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Populist candidates and causes have scored a series of remarkable victories in Europe and the Americas since 2015. It is too soon to say whether we are living in a populist “moment,” or at the dawn of a new populist age. It is not, however, too soon to think carefully about the consequences of populism for public policy. Nor is it too soon to consider policy decisions by non-populist governments today that might affect the likelihood that this will be only a moment and not an age.This paper considers the relationship between two ideologies: welfare-consequentialism and populism. Welfare-consequentialism, reviewed in Part 1, holds that governments should always try to adopt the policies that are most likely to make individuals’ lives go best. Part 2 juxtaposes it with populism, defined as the view that (i) society is divided into a pure people and a corrupt elite, and (ii) public policy should give effect to the general will of the pure people (Mudde 2004). The paper then argues that welfare-consequentialism and populism are diametrically opposed ideologies. They are fundamentally incompatible in their representations of “the people,” and in the weight they give to public opinion. Populism’s anti-elitism may sometimes be reconciled with welfare-consequentialism, but not in the many cases where it takes the form of anti-intellectualism. Part 3 concludes by asking whether, in the long-term, welfare-consequentialism makes a polity more or less vulnerable to populism.

A life-evaluation question asks a person to quantify his or her overall satisfaction with life, at the time when the question is asked. If the goal of public policy is to make individuals’ lives better, does it follow that maximizing aggregate life-evaluations constitutes policy success? This paper argues that life-evaluation data provides a solid basis for welfare-consequentialist policy-making. This is illustrated by the successful argument for expanding state-funded mental health services in the United Kingdom.However, life-evaluations do not always provide a complete account of individual welfare. Policy-makers therefore must sometimes inquire into the extent to which individuals’ preferences would be fulfilled, if different policies were to be adopted. This article proposes synthesizing life-evaluationist and preferentist data about individual welfare, as a basis for rational policy-making.

Canadians should invest in affordable housing. It’s a commitment to lifting the most vulnerable members of our society from the ground up — and lifting our entire country up in the process.

How can we preserve and extend what's good about contingency fees, while minimizing the bad and the ugly? In order to identify the regulatory tools best suited to this challenging task, this Chapter proposes a consumer welfare analysis. The consumers of contingency fee legal services are the individual clients, and the members of classes, represented by law firms working on this basis. These consumers, like other consumers, have interests in:(i) quality, (ii) price, (iii) fairness, and (iv) choice. Part 2 of this Chapter will analyze these four sets of consumer interests, all of which are affected by the regulation of contingent fees. Part 3 scrutinizes various regulatory approaches to contingency fees against the consumer welfare criterion. I argue that heavy-handed interventions, such as fee caps and retrospective price review, can do as much harm as good for consumers. "Light touch" alternatives such as disclosure and standardized contracts, and fostering the "invisible hand" of the market, are preferable approaches for a regulators interested in maximizing consumer welfare.

This volume is a collection of papers presenting theories & strategies for public interest litigation, a specialized area of litigation aimed to bring about social impact, & the various avenues & methodologies that have been used in Canadian history.

In popular culture and imagination, World War I was a bloody, muddy, senseless, almost accidental conflict. International law seems far removed from the causes of the war or the way hostilities were conducted. This seeming irrelevance of international law in popular imagination is rejected in intellectual, literary, and scholarly accounts. However, during the centenary of the war, it is time to rethink the role law played in this first large-scale conflict of the twentieth century. Drawing on recent legal historiography as well as original research, this article will argue, through a look at the conduct of naval warfare, that law was central to how Allied, Central, and neutral states navigated the conflict. Specifically, we examine the role law played in the practices of the warring parties in navigating the interdiction of – and attacks on – the civilian shipping of belligerents and neutrals.

A co-founder of Idle No More was put on trial for ‘trespassing’ on her family’s ancestral lands. Canada has much to learn about institutionalizing respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples.

The prospect of political interference is at the heart of the SNC-Lavalin controversy. But it raises more issues related to identifying and preventing inappropriate interference.

Since 2009, the United Nations has been engaged in a process of ‘strengthening’ the human rights treaty body system which monitors the implementation of the core international human rights treaties. The number of human rights treaty bodies has, over time, expanded to ten, with each treaty body independently tasked with monitoring an increasing number of States Parties’ compliance with human rights treaties and optional protocols. This proliferation has in turn precipitated the need for a process to improve the overall functioning of the system.While significant attention has been dedicated in the treaty body strengthening process to the issue of States Parties’ under-reporting and capacity deficits, comparatively little attention has been directed towards accessibility issues, capacity building, and technical assistance for domestic civil society organizations (CSOs) - groups whose informed and active participation are essential to the proper functioning of the entirety of the treaty body system. In light of this lack of attention, an ecosystem of intermediary non-government organizations (NGOs) has emerged organically to provide much needed capacity building, advisory services, and technical assistance to domestic CSOs looking to engage with treaty bodies. However, the ad hoc nature in which these intermediary NGOs have emerged and the lack of formalized institutional relationships with treaty bodies has resulted in a number of systemic issues that desperately need to be addressed in the treaty body strengthening process.This paper will discuss the ongoing process of treaty body strengthening, current services provided by intermediary NGOs to assist domestic CSOs in engaging with human rights treaty bodies (as well as the Universal Periodic Review), gaps within the current framework, and recommendations to improve access for domestic CSOs within the current treaty body strengthening process.

