One Rule to Rule Them All: Subordinate Legislation and the Law of Judicial Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court’s decision in Vavilov purported to provide a complete rule regime for the review of administrative action, simplifying an area of the law subject to erratic doctrinal amendment. One question, post-Vavilov, is how far this rule regime sweeps. For some time, Canadian courts have struggled to review subordinate legislation — executive regulations, municipal bylaws, and other binding rules. At some points, courts have suggested that this sort of legislation should be reviewed highly deferentially such that only a regulation completely unrelated to an enabling statute would be ultra vires. At other times, courts have simply applied the run-of-the-mill reasonableness standard, which governs adjudicative decisions, to municipal bylaws and other binding rules. This confusion has only proliferated after the Supreme Court’s rejigging of the law of judicial review in Vavilov, and courts have since struggled to determine whether Vavilov, which sets a presumptive standard of reasonableness for all administrative action, applies to subordinate legislation. This paper argues that Vavilov’s rule regime, whatever its flaws, provides a set of constitutionally compliant rules that are workable in the context of subordinate legislation, including executive legislation. It argues that Vavilov’s simplifying mission should be construed broadly. By centring the institutional design choices of legislatures, Vavilov connects to the legitimate constitutional source of subordinate legislation: its attachment to a statute adopted in the primary lawmaking act. This core feature of Vavilov makes it transferable, if imperfectly, to the context of subordinate legislation. It also makes Vavilov an attractive starting point for other areas of the law of judicial review.
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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 | 0.023 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".