So here we are, on the penultimate day of 2019. When this year began, I was not at all optimistic that the state of administrative law would improve with Vavilov’s release. But now I’m writing a third blog post on my gratitude! So never say surprises cannot happen… 14) Most alarming interpretations of Newfoundland Nurses repudiated. The Supreme Court’s decision ...

On Monday, I began the expansion of my list of twenty important – and positive – lessons from last week’s Vavilov decision. Now, I continue… 8) Access to justice can be facilitated by either reasonableness or correctness review depending on the circumstances. Defenders of reasonableness review frequently defend it on the basis that it facilitates access to justice. This is ...

Humans often don’t evaluate an experience in light of how good it is, but rather against how much it met/failed to meet/exceeded our expectations. And on that front, the Supreme Court’s decision in Minister of Citizenship and Immigration v Vavilov delivered in spades. After years of lamenting administrative law decisions coming from the Supreme Court, we have what looks like ...

In my last post on this blog, I commented and mostly praised two recent blog posts at Double Aspect by Mark Mancini from earlier this month calling for less deference to administrators in judicial review, unless a statute explicitly calls for such deference. But after I began drafting my response, a new development arose that now calls for a brief ...

Earlier this month, Mark Mancini wrote two very thoughtful blog posts on the Double Aspect blog, attempting to bring administrative law back to first principles. These intriguing posts are worthy of commentary. I will respond to Mancini’s two posts today, and follow up next week with an addendum in light of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in Canada ...

Earlier this month, Advocates for the Rule of Law appeared as an intervenor in the Bell/NFL and Vavilov appeals at the Supreme Court. Prior to the hearing, the Court advised the parties that these appeals would present an opportunity to reconsider the Court’s seminal decision in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, released a decade ago.  Consequently, various organizations, including ARL, moved to intervene in the case. ...

On August 30, 2018, Advocates for the Rule of Law brought a motion for intervention at the Supreme Court of Canada in three appeals: Minister of Citizenship and Immigration v Vavilov,[i] Bell Canada v. Canada (Attorney General),[ii] and National Football League v. Canada (Attorney General).[iii] In a rare move, the Court’s judgment granting leave to appeal elaborated as follows: The ...

In Groia v Law Society of Upper Canada, 2018 SCC 27, decided last week, the Supreme Court of Canada once again fractured over the approach to take to the judicial review of an administrative decision ― and, once again, the majority chose correctness review disguised as reasonableness as its methodology. The substantive issue in Groia was whether the Law Society was entitled to ...

The 10th anniversary of Dunsmuir presents an opportunity to revisit perhaps its most controversial aspect: the seeds it planted for a presumption of deference on home statute interpretation. As Professor Daly notes, the presumption is a “black hole” which engulfs questions of statutory interpretation in administrative law: Paul Daly, “Unreasonable Interpretations of Law” in Judicial Deference to Administrative Tribunals in ...

 The Supreme Court recently issued its decision in Quebec (Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail) v Caron, 2018 SCC 3, which may, or may not, be another sign that the Court’s love affair with deference to administrative decision-makers is coming to an end ― in practice if not yet in theory. I ...