for allegedly exerting pressure upon its former Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, regarding the prosecution of SNC Lavalin.  Precisely what occurred remains unknown, and contrary to many social media commentators, we are not going to give our opinion on what may or may ...

For the third time in little more than a year, the Supreme Court of Canada has granted Advocates for the Rule of Law leave to intervene to assist the Court in addressing a significant public law issue. This time, ARL will make submissions on when intermediate appellate courts may depart from their own binding precedents. This question of horizontal stare ...

Double Aspect, the law blog of Leonid Sirota and Mark Mancini, recently hosted The 12 Days of Christmas, in which contributors offered their picks for the five worst public law Supreme Court of Canada decisions between 1967 and 2017. My list included Andrews, which I criticized for starting the mess that the Supreme Court has made of section 15(1) of ...

In a guest post on the Double Aspect Blog over the Christmas break, Professor Bruce Pardy (Queen’s Law) picked the Supreme Court’s decision in Andrews as one of the worst decisions since 1967. While I believe Professor Pardy offered some important criticisms of the Court in his post, I must respectfully disagree with his attack on the Andrews decision and ...

Earlier this month, I had the true privilege of taking part in a discussion with Justice David Stratas of the Federal Court of Appeal, who is one of Canada’s most prominent jurists, on the subject of statutory and constitutional interpretation. The conversation was part of the Runnymede Society’s annual Law & Freedom Conference. Justice Stratas and I covered a lot ...

Last week’s unusual Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Welsh v Ontario made headlines as the Court quashed an order that $1.5 Million dollars be paid to a charity. The facts of the case make the result a bitter pill to swallow. But despite this result, and the unusual statutory and factual matrix in which the case emerged, the decision ...

As any Ontario personal injury lawyer knows, the common law of damages has been modified significantly in the context of motor vehicle accidents, to the benefit of defendants and their insurers. The legislature has enacted various measures to limit the ability of plaintiffs to recover in tort. It has done so for two reasons: 1) to help limit the number ...

Over on Professor Daly’s blog Administrative Law Matters, Professor Audrey Macklin wrote what I would characterize as a confessional: an admission that the law of judicial review in Canada may be beyond repair. What Prof. Macklin proposes, in light of this realization, is a renewed focus on the principles of statutory interpretation, rather than a myopic focus on standard of ...