Legal Process

In a commentary in the National Post, Professors Lorraine Weinrib and Lorne Sossin argue that the Governor-General's decision-making should be public and transparent in situations such as the recent request by the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament ("Canada's constitutional 'black box'," December 11, 2008).

Last Thursday, Governor-General Michaelle Jean granted a request from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to prorogue Parliament until late-January. She thus protected the Conservative government from a confidence vote that would have likely toppled the minority government, and perhaps prompted her to invite a Liberal-NDP coalition, supported by the Bloc Quebecois, to form a government. We would like to be in a position to share with you the arguments that the Prime Minister submitted to the Governor-General and her reasons for accepting them.

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):

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.

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.