In Canadian Constitutional law, interjurisdictional immunity is the legal doctrine that allows a law to be applied to matters outside of the constitutional jurisdiction of its enacting head of power if it can be proved to be an essential aspect of the dominant characteristic of its validly enacted statute.
Traditionally, the immunity doctrine was invoked when it was found that legislation "sterilized" or impaired the other order of government's legislative authority in a given head of power. However, the scope of the doctrine was expanded in Commission du Salaire Minimum v. Bell Telephone Co. of Canada (Bell #1) in 1966 when it was determined that a valid law could not apply if it merely affected - not impaired - a vital part of the other order of government's jurisdictional authority. In response to this more classical approach to settling matters of constitutional law, the necessary degree of infringement was revisited in Canadian Western Bank v. Alberta in 2007, where the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that, in the absence of outright impairment of the "vital or essential part", Interjurisdictional Immunity would not apply.
Additionally, though the doctrine was textually justified in the Canadian Western Bank ruling, the court also expressed a preference for relying on the doctrine of Federal Paramountcy over Interjurisdictional Immunity when attempting to resolve federalism disputes (after the impugned legislation had been found valid).
Though there remains some debate, it has generally been accepted that the doctrine applies to both the federal and provincial governments equally. Nevertheless, virtually all of the case law concerns situations where provincial laws encroach on federal matters.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||