The national securities regulator and judicial Stockholm Syndrome

By Emmett Macfarlane - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 0 Comments

For much of its history, the Supreme Court of Canada was described as a “captive court” because it was bound by the rulings of Britain’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), which served as Canada’s final court of appeal until 1949. Indeed, many scholars argue that the Court remained captive until the Charter of Rights came into effect in 1982, when its judges finally began to exercise real policy-making power and assert “judicial creativity” into their decisions.

If today’s unanimous reference opinion on the federal government’s proposed legislation to create a national securities regulator is any indication, the Court may still be suffering from judicial Stockholm Syndrome.

Such a critique may be harsh (and perhaps even unwarranted). For decades the provinces have been responsible for regulating the securities market under their constitutional powers relating to “property and civil rights,” and their ability to do so was not questioned in this case. Continue…

This Court doesn’t lean

By Paul Wells - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments

“You know, the Supreme Court, it’s like the Tower of Pisa,” Maurice Duplessis used to say. “It always leans in the same direction.” Ho-ho. Toward Ottawa, he meant. The mid-20th-century Quebec premier was arguing that Quebec couldn’t win at the highest court in the land because the court would always invoke a “national interest” to ignore the Constitution and run roughshod over provincial rights.

It’s super-popular in Quebec nationalist circles to quote Duplessis on the Tower of Pisa, as the St.-Jean-Baptiste Society of the Mauricie does in this .pdf — without worrying too much that what set Duplessis off was the top court’s demolition of his loathsome Padlock Act, which he used to shut down suspected Communist-owned businesses in defiance of due process and free speech. Also handily ignored: the Supremes were upholding lower-court decisions in Quebec courts when they tossed Duplessis’s law out. Basically, justices from across Canada, when asked, joined a string of Quebec judges in protecting the people of Quebec from a lousy democrat. You’d think people would bear that in mind when quoting Duplessis on leaning towers. But no such luck.

Moving along, we note that one of the first things René Lévesque’s new Parti Québécois government did in 1976 was to contract legal scholar Gilbert L’Ecuyer to poke through Supreme Court jurisprudence looking for leaning towers. He didn’t find any: his 1978 study said the Supremes were faithfully applying the tenets of an 1867 constitution (that, to be fair, L’Ecuyer found unconscionably biased in its provisions toward the federal level).

No matter. The Leaning Tower metaphor is impervious to bullets and evidence. Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe rehearsed it in anticipation of the 1998 Supreme Court reference decision on secession. That’s when I first heard about it.

Fast forward to today, when the Supremes brought down their opinion on the national securities reference. Continue…

Democratic rights

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

Elizabeth May is joining an attempt to challenge the first-past-the-post electoral system as a violation of the Charter.

The case would argue that the Constitution protects the right of Canadians to have “effective representation,” which goes beyond having the right to cast a ballot. The two groups, the Association for the Advancement of Democratic Rights and Fair Vote Canada, have also earned an endorsement from Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

“The key issue is not that it’s unfair to the Green Party,” May said Tuesday at a news conference with representatives from the two groups. ”It’s unfair to democracy. It’s unfair to voters, and I think it’s a big reason for the decline in voter turnout.”

Ms. May argues that voter turnout is higher in countries with proportional representation. Going back to some numbers I posted last year, that’s somewhat true: all of the countries listed there, with the exception of Canada and France, use some kind of proportional representation. So while proportional representation is present in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands (all with turnout over 80%), it is also present in Portugal (under 60%) and Switzerland (under 50%).

Why official bilingualism doesn’t mean settling for second-best

By the editors - Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Most Canadians consider themselves to be reasonable people, and rightly so. In fact, the term “reasonable” and its variants appear a dozen times throughout Canada’s Constitution. So when it comes to hiring for Ottawa’s most senior jobs, we ought to consider the meaning of “reasonable.” Is it reasonable to make the ability to speak both official languages the single most important qualification for all such positions?

