Deference on Questions of International Law

The majority of the Federal Court of Appeal in Hernandez Febles v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2012 FCA 324 refused to defer to the immigration authorities' interpretation of Article 1F(b) of the Refugee Convention (as implemented by s. 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act).

Two Recent Papers on Accountability

I was particularly taken by Julia Black's recent Calling Regulators to Account: Challenges, Capacities and Prospects:

Since their inception, public lawyers and political scientists have fulminated at the lack of accountability of regulatory agencies. But, though it may surprise their critics, regulatory agencies do not go out of their way to be unaccountable. The difficulties of accountability, this article argues, lie in large part elsewhere: with the institutional position and accountability capacity of the accountors, and with the particular nature of the challenges that face them. The article focuses on developments in the roles of the four main accountors in the UK political domain in turn: the core executive, Parliament, the National Audit Office and consumer bodies, exploring their relationships both with the accountees (the regulators) and with other bodies which are calling those regulators to account. It examines their capacity to call regulators to account, and to meet the five core accountability challenges that face them: viz the scale and scope of the regulatory landscape, the number of organizations involved in any one regulatory domain, the complexity of their relationships and their propensity to blame-shift; the technical complexity and contestability of the regulatory task; the opacity of regulatory processes; and the willingness of the accountee to be called to account. These challenges produce deep-rooted tensions which are not easy to resolve, and create opportunities for blame- shifting which both accountors and accountees can, and do, seek to exploit. Moreover, the roles of accountors themselves are fluid, moving from accountor to participant to controller, bringing further complexity to the accountability relationship. However, it is the nature both of the relationship and the task of accountability that these tensions will exist, and it is right that they do, at least up to a point. For without those tensions both regulators and their accountors will become complacent, which will be to their detriment, as well as ours.

Accountability is a vast concept, and its application is often difficult. Black talks of accountors: bodies which hold regulators to account. She emphasizes the need to look at (1) their institutional position, including the amount of respect they attract and (2) their accountability capacity, in terms of resources. These, it seems to me, are two very helpful axes for charting the concept of accountability in different contexts. For example, one could say as a general matter that courts have a strong institutional position but limited capacity for holding others to account. Therefore, we must sometimes look to extra-judicial bodies.

In that regard, Mark Elliott's recent Ombudsmen, Tribunals, Inquiries: Re-fashioning Accountability Outside the Courts is also worth noting:

Courts play a prominent and significant role in holding public bodies to account in the UK, most obviously through the exercise of powers of judicial review. However, the accountability 'system' extends far beyond the courts, encompassing (among other institutions) tribunals, ombudsmen and inquiries into matters of public concern. This chapter argues that accountability is a protean concept, and that the accountability system must therefore exhibit appropriate diversity if accountability in all its relevant senses is to be secured. This raises questions about the balance and relationship between legal and political mechanisms for supplying accountability. It is argued that an increasing tendency to view the legal-judicial model as a paradigm places other accountability institutions at risk of inappropriate judicialisation. That trend, it is contended, must not continue unchecked if the accountability system is to remain suitably diverse.

Steering Charter Claims in the Right Direction

Williams v. British Columbia (Superintendent of Motor Vehicles), 2012 BCSC 1976 featured an unsuccessful argument that the respondent, the statutory decision-maker who follows up on road-side penalties administered by the provincial police force, had jurisdiction to grant Charter remedies.

Municipal Councillors: Bias and Legislative Activities

Decision-making by municipal councillors has garnered plenty of headlines in recent months due to the travails of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (see my posts here and here, and my Financial Post op-ed).  The issues in Ford's case are principally ones of statutory interpretation. A recent decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal, Beaverford v Thorhild (County No. 7), 2013 ABCA 6, is a more traditional application of the common law rule against bias, although the presence of Facebook in the facts of the case gives it a certain novelty value.

I fear, however, that the Court got it wrong in finding bias in this case. It has been quite a while since the Supreme Court of Canada has addressed the rule against bias and this case may provide it with an occasion to do so.

Causation: Administrative-law style

I open with a warning: I find the Supreme Court of Canada's causation jurisprudence hard to fathom, so it is with some trepidation that I venture out to comment on Alberta (Workers' Compensation Board) v Alberta (Appeals Commission for Alberta Workers' Compensation), 2012 ABQB 733. The case is about an individual who contracted asbestos-related disease through his employment and who subsequently died of metatastic renal cell carcinoma.

Courts and Copyright: Some Thoughts on Standard of Review

My essay on the Supreme Court of Canada's copyright pentalogy will be published around Easter in a volume edited by Michael Geist, the working title of which is The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law (see page 18 here).

You can download my paper here. Here is the abstract:

In June 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada decided five important copyright cases.

In doing so, it also introduced an innovation to the law of judicial review. In Rogers Communications Inc. v. Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, a majority of the Court held that, even though the Copyright Board was interpreting its own statute (typically, a situation in which deference is appropriate), no deference would be paid to its interpretation of the scope of copyright.

For the majority, Justice Rothstein explained that the Copyright Board and the Federal Court of Canada have concurrent jurisdiction to deal with issues of copyright law. As the Copyright Board does not operate in a "discrete and specialized" administrative regime, deference to its decisions on matters of interpretation would be inappropriate. I argue that the new "shared jurisdiction" exception will lead to confusion. Clever counsel will doubtless try to stretch the Court's logic to other areas, such as competition and securities regulation. I further suggest that it was unnecessary to develop this exception, because the Court already possesses the doctrinal means of addressing the problems by which it was concerned.

My primary focus is thus relatively narrow, confined to technical questions of administrative law. However, I adopt a broader lens towards the end of this paper and suggest that Canadian courts ought to be more willing to accord deference to the decisions of the Copyright Board. Courts do not, in short, have the copyright on wisdom about intellectual property law.

I then conclude with some thoughts on the application of the general principles of administrative law in one of the other cases in the pentalogy, Alberta (Education) v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). The serious disagreement between the majority and minority judges in that case casts light on an important issue in administrative law, the characterization of administrative decisions 

My original post from last year, in which I developed the arguments in the paper for the first time, is here.

Happy New Year

For those of you wondering where I have been, I have been partly resting on my laurels since my runner-up award at the Clawbies and partly plotting the overthrow of this year's winner in the Best Law Professor Blog category, ABlawg, the Calgary Law Faculty's blog.

Normal service should resume over the next couple of days, although my partner and I are in the process of buying a house (our first), which is proving to be very time-consuming. So, lower your expectations accordingly, please!