scholarly journals Administrative Fairness in Alberta

1969 ◽  
pp. 351
Author(s):  
David Phillip Jones

This article discusses the recent development in the scope of the administrative law concept of the "duty to be fair" and the effect of that development on judicial review and on the need to characterize functions. The author examines in depth five recent cases, including Martineau v. Matsqui Institution Disciplinary Board (No. 2), decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in December 1979, insofar as they involve application of the concept of fairness.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark P Mancini

In an upcoming set of cases, the Supreme Court of Canada will review its approach to the standard of review of administrative action. In this paper, the author suggests that the Court must go back to the foundation of judicial review in redesigning the standard of review, namely, the task of courts to police the legal boundaries of the administrative body. To do so, courts must authentically interpret the legislative grant of authority to the administrative decision-maker, particularly to determine the appropriate intensity of review. To that end, the author suggests that the Court should discard two myths that have pervaded modern administrative law: (1) that administrative decisionmakers should be granted deference based on purported expertise in matters of statutory interpretation; and (2) that jurisdictional questions exist separately from questions of law. The myths may impose a different standard of review than the one discernible with the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation. The author argues that these court-created devices should not exist at the expense of the constitutionally prescribed duty of the courts to exercise their policing function and engage in genuine statutory interpretation to determine the appropriate standard of judicial review in a given case.


2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-833 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy B. Flemming ◽  
Glen S. Krutz

The expanding public policy role of high courts heightens concerns over whether societal and political inequalities affect the outcomes of litigation. However, comparative research on this question is limited. This article assesses whether status inequalities between parties and differences in the experience and resources of attorneys influence the selection of cases for judicial review in the Supreme Court of Canada. A series of statistical models reveal that governments are more likely than other parties to influence whether leave is granted but that the experience and resources of lawyers, unlike in the United States, have little impact. The decentralized, low volume and high access features of the Canadian process may explain this finding.


2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-507
Author(s):  
Paul Daly

In Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, the Supreme Court of Canada attempted to clarify and simplify Canadian judicial review doctrine. I argue that the Court got it badly wrong, as evidenced by four of its recent decisions. The cases demonstrate that the new categorical approach is unworkable. A reviewing court cannot apply the categorical approach without reference to something like the much-maligned “pragmatic and functional” analysis factors. The categories regularly come into conflict, in that decisions could perfectly reasonably be assigned to more than one category. When conflict occurs, it must be resolved by reference to some factors external to the categorical approach. The new, single standard of reasonableness is similarly unworkable without reference to external factors. Different types of decision attract different degrees of deference, on the basis of factors that are external to the elegant elucidation of reasonableness offered in Dunsmuir. Clarification and simplicity have thus not been achieved.


2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-250
Author(s):  
Ran Hirschl

The Courts, Ian Greene, The Canadian Democratic Audit Series; Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006, pp. xvii, 182.This book is another welcome addition to the Canadian Democratic Audit Series. It sets out to assess the democratic credentials of Canada's judiciary—a most significant branch of government in post-1982 Canada. The book's approach is refreshing in several respects. Instead of the traditional focus on the well-rehearsed debate over the questionable democratic credentials of judicial review, the book attempts to evaluate the adequacy of the Canadian court system in relation to three basic tenets of democracy: participation, inclusiveness, and responsiveness. Unlike most accounts of Canadian political institutions, it pays due attention to elements of the court system beyond the Supreme Court of Canada. In so doing, Greene is able to assess more accurately whether the Canadian judiciary as a whole is living up to that set of reasonable democratic expectations.


2010 ◽  
pp. 1017
Author(s):  
Alice Woolley ◽  
Shaun Fluker

In Dunsmuir the Supreme Court of Canada reassessed the “troubling question” of how courts should review decisions of administrative tribunals. The majority judgment of Bastarache and LeBel JJ. (writing also for McLachlin, Abella, and Fish JJ.), sought to simplify the judicial review process by reducing the standards of review from three to two, increasing reliance on precedent to determine which standard is appropriate, making explicit the significance of the nature of the question to the determination of the standard in every case, and re-labelling the “pragmatic and functional” test the “standard of review analysis.” In its recent judgment in Khosa the Supreme Court emphasized the simplifying intention of Dunsmuir, suggesting that “Dunsmuir teaches that judicial review should be less concerned with the formulation of different standards of review and more focused on substance, particularly on the nature of the issue that was before the administrative tribunal under review.”


Author(s):  
Steven Gow Calabresi

This chapter assesses the emergence of judicial review in Canada. Canadian judicial review emerged as a direct result of federalism and separation of powers umpiring by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), which was Canada’s highest court from the adoption of the British North America Act in 1867 until Canada ended appeals to the JCPC in 1949. There was also, as Ran Hirschl would argue, an element of elite hegemonic entrenchment by imperial British colonial elites in the retention of the JCPC as the highest court of appeals in Canada from the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1875 until Canada abolished appeals to the JCPC in 1949. Some Canadian elites tried and failed to end JCPC judicial review in Canadian cases in 1875. Canadian judicial review from 1867 to 1982 was exclusively concerned with federalism and separation of powers judicial umpiring because Canada had no constitutional Bill of Rights until 1982. There are thus two founding moments in the judicial review of legislation in Canadian history: firstly, the period from 1867 to 1982 when Canadian federalism and separation of powers law took shape as a result of federalism and separation of powers umpiring; and, secondly, the period from 1982 to the present, when the Supreme Court of Canada began vigorously enforcing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The emergence of judicial review from 1982 down to the present day is partly a rights from wrongs phenomenon, and it is partly the result of constitutional borrowing from the United States’s Warren Court.


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