False Western Universalism in Constitutionalism? The 1867 Canadian Constitution and the Legacy of the Residential Schools was published in The Canadian Constitution in Transition on page 270.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Google Inc. v Equustek has been criticized as amounting to an excessive claim of extra-territorial reach and possibly a way to bring the right to be forgotten to Canadian shores. In this comment, the author argues that the case is in fact an orthodox application of equitable principles, and one that stresses the importance of the notion that equity acts in personam. On occasion, equity does purport to exert an influence on a litigant’s conduct which takes place beyond the court’s geographical jurisdiction, but it does so, mindful of the practical limitations on enforcement of such orders.

This paper provides a conceptual intervention through an analysis of the myths surrounding agricultural citizenship and migrant work that underlie the temporary foreign worker program in two settler countries: Canada and Israel. The paper offers a brief insight into the ideologies around farm work that informed the colonisation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the expropriation of non-citizen labour. It begins with a historical overview of how agriculture was used as a tool of colonisation even as settlers struggled to cultivate Canadian lands because of the seasonal nature and the persistent lack of labour. From the time of Confederation, agriculture began to be intimately tied with immigration policies culminating in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) that persists to this day. The paper then expands the analysis to Israel to show how other settler nations have also followed similar ideological and policy trajectories. The paper illustrates how racial capitalism intertwines with settler colonial practices discursively and institutionally through immigration policies.

"The book delivers a comprehensive overview of the foundational concepts, principles, sources, and institutions of the international legal system and how they are experienced and practiced domestically and in foreign relations"-- Provided by publisher

"This book provides a comprehensive overview of Canadian public health law and policy. Written and edited by leading health law scholars and featuring contributions from legal and health experts from across the country, it offers an in-depth analysis of current critical public health issues."-- Provided by publisher.

In Anglo-American legal discourse, the juridical subject of dispute resolution has traditionally been conceived as a bearer of rights or a bearer of interests: rights, in the model of liberal legalism that regards adjudication (i.e. court and tribunal processes) to be the preferred means of resolving disputes in the adversarial tradition; or interests, in an alternative or complementary model that regards consensual dispute resolution (i.e. negotiated and mediated settlement processes) to be the preferred means of resolving disputes in the non-adversarial tradition. This article explores the ethical implications of reframing the bearer of interests as a bearer of desires. This is more than just semantics. Reconceiving the juridical subject in this way invokes the contemporary tradition of progressive social theory that has centered the concept of desire in its critique of the liberal humanist subject. This critique has yet to be fully explored in the legal scholarship. One of the most productive lines of argument in this tradition is derived from queer theory – in particular, a strand of post-identitarian thinking in queer theory that regards sexual desire as something that is disruptive of ontology regardless of gender or sexual identity. This strand of thinking raises important questions in this context. Is it possible to theorize juridical subjectivity as a form of sexual subjectivity? What follows from such an effort to “queer” the constitution of the juridical subject, independent from its politicized identity as a bearer of rights in liberal legalism? Could this theory teach us something about the ethics of rights and interests-based dispute resolution processes?This paper argues that theorizing about the juridical subject of dispute resolution through the lens of sexual desire encourages us to think about the practice of settlement non-instrumentally, not unlike sexuality itself, which reveals the practice to be immune to the liberal legal imperatives of politicized identity. This is what makes it a fitting analogue for the trope of sexual freedom in queer theory, which opens up a pressing line of criticism about legal policy initiatives that have sought to limit, and in some cases categorically ban the use of consensual dispute resolution altogether. At the same time, however, this theory raises difficult questions about the ethics of sexual desire given the risk that consent to sex and settlement may be induced by coercive force. This helps us to understand the proper role of law – and specifically, the legal doctrine of consent – in regulating the conduct of these practices, or at least to understand it as something deeply fraught with uncertainty.

The need for greater diversity among organizational leaders and directors remains a challenge for organizations within the third sector, and beyond. This study examines diversity through a critical mass lens; that is, we examine an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between the ethno-racial composition of boards of directors and their perceived ability to engage stakeholders, improve organizational responsiveness, and effectively manage fiduciary responsibilities. Our study, drawing on a survey of 247 boards, clarifies the need for a critical mass approach to leadership diversity by highlighting the uneven impact of diversity on performance demonstrated by periods of accelerating and decelerating effect. We find that boards achieving a critical mass of ethno-racial diversity improved board performance among three governance activities—fiduciary performance, stakeholder engagement, and organizational responsiveness—with our critical mass approach illustrating the uneven impact of diversity on performance for each governance activity.

14 — Notes and Comments