The appointment of Michael Ferguson as Canada’s next auditor general has become an unusually contentious affair. Ferguson served as auditor general of New Brunswick from 2005 to 2010 and was noted for his blunt criticism of provincial spending and debt. He also has experience as the provincial deputy minister of finance. So there’s no question of his ability to scrutinize the federal government’s books or hold Ottawa to account. The only real complaint is that he admits he cannot speak French fluently.

Response to this admission has been vitriolic. Liberal MPs boycotted the appointment vote in Parliament because they claimed Ferguson’s unilingualism made the entire process “illegitimate.” The Edmonton Journal editorialized that “Ferguson cannot possibly be the best man for the job because he does not speak both official languages.” Graham Fraser, the commissioner of official languages, claimed the Harper government had “humiliated” Ferguson by nominating him for a position he was unqualified to fill.

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50-plus-what?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 4, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Romeo Saganash questions his party’s position on secession.

The Cree MP, who represents a vast northern Quebec riding, is doubtful the 50-per-cent-plus-one threshold is consistent with the Supreme Court’s 1998 opinion on the matter. ”I don’t know to what extent is that the proper interpretation of the Supreme Court’s opinion,” Saganash said Thursday in a wide-ranging interview with The Canadian Press. ”The Supreme Court said it has to be a clear response to a clear question.”

The NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration is available here.

The man who got passed over for the Supreme Court

By John Geddes - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 2 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

The selection of a new Supreme Court of Canada judge is a process so shrouded in secrecy that it’s an irresistible invitation for lawyers to speculate, gossip and argue about the best candidate. Yet after the Prime Minister announces an appointment, the legal community tends to close ranks, praise the new pick, and rarely mention those passed over. So it was this week, when Stephen Harper nominated Justice Michael Moldaver and Justice Andromache Karakatsanis, both of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to fill two Ontario vacancies on the top court.

But Don Stuart, a law professor at Queen’s University, after echoing the general consensus by admiring the nominees’ credentials, added an unusually blunt note of regret about a particular judge who didn’t get the nod—Justice David Doherty, also of the Ontario Court of Appeal. “Every person who is associated with criminal justice would know that David Doherty has written most of the leading judgements in most of the areas,” he told Maclean’s. “He’s our leading judge, really. It seems disappointing that he was not chosen.”

In fact, Doherty’s name has been on short lists of possible Supreme Court of Canada judges from Ontario going back to the 1990s, when then-prime minister Jean Chrétien was making the selections. He is far from the only eminent judge to be repeatedly passed over, but, at least on paper, he seemed an especially obvious contender this time. The two retiring judges being replaced are Justice Ian Binnie and Justice Louise Charron. Charron had been the court’s heavy lifter when it came to writing decisions on criminal law, which has lately made up about a third of its caseload.

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Freedom to hyperlink has copyright consequences

By Jesse Brown - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 6 Comments

The Supreme Court of Canada gets the Internet.  This week, it unanimously ruled that linking to libelous or defamatory content is not the same thing as publishing libelous or defamatory content. The case involved a former Green party campaign manager, Wayne Crookes, who wanted one Jon Newton to remove links from an article about Crookes on his website. While Newton’s article was not libelous, Crookes felt the material he linked to was. Publishing the link, Crookes’s attorneys argued, was no different than publishing the material it linked to.

The Court did not agree.

First of all, there’s an unsolvable technical problem involved in deeming linking and publishing to be the same thing. Unless I’m linking to my own content, I have no control over what lies at the other side of my link. The page I link to today may change tomorrow. If linking in Canada were to be considered publishing, then publishing would instantly become too risky to pursue for anyone with assets to protect. It would be like telling a cookbook publisher that the latest tome about cupcakes they just sent to the printer may or may not hit stores with images of child pornography included.

The effect on the Internet in Canada, the Court ruled, could be “devastating.” Continue…

Why we need real scrutiny

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 7 Comments

Emmett Macfarlane considers yesterday’s Supreme Court hearings.

