POLI 1119 Lecture : Court Decisions.docx
Document Summary
Court decisions: no written document can cover all contingencies. Always going to be grey areas; areas of disagreement. How do we really know what the constitution really means: different people can interpret the same thing differently, courts bring clarity to the constitution and are a key component to the living constitution". Constitutional interpretation are many ways an annex; it helps us read it. The actual constitution leads us to think we have a very centralized government: under the jcpc provincial power grew immensely at expense of. Federal government, under sc this trend stopped and slightly reversed. They said, you can"t interpret the constitution this way. The federal does have power, and it seems they have immense power. We must look at the clauses as a whole. A federal system, devised to give powers to federal and provincial; have autonomous decision-making power. On the surface, federal government seems to have sweeping powers but it should not be interpreted this way.
