Do Interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada Make a Difference?

Benjamin Alarie
Monday, November 2, 2009

Andrew Green and I have just posted a draft of a new paper to SSRN, Interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada: Accuracy, Affiliation, and Acceptance.  This is a work in progress that has been prepared for this Friday's Symposium on Interventions by the Asper Centre here at the Faculty of Law.  Here is the abstract to the draft paper (comments and suggestions are welcome):

Federal Judicial Appointments: Nothing Has Changed

Thursday, December 3, 2009

This article first appeared in The Lawyers' Weekly, November 20, 2009.

Some of us entertained a slender hope in 2006 that the Harper administration, after its election into office, could be persuaded not to use federal judicial appointments to feed the patronage mill. After all, as Opposition leader, Harper had fiercely denounced the Liberal party sponsorship scandal in Quebec and had promised to introduce an accountability act if the Conservatives won the next election. In a similar vein, Vic Toews, the future first justice minister in the Harper cabinet, endorsed a 2005 report of the House of Commons Justice Committee criticizing patronage appointments and calling for exclusively merit-based appointments. Toews was deputy chair of the committee.

How to Tame a Prerogative

David Schneiderman
Monday, March 15, 2010

From The Globe and Mail (March 10, 2010)

Opposition efforts to get at the facts about Afghan detainee abuse appear not to have entirely abated, despite former Supreme Court of Canada justice Frank Iacobucci's appointment to advise the government about releasing documents. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's constitutional footwork certainly did not do the trick. Prorogation simply will not erase the stain of Canadians handing over Afghan detainees to face torture, if accusations are true. The break also should not allow him to escape the House's motion calling for uncensored documents relating to the abuse allegations.

Up until the day before the motion in December, the government side claimed that a variety of statutes legally barred it from releasing documents that threatened national security. It was only then that Carolyn Kobernick, assistant deputy minister in the Department of Justice, acknowledged that there was no statutory basis for refusing to deliver unredacted documents.

Instead, Ms. Kobernick claimed that the government, when making decisions regarding disclosure, would be guided by “the values underlying Parliament's intention in these provisions” – namely, “to protect the national security of Canada from harm by the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information.” So there was no legal bar to the production of unredacted documents, only a discretion guided by values underlying the law.

Abdullah Khadr and the Consequences of Detainee Abuse

Kent Roach
Monday, December 5, 2011

This commentary by Prof. Kent Roach is cross-posted from the JURIST website.

According to the Canadian courts, what happens in Pakistan does not stay in Pakistan. The Supreme Court of Canada recently refused to review a permanent stay of extradition proceedings against Abdullah Khadr. Lower courts had previously ruled that "gross misconduct" by the US in arranging and prolonging Khadr's detention in Pakistan justified the extraordinary remedy of a stay of proceedings. The Supreme Court's refusal to consider this case means that Khadr will not be extradited to the US, where he has been indicted on charges of material support of terrorism for allegedly supplying arms and explosives to be used against US forces in Afghanistan. It is possible, but not probable, that Canadian authorities will prosecute Khadr, who was released in August 2010 after four-and-a-half years of pre-extradition custody and has still not been charged in Canada.

Symposium on Lifelong Learning in Professionalism

Chief Justice of Ontario's Advisory Committee on Professionalism

Symposium on Lifelong Learning in Professionalism

February 20, 2009
9:00 am - 4:30 pm
Reception to follow, 4:30 - 6:00 pm

Bennett Lecture Hall
Flavelle House, 78 Queen's Park Cres.
University of Toronto

Hosted by the Centre for the Legal Profession
Free, but registration is required

Asper Centre Workshop: Exclusion of Evidence

David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights

Presents

 

Exclusion of Evidence under s.24(2):

The Supreme Court Decisions of the Summer of 2009

 

DATE: September 30, 2009

12:30 – 2:00 p.m.

Bennett Lecture Hall

A light lunch will be served.

 

Article: Ziegel - The right way to pick Supreme Court judges

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

By: Jacob Ziegel

This commentary was first published in the National Post on August 19, 2011.

Ian Binnie and Louise Charron announced their intention to retire from the Supreme Court of Canada at the end of August more than three months ago. Yet it was only on Aug. 5 that the Minister of Justice announced the appointment procedure the federal government intended to follow in appointing their successors on the Court.

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