Saturday, March 13, 2010

In which I seek to make Justice Iacobucci's job much easier

Let's note that despite the obvious problems with the Cons' efforts to box in Justice Iacobucci, they do seem to have left open one key opening for him to decide based on the proper role of Parliament despite it having been left out of terms of reference. And it might only take one sentence for Iacobucci to perform that task:

It is my view that independent of the contents of the documents requested by the House of Commons, the public interest in affirming Parliament's authority to order their disclosure exceeds any potential public interest in non-disclosure, and as such it is not necessary to consider whether the requested documents contain any "injurious information".


Of course, there should be no need to inject a "public interest" step in order to confirm the principle of parliamentary supremacy. But better that it be used as the means to inject a concept deliberately excluded from Rob Nicholson's terms of reference than for parliamentary supremacy to be ignored altogether.

Edit: fixed wording.

No comments:

Post a Comment