Principles to ensure the law is not abused in Canada

As 19th-century British constitutional scholar Albert Venn Dicey writes in his Law of the Constitution, the rule of law “means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy or predominance of the regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power, and excludes the existence of arbitrariness, of prerogative, or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of the government” (1915, 198). [...] In slogan form, it is the legislature that writes the law, the executive that imple- 4 Principles to ensure the law is not abused in Canada C O M M E N T A R Y ments the law, the judiciary that interprets the law, the Crown that safeguards the law, and the citizenry that gives consent to the law. [...] As section 3 of the act notes, a national emergency of this scope must be understood to be: an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that (a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such pro- portions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or (b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to pres. [...] It is then entrusted to the government of the day to be exercised on behalf of, and in the interest of, the people of Canada. [...] He is co-author of the logic textbook “Argument” and author of the stage play “Socrates on Trial.” He has taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Center for the Study of Language and Information.