Justice Côté’s partial dissenting reasons in References re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2021 SCC 11 offered an original interpretation of the Constitution Act, 1867 that challenges the conventional view on the Parliament of Canada’s authority to enact Henry VIII clauses. A Henry VIII clause is a statutory provision that delegates to the executive the power to amended an enabling ...

If there is one aspect of Canadian administrative law that is relatively understudied, it is the constitutionality (or, less ambitiously, the desirability) of the delegation of legislative power from Parliament to the Cabinet and administrative actors. The recent Saskatchewan Carbon Tax Reference puts into stark relief the underdeveloped nature of the law in this area, and the stakes underlying the ...

The administrative state, the supposed sword of progressives, is not necessarily so. In many countries, the administrative state was constituted on the urging of progressives to advance a social justice agenda. In the United States, progressive reformers during the New Deal era sought to make government a “prescriptive entity” designed to advance certain progressive goals. Executive orders reached a “heyday” during ...