Supreme at Last: The Evolution of the Supreme Court of Canada

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Supreme at Last is a well-written survey of the Supreme Court’s coming
to maturity since 1949, when it emerged as Canada’s final court of
appeal.

McCormick’s central contention is borne out: in 50 years, the court
has outgrown a low profile marked by passivity and a narrow legal
perspective to become a distinguished, respected, and highly
professional judicial arbitrator. Its decisions now take into account
value-laden issues of public policy, and make the court an important
agent in the governance of the country.

In the 1950s, the Supreme Court was a nine-man court that crafted
judgments based on English precedents and was composed largely of former
practitioners appointed for their political connections. In these early
years as the final court of appeal, the court was not held in great
respect by Parliament, the public at large, the legal profession, or
lower courts. Because chief justices were appointed on the basis of
seniority, old men of questionable health and vigor could serve short
terms (three in ten years after 1963), until Pierre Trudeau preferred
Bora Laskin to Ronald Martland in 1973. The court’s judgments were
shaped by a narrow reading of the division between federal and
provincial powers laid down by the British North America Act of 1867.

But by 1982, as a result of Laskin’s judicial activism, the
appointment of the first woman to the court, a patriated Constitution
with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the appointment of markedly
capable personnel, the court had emerged as a key player in the daily
lives of citizens. McCormick studies the internal process by which this
change was achieved, as reflected in the justices’ voting patterns,
and offers an explication of the legal assumptions and values that
majority decisions, concurrences, and dissents signified.

While readers have no way of challenging the statistics laid out in
their neat and comprehensible tables, the measured conclusions that the
author draws from them are persuasive. His useful, readable primer
places the history of the court since 1949 in perspective and raises
intriguing questions about its direction under Beverley McLachlin, its
new chief justice.