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Canadian copyright collectives and the Copyright Board have in recent years advanced the theory that when the Board certifies collectives’ tariffs (or fixes the royalties in individual cases), those tariffs become mandatory on users. Users have no choice whether to deal with the collective; they must pay the specified royalties as long as they make a single unauthorized use of a work from the collective’s repertoire. Many users, for some strange reason, have also subscribed to this view, despite its extraordinary consequences. This article, first in a series of two, shows that this spectre of a “mandatory tariff” lacks any basis in law. Established case law debunks it, standard principles of statutory interpretation contradict it and the legislative history discredits it. An approved tariff creates a compulsory licence that interested users can avail themselves of, if they wish to obtain a licence, but it does not force users to become licensees. Copyright collectives can recover unpaid royalties only from users who offered to pay them and later default on their payment.

Canadian copyright collectives and the Copyright Board have in recent years advanced the theory that when the Board certifies collectives' tariffs (or fixes the royalties in individual cases), those tariffs become mandatory on users. Users have no choice whether to deal with the collective; they must pay the specified royalties as long as they make a single unauthorized use of a work from the collective's repertoire. Many users, for some strange reason, have also subscribed to this view, despite its extraordinary consequences. This is a second article in a series of two. The previous article showed that the “mandatory tariff” theory cannot, as a matter of statutory interpretation and in light of the case law, withstand scrutiny. This article shows that in addition, construing the Act in accordance with the “mandatory tariff” theory gives rise to numerous practical challenges, conceptual puzzles, procedural nightmares, and constitutional headaches, each of which should weigh the scales against it. In contrast, the “voluntary licence” theory avoids all these quandaries, and, in addition to being consistent with earlier case law, appears clear, simple, and coherent.

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In recent years, unwritten constitutional principles often find their place in Canadian constitutional law via their supposed foothold in the part of the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 that refers to “a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom”. Principles such as judicial independence, democracy, federalism, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and protection of minorities have been derived from the preamble. This article looks through over a hundred years of Supreme Court of Canada case law in order to determine what that preambular phrase has meant over time. It turns out that in the years immediately after 1867, it referred to what we now call political constitutionalism. A hundred or so years later, this same passage came to be associated with legal constitutionalism, though the Court has more recently backed away from the fullest implications of that approach. This article proposes a reading of the preamble and constitutional principles that is consistent with recent Supreme Court of Canada case law and defensible given current jurisprudential trends. That reading gives due regard to the traditional meaning of the rule of law all the while acknowledging that there are genuinely hard cases (particularly prevalent at the Supreme Court level) where neither rules nor principles provide clear answers. In those circumstances, respect for the rule of law requires as much wisdom and judgement as it does application of more prosaic legal skills. This article therefore recommends what is here referred to as a “sustainable jurisprudence” that offers an essential bridge between by now orthodox Dworkinian principle-based reasoning and contextual studies more commonly found in socio-legal, feminist, and other critical literature.

This article considers the content of the unwritten principle of democracy and its potential relevance in Canadian constitutional interpretation. The unwritten principles of federalism, the rule of law and constitutionalism, democracy, and the protection of minorities set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Secession Reference have received extensive academic attention. Much yet remains unknown, however, about the democracy principle. This article argues that we should interpret the unwritten principle as embodying a “thin” or procedural account of democracy tied to meaningful participation, rather than a “thick” version imposing specific outcomes or broader obligations. I argue that whatever the weight of a “thick” account of democracy, a “thin” understanding is preferable for filling in the content of a constitutional principle that has legal force. The central critiques of the use of unwritten principles in constitutional interpretation are 1) that they lack legitimacy and 2) that they are incoherent in relation to one another. Operationalizing a thin version of democracy in constitutional interpretation responds better to the claims that the unwritten principles lack legitimacy or are incoherent. A thin account still permits the unwritten principle to carry out its functional role in constitutional interpretation, such as enabling courts to fill in gaps in the text or to engage in structural reasoning. The article considers the implications of this approach for referendums and municipal elections.

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Principles form part and parcel of our law and legal discourse, so much so that we seldom think of what they are and what they entail. For centuries they have been invoked daily to interpret and argue about the law. But when it comes to matters of constitutional law, principles are further called upon to perform a perennially controversial function: to help police the boundaries of state action. In most common law jurisdictions with a written constitution, this function of principles runs against the generally accepted view that the exercise of judicial review must ultimately be governed and restricted by the terms of the national constitution. This Article argues that the exercise of judicial review based on principles is not confined to that view, once the relationship between principles and the constitution is unpacked and recontextualized.While the English-language literature on principles over the past half-century has been dominated by a select group of Anglo-American scholars, there is a wealth of untapped insights from other parts of the world. One of the major contributions by continental legal theorists even predates the earliest modern Anglo-American writings on the subject by more than a decade. Overall, the law literature in common law and civil law systems reveals a significant degree of commonalities in the basic characters of principles despite the absence of initial evidence of transsystemic borrowings. The wider conceptual inquiry also displays a shift in the focus of the debate, from the protracted search for a clear-cut distinction between rules and principles towards a redefinition of principles’ relationship with “written” law, be it in the form of a civil code or a constitutional instrument. From this inquiry reemerge “unwritten” principles not deriving from codified or legislated law although they have been used to develop the law. Translated into the constitutional domain, these unwritten principles bear no logical connection with the terms of the constitution. Their main functions cover the entire spectrum from serving as interpretive aids to making law by filling gaps. The theoretical framework fits with an ongoing four-century-old narrative of the evolution of constitutional principles and judicial review across most common law-based systems. Constitutional principles are another area where Anglo-American law and legal discourse is less exceptional and more universal than what many assume. Throughout modern Western history, legal battles have been fought and ensuing developments have been made on the grounds of principles. Our law and jurisprudence remain based on them.

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Taking its cue from the Supreme Court of Canada's constitutionalization of the criminal law's unwritten general part, this article illustrates the interaction between criminal law theory and constitutional law that process implies. It does so by applying a criminal law theory of why and when force in self-defence is justified in order to assess the constitutionality of the self-defence provisions of Canada's Criminal Code. The assessment concludes that, though frequently criticized for excessive complexity, the Code's provisions on self-defence accurately track the nuances demanded by the theory of self-defence best qualified to interpret the provisions. That theory, I argue, puts dignity rather than self-preservation at its centre.