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“You Can't Always Get What You Want”1: Regime Politics, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Harper Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2017

Emmett Macfarlane
Emmett Macfarlane*
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
*
Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo ON, N2L3G1, email: emacfarl@uwaterloo.ca
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Abstract

Applying the regime politics approach to the study of judicial behaviour, which regards the Supreme Court as largely operating to preserve the policy agenda of the existing lawmaking majority, this paper evaluates the Court's behaviour during the Conservative government's tenure. There is evidence to support the basic core of the regime politics thesis. The Court rarely invalidates laws passed by the sitting government. Nonetheless, the Court's behaviour during the Conservative government's tenure was distinctive. Incorporating a measure of issue salience—the relative importance of the policies affected—into the analysis demonstrates the Court's impact on the Conservatives' policy agenda stands in sharp contrast to previous governments. It is the only government of the Charter period to have policies in its election platforms blocked by judicial review and the only government in Canadian history to effectively lose all of the constitutional reference cases it posed to the Court.

Résumé

En appliquant l’approche de la politique du régime à l’étude du comportement judiciaire, qui considère que la Cour suprême opère dans une large mesure pour préserver l’agenda politique de la majorité legislative en place, cet article évalue le comportement de la Cour pendant le mandat du gouvernement conservateur. Il y a de fortes indications à l’appui des fondements de la thèse de la politique du régime. La Cour invalide rarement les lois promulguées par le gouvernement au pouvoir. Néanmoins, le comportement de la Cour pendant le mandat du gouvernement conservateur s’est différencié de façon distinctive. L’introduction dans l’analyse d’un degré de saillance de la question- l’importance relative des politiques affectées - démontre que l’incidence de la Cour sur l’agenda politique des conservateurs se démarque nettement des gouvernements précédents. C’est le seul gouvernement, pendant la période de la Charte, dont les politiques dans ses plateformes électorales ont été bloquées en vertu d’un contrôle judiciaire et le seul gouvernement dans l’histoire du Canada qui a perdu pratiquement toutes les affaires judiciaires présentées devant la Cour en matière constitutionnelle.

Type
Research Article/Étude originale
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 2017 

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Footnotes

1

Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed (United Kingdom: Decca Records, 1969).

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