“Conservatives used to respect precedent.”
That was the mocking response from Canada’s leading journalist of judicial supremacy, Andrew Coyne, to legal scholars who raised the alarm recently over the Liberal government’s proposal to limit what remains of parliament’s power by inviting the courts to invent new limits of legislatures’ use of the notwithstanding clause. Apparently, the traditional scope of parliamentary sovereignty is one precedent that Coyne is willing to abjure.
