The Supreme Court of Canada: History of the Institution

Agar Adamson is the author of Letters of Agar Adamson, 1914–19 and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

It is rather surprising, given Canadians’ interest in their political structures, including the Constitution and the politicians who shaped it, that this work by Snell and Vaughan is, in fact, the first comprehensive history of the Supreme Court of Canada. As the authors point out, “unknown and uncelebrated by the public, overshadowed and frequently overruled by the Privy Council, the Supreme Court of Canada before 1949 occupied a rather humble place in Canadian jurisprudence as an intermediate court of appeal.” To those Canadians who live outside the world of the courtroom and the barrister’s office, the Supreme Court has remained the unknown part of our constitutional and political framework. Very few Canadians study the Court in school or in university, and few Canadians outside the disciplines of law and political science have done any significant research on the Supreme Court.

Consequently, this work is a welcome addition to Canadian academic literature. Snell and Vaughan have constructed a useful and readable chronological history of the Court.

The authors in their preface explain why no quantitative analysis of cases or judges is presented in the work. This omission, which might, on first inspection, seem to be a major flaw in the book, is perhaps one of its strengths. Such analysis would have introduced controversial issues into the work and would have overshadowed the authors’ research. Certainly, such an analysis is required, but the authors were correct in leaving it to someone else to undertake.

Some readers are obviously going to be disappointed with the fact that certain important cases are given only brief mention or, in fact, no mention at all. One such case is that of Lavell and Bedard in 1974, another is Johannesson versus The Municipality of West St. Paul in 1952. The Lavell case is important because, as Mr. Justice Laskin (as he then was) pointed out in his minority opinion, the Court, in fact, rejected the liberalizing of the Canadian Bill of Rights, which had taken place earlier in the Drybones case (1970). The Johannesson case was the first constitutional decision handed down by the court following the cessation of appeals to the Privy Council in 1949. However, the authors should not be unduly faulted for these omissions, serious as they are, for what they have attempted to do in this book is to give a general picture of the Court and its tendencies to be judicially conservative, and to describe the men and one woman who have served as justices of the Supreme Court of Canada.

This work is, of course, important for one other reason. After April 17, 1982, one will no longer be able to write, as the authors did, about the Court being unknown and uncelebrated by the Canadian public. The advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms means that the Supreme Court of Canada will play an increasingly important role in the lives of all Canadians, and not just those who are learned in the law. It behooves all of us to become more familiar with the traditions of our Supreme Court. It is for this reason that Snell and Vaughan deserve our praise for giving us a very readable, informative, well-researched, and well-documented history of this overlooked institution of government and politics in this country.