While reform should be crafted to avoid the overt partisanship that infects the American process, any process we do design should acknowledge the political reality that different judges approach their function in different ways. That is where a public hearing can ultimately be useful. It is unfortunate that this second stab at the public interview process wasn’t used to shed light on how judging actually works.

(As a footnote: Team Macleans.ca will be expanding somewhat in the weeks and months ahead with a bevy of new contributors. Emmett, for instance, will be stopping by every so often with thoughts on the Supreme Court. Last month he wrote about the Court’s Insite decision. Equally smart and witty writers on a variety of political issues will soon follow. We’re excited.)

Consult widely

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Lorne Sossin calls for a return to the 2005 model for Supreme Court consultations.

As originally developed during the Liberal government of Paul Martin, the screening committee involved members of Parliament, but also leaders in the legal community and representatives from non-partisan bodies within that community. The advisory committee developed in 2005 included an MP from each party, a retired judge and, from the region where the vacancy arises, a nominee of the provincial attorneys-general, a nominee of the law societies and two prominent Canadians who are neither lawyers nor judges.

… This hybrid model was far from perfect, but it signalled that, while the voices of elected parliamentarians matter, it was also vital that the selection of judges not be, and not be seen to be, simply an expression of majority will. The court’s mandate to be vigilant over minority rights and interests is a fundamental aspect of Canadian democracy. 

Why public hearings with Supreme Court nominees should mean something

By Emmett Macfarlane - Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 10:56 AM - 21 Comments

For advocates of greater transparency and democratic accountability in the Supreme Court appointments process, Wednesday afternoon’s ad hoc committee hearing—which gave members of Parliament an opportunity to interview the prime minister’s two nominees—was rather difficult to watch.

The questions ranged from vacuous puffery, such as asking Justices Andromache Karakatsanis and Michael Moldaver to name their personal heroes, to glib and disrespectful challenges to Moldaver regarding his inability to speak French. The broader question of whether Supreme Court justices ought to have proficiency in both of Canada’s official languages is most definitely a legitimate one. And it was certainly not out of bounds for members to ask Justice Moldaver about the importance of language capacity and his intentions to learn French. (I’ll set aside for now the debate about whether we should make bilingualism a prerequisite for appointment to the Court). Continue…

Harper nominates pair of Ontario judges to Supreme Court

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 10:56 AM - 0 Comments

Stephen Harper moved to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court Monday monring, announcing his nominations of Justice Michael Moldaver and Justice Andromake Karakatsanis. Moldaver’s appointment is expected to rejoice the law-enforcement community, as the Ontario appellate judge has shown a reluctance to strike down legislation and expressed concern over the growth of litigation cases under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Meanwhile, Karakatsanis is a more unknown quantity; she is a long-time civil servant with a short history on the bench, but has close connections to senior Conservatives inside the federal government, most notably Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, with whom she worked when Flaherty was Ontario’s attorney-general. Both nominees will appear before a parliamentary committee on Wednesday to answer questions, though the committee has no power to reject them.

The Globe and Mail

Harper swings and misses on Insite

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 86 Comments

Andy Clark/Reuters

The limits of Stephen Harper’s power are becoming as interesting as the extent of it. Most days, life looks pretty good. His MPs form a comfortable majority in the Commons. Three of the caucuses he faces have no leader. The leader of the fourth, Elizabeth May, has no caucus. He inherited and did not ruin a well-performing economy. Even Americans envy Canada’s fortune.

But there is a clinic in Vancouver the Prime Minister cannot shut down by the hair of his chinny chin chin. The clinic is called Insite, and every morning drug addicts line up waiting for it to open. They keep it full until evening, injecting their veins full of heroin and other drugs. This just seems wrong to the Prime Minister. Three times he has sent federal government lawyers to court to say so. Each time they come up snake eyes.

Last week it was the Supreme Court of Canada. Two justices Harper named joined the unanimous decision against his lawyers’ arguments. Insite will stay open. Other supervised-injection sites may follow. (That last part isn’t clear. We’ll walk you through it in a minute.)

Continue…

Are we ready to subsidize heroin?

