Justice Wilson’s Administrative Law Legacy: The National Corn Growers Decision and Judicial Review of Administrative Decision-Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Justice Wilson’s concurring reasons for judgment in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in National Corn Growers Assn. v. Canada (Import Tribunal) represent the most elaborate expression of her thinking about the rationales for judicial deference to the decisions of administrative tribunals and the methodology courts should employ in approaching judicial review of the decisions of administrative tribunals. A great deal of development has taken place in Canadian thinking about judicial review since that decision was released on November 8, 1990, but Justice Wilson’s articulation of the reasons courts should defer to the interpretation given by tribunals to their enabling legislation continues to influence contemporary judicial review jurisprudence, as does her criticism of excessive segmentation of tribunal decisions during the course of judicial review. On the other hand, it was evident to commentators in the wake of the National Corn Growers decision that Justice Wilson’s reasons were deficient as a unifying the ory of substantive judicial review of administrative decision-making. This paper seeks to evaluate Justice Wilson’s reasoning in the National Corn Growers case in light of subsequent judicial attempts to develop a more comprehensive approach to common law judicial review of substantive administrative decision-making in Canada. The author concludes that Justice Wilson’s approach to judicial review managed to avoid certain pitfalls that were to plague later attempts to develop a unified the ory of substantive judicial review. Nevertheless, in the author’s view her reasons share with more recent jurisprudence the weakness that insufficient attention is paid to the considerations that justify judicial intervention notwithstanding a more general posture of deference to tribunal decision-making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.068 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".