Reassessing the Constitutional Foundation of Delegated Legislation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article assesses the constitutional foundation by which Parliament lends its lawmaking powers to the executive, which rests upon a century-old precedent established by the Supreme Court of Canada in a constitutional challenge to wartime legislation. While the case law demonstrates that courts have continued to follow this early precedent to allow the parliamentary delegation of sweeping lawmaking powers to the executive, it is time for courts to reassess the constitutionality of delegation in light of Canada’s status as a liberal democracy embedded within a system of constitutional supremacy. Under the Constitution of Canada, Parliament is placed firmly at the centre of public policymaking by being vested with exclusive legislative authority in certain subject matters. Parliament must therefore play the principal federal lawmaking role. The Supreme Court’s 1918 judgment should no longer be followed to the extent that it allows courts to accept near unlimited delegation of Parliament’s lawmaking powers to the executive. Instead, and to that extent, the judgment should be seen as an historical anachronism, a holding that was suitable for a young country in the context of the First World War but now out of step with the constitutional role of Parliament as seen through the contemporary approach to constitutional interpretation. Courts and Parliament must take delegation more seriously, and constitutional safeguards should be established to better protect the role of Parliament as lawmaker in chief and restore the proper constitutional balance. Achieving this goal would be a major advance toward the democratic, representative and accountable federal lawmaking process contemplated by the Constitution. It is possible through reforms to strengthen the judicial scrutiny of the vires of regulations and creating effective parliamentary mechanisms to scrutinize and supervise the exercise of delegated lawmaking powers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".