By Ken MacQueen and Martin Patriquin - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 221 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

For the last 22 years, Cactus Montréal has doled out needles, crack pipes and other necessities of drug use to the city’s addicts. North America’s first needle exchange program had humble beginnings; it once provided its services from a cockroach-infested storefront on St-Dominique St., facing a particularly seedy section of Montreal’s red-light district. Today, Cactus’s headquarters are a monument to respectability. Its drop-in centre and needle exchange occupy a bright, glassed-in corner of an avant-garde building in downtown Montreal, across the street from a university pavilion. “A lively and warm place,” as its website advertises, “where people of all stripes come to get injection equipment, condoms, crack pipes, counselling and even to draw a picture or play an instrument.”

Thanks to last week’s landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling directing the federal government to stop obstructing Vancouver’s Insite supervised injection clinic, Cactus will soon be renovating once again. Cactus administrators, and those across the country who advocate harm reduction, a policy of mitigating the damage of drug use without requiring abstinence, interpret the ruling as essentially green-lighting supervised injection sites, albeit under strict conditions. By next spring, Cactus administrators hope to have an area where drug users will be able to inject drugs under the supervision of a medical professional. Many of Montreal’s other needle exchange sites, as well as those in Quebec City, will likely follow suit in the coming year, if they meet the criteria the court established to win a federal exemption from drug possession laws.

You might say it’s infectious. Supervised injection sites have the backing of several of the country’s biggest health authorities, including those in Montreal and Vancouver. There are preliminary plans for another site in Vancouver, and possibly one in Victoria. Some advocates look ahead to a time when addicts might receive prescription heroin rather than street drugs. While many governments are reluctant to endorse giving addicts a place to shoot up, let alone the drugs to do so, every province has some sort of needle exchange program. Even Calgary gave out safer crack pipe kits for three years until health officials nixed the program over the summer.

For proponents, providing a clean, medically supervised place to imbibe drugs is simply a logical extension of a service already provided across the country. “The Supreme Court decision let us stop being hypocrites,” Cactus community coordinator Jean-François Mary told Maclean’s. “For 22 years, we gave people clean tools, then sent them out into the street. We were doing half the work. Now they’ll be able to shoot up in complete safety.”

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Bold and cautious? Dissecting the Supreme Court’s Insite ruling

By Emmett Macfarlane - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 2:37 PM - 5 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

“Insite saves lives. Its benefits have been proven.” With that blunt statement, the Supreme Court of Canada cuts to the heart of the matter: by denying Vancouver’s safe-injection facility, Insite, a further exemption from laws prohibiting drug possession, the federal government acts contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The ruling stands as a razor-sharp rebuke of the federal government’s rather fragile position, at least as in terms of the insurmountable evidence that Insite averts deaths from overdose, helps prevent the spread of disease, and facilitates treatment and recovery. The Court’s decision also stands as a potential landmark in Canadian constitutional law, having considerable implications for the obligations the Charter increasingly imposes on government.

Before delving into these two important elements of the decision, it is worth noting what the Court does not do. Continue…

Closing Insite would violate Charter: Supreme Court

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 5 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

A crowd gathered on the gritty streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside burst into cheers Friday morning at news the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that Insite, the supervised injection site for drug addicts can remain open. The ruling is a stinging defeat for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which claimed the site fostered addictions, encouraged crime and violated the federal criminal code by facilitating the use of illegal drugs.

The court ordered the federal health minister to immediately issue an exemption at the site from laws prohibiting drug possession and trafficking to allow the facility to operate. The ruling almost certainly assures that similar sites will open across Canada. Montreal, Toronto and Victoria are among the communities that have expressed interest in establishing similar services. Continue…

The Insite ruling

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:53 AM - 41 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

(This post last updated at 7:46pm)

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Insite safe injection facility—a unanimous ruling in the facility’s favour—is here.

