Abstracts Law

Disappointing dividends: The impact of budget support on parliaments and accountability

by Jocelyn Stacey

This thesis argues that environmental issues present an ongoing emergency, and that to understand the relationship between law and the environment we need to take the ongoing emergency seriously. Like emergencies, environmental issues possess two salient epistemic features: the inability to know in advance which issues contain the possibility of catastrophe, and the inability to know in advance what to do in response to a catastrophe. These features undermine the assumption that law can be equated with predetermined legal rules set out by the legislature and enforced by the courts. By developing a framework based on the concept of the environmental emergency, the thesis reveals and critiques the assumptions about law contained in existing accounts of Canadian environmental law. It then offers an account of the rule of law that requires public officials to publicly justify their decisions on the basis of core constitutional principles, namely reasonableness and fairness. In elaborating these principles, I draw out connections between common law constitutionalism and theories of deliberative democracy. I then develop an account of how the administrative state can be governed by a democratic conception of the rule of law. The crux of this account is that it protects the autonomy of individuals, understood as rational and self-determining agents, and their capacity to actively participate in environmental governance. By requiring public officials to publicly justify their decisions on terms that citizens can understand and reasonably accept, this deliberative and constitutional account allows citizens to obey or contest the law. It thereby enables their participation in the project of articulating and re-articulating core constitutional principles. The thesis also explains how creative institutional design is essential to maintaining public justification in the environmental context. On this view, specialized appeals tribunals, auditor generals and ombudsmen are not unfortunate (if necessary) deviations from the rule of law, but a fuller realization of its ideals in the complex regulatory context of environmental decision-making. I argue that well-known environmental principles of sustainable development and precaution can be defended on the basis that they safeguard the relationship between citizens and state that public justification makes possible. La thèse soutient que les problèmes environnementaux présentent une urgence continue et que, pour comprendre la relation entre le droit et l'environnement, nous devons prendre au sérieux cette urgence continue. Comme toute urgence, les problèmes environnementaux possèdent deux importantes caractéristiques épistémiques : l'incapacité de savoir à l'avance quels problèmes peuvent conduire à la catastrophe, et l'incapacité de savoir à l'avance comment répondre à une catastrophe. Ces caractéristiques contredisent la préconception selon laquelle on peut assimiler le droit à des règles juridiques prédéterminées, établies par la législature et appliquées par les cours de… Advisors/Committee Members: Evan Fox-Decent (Supervisor).