 The Minister made a decision not to extend the exemption from the application of the federal drug laws to Insite. The effect of that decision, but for the trial judge’s interim order, would have been to prevent injection drug users from accessing the health services offered by Insite, threatening the health and indeed the lives of the potential clients.  The Minister’s decision thus engages the claimants’ s. 7 interests and constitutes a limit on their s. 7 rights.  Based on the information available to the Minister, this limit is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.  It is arbitrary, undermining the very purposes of the CDSA, which include public health and safety.  It is also grossly disproportionate: the potential denial of health services and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users outweigh any benefit that might be derived from maintaining an absolute prohibition on possession of illegal drugs on Insite’s premises.

Early reads from the Globe, Canadian Press, Postmedia, Star and CBC.

10:33am. Libby Davies, whose riding includes the Insite facility, applauds. Three years ago she lectured Tony Clement and called on him to abandon the government’s appeal.

10:46am. Liberal health critic Hedy Fry applauds.

10:51am. The Canadian Public Health Association applauds.

11:37am. Ms. Davies raised the court’s decision in QP just now, provoking a response from Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq. Continue…

Why Harper is never in the Stampede parade

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 5 Comments

Photographs by Mitchel Raphael

Security, the royals and the parade

The Canadian tour of Prince William and Kate includes a stop at the Calgary Stampede. One MP said local officials hoped the couple would actually be in the Stampede parade, but that doesn’t look like a possibility because the security costs would be too high with so many tall buildings along the route. Ever since Stephen Harper became PM, Conservatives have been hoping to get him into the parade. But, according to the MP, the security costs for that to happen were estimated a few years ago at $300,000. The Windsors would likely cost a lot more. So instead crowds will see the royal couple do the route in reverse (a 20-minute car trip as opposed to the hours-long parade), ending up at Bow Valley College, where they will officially start the parade.

MacKay knows if you have served

At Party Under the Stars, a fundraiser to help purchase electronic and other recreational equipment for troops in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Peter MacKay told the crowd that whenever anyone sees a member of the Canadian Forces they should go up and thank them. When Capital Diary asked MacKay’s aide if the minister practises what he preaches, the aide confirmed that he did and added that his boss can spot armed forces personnel even when they are out of uniform, by looking for certain bags or signs. One time in Frankfurt’s airport he went up to an out-of-uniform Canadian soldier and thanked him. The shocked soldier asked, “How did you know I was in the military?” MacKay just smiled.

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The reform party

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 35 Comments

Through Tim Harper, Progressive Consevative senator Lowell Murray explains his concerns with the current style of Senate reform.

Many otherwise productive senators of a certain age would likely do what he might have done, turn down a job that has only a nine-year lifespan, meaning he or she would have to search new work in their 50s. There would be the obvious tension of elected members working alongside appointed members, and, he says, the Senate becomes the elite body.

An Ontario senator would be elected province-wide and he or she would have a stronger mandate from more voters for a longer period of time than an MP from the province. Such province-wide votes would also be biased against northern and rural representatives and would favour candidates from large urban centres home to large media. It could also lead to U.S.-style gridlock.

Meanwhile, the Ontario government is thinking about joining a legal challenge.

Senate reform goes centre stage

By Colby Cosh - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 12 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Last week’s Throne Speech was expected to be bereft of surprises. As it happened, a cranky Senate page with a handmade sign ensured that the event wasn’t a complete bore. But there was another, subtler eyebrow-raiser in the works. Despite prior reports of Conservative caucus dissension over Senate reform, Governor General David Johnston’s scripted words expressed the Prime Minister’s determination to act fast on it. Reform “remains a priority for our government,” Johnston reported, promising to reintroduce legislation—thwarted by weighty Oppositions in the past—“to limit term lengths and to encourage provinces and territories to hold elections for Senate nominees.”

The Conservative plan to tweak the Senate without opening up a politically unthinkable Constitution-amending process seems about to take its long-awaited first step. And that implies a reignition of the debate over whether a prime minister can actually get away with such a thing. Quebec’s government is already threatening to haul the feds before the Supreme Court to block term-limit and Senate-election legislation. “If they try that, the Court is literally going to laugh at them,” says a confident Sen. Bert Brown, the Conservative reform advocate elected as an Alberta “senator-in-waiting” in 2004 and appointed to the upper house in 2007.

Constitutional scholars are unsure whether Brown is right. The government’s theory is that there is no “manifest conflict”—to use the phrase of Simon Fraser University political scientist Andrew Heard—between Senate elections and the text of the Constitution. The Constitution merely says that the governor general will “summon qualified persons to the Senate”; it does not say Parliament cannot invent new methods of making candidates available for his consideration.

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"To be 'open to Quebec' is to insist on a clear majority for secession"

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 12:12 PM - 34 Comments

Liberal MP Stephane Dion counsels Jack Layton.

In its opinion on the secession of Quebec, the Supreme Court of Canada mentioned the words “clear majority” at least 13 times, and also referred to “the strength of a majority.” However, the Court does not encourage us to try setting the threshold of this clear majority in advance: “it will be for the political actors to determine what constitutes ‘a clear majority on a clear question’ in the circumstances under which a future referendum vote may be taken.”

The power to appoint judges doesn’t mean Harper will get what he wants

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:10 AM - 59 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

On May 13, Mr. Justice Ian Binnie and Mme. Justice Louise Charron announced they’ll retire from the Supreme Court of Canada this summer. Their replacements will be Stephen Harper’s third and fourth appointments to the top court, but the first two he’ll make as head of a majority government. By the next election, Harper will have named at least five of the court’s nine justices, maybe more.

The day before Binnie and Charron announced their retirements, quite by coincidence I spent half a day attending the top court’s hearings. The Supremes were hearing arguments about Insite, the Vancouver clinic where drug addicts use their street-bought heroin and other substances under medical supervision.

The case illustrated why a prime minister takes a keen interest in his power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. But it also showed that the power to put a judge on the court isn’t a magic wand. When the final Insite decision comes down, don’t expect much of a rift between Harper’s appointees and the majority who were there before he came along.

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Two Supreme Court judges announce retirement

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 0 Comments

The Supreme Court of Canada will lose two of its nine members by the end of this summer.  Justice Ian Binnie, 72, and Justice Louise Charron, 60, announced on Friday they plan to retire effective August 30, though Binnie suggested he is open to staying on until his replacement is found. Binnie has served on the court since 1998 and was three years away from mandatory retirement at age 75. Charron, meanwhile, wrote she simply wanted to retire earlier.

CBC News

Not even arguing the science

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 60 Comments

Whatever Tony Clement has said about the “evidence”—and whatever value you are supposed to place on Mr. Clement’s public pronouncements—the government’s lawyers managed to concede during yesterday’s Supreme Court hearings that Insite has worked.

Federal lawyer Paul Riley conceded health ministers allowed it to operate from 2003-2008 following a wave of deaths in the 1990s “to permit a scientific study of the nature of that program as a question of policy.” 

“And it worked,” interjected Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. She cited the trial judge’s findings based on research showing addiction is an illness; unsanitary equipment is linked to infections and disease, and risk of death is lessened by supervision of qualified health professionals. “Lives are being saved, diseases are being prevented by this site, and are we putting too fine a point on it by saying the site has nothing to do with it?” McLachlin said.

“In the end this program somehow, while not being perfect, works,” said Justice Louis LeBel. “Have you got anything that tends to demonstrate that this program doesn’t work?”

Riley stammered in reply: “I think that’s a fair observation.”

Supreme Court rules PM's agenda may be kept private

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 1:01 PM - 1 Comment

In a landmark unanimous ruling issued on Friday, the Supreme Court decided the Canadian public does not have the right to access sensitive information held by public officials like the prime minister and cabinet ministers. The ruling, written by Justice Louise Charron, held that such an expansion of the Access to Information Act “can only be achieved by Parliament.” The decision followed the rejection of requests by opposition politicians and the media for access to minutes, agendas, e-mails and day timers that related largely to former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s use of government aircraft, and to high-level national defence meetings.

The Globe and Mail