Resumen de Redefining Legislative Compliance: Parliamentary Responses to the Supreme Court of Canada

Shauna Hughey, Anindita Ponkshe, Andrea Lawlor

• How willing are Canadian legislatures to comply with the highest court in the land? In this article, which sheds new light on the legislative processes of creating Charter-driven policymaking, the authors provide a new operationalization and conceptualization to legislative compliance with the Supreme Court of Canada. Unlike previous studies of the courts, which have tended to focus on Parliament’s ability to deviate from Supreme Court decisions, the authors build on existing literature to propose measuring compliance on a scale, ranging from non compliance, to partial compliance, and compliance. By incorporating a measure of partial compliance, they account for the degrees of compliance with Court decisions, in which a legislative response may comply with part, but not all, of a Court decision. The authors, who find that legislatures partially comply with the courts at a high rate (44.7 per cent), conclude that the understanding of compliance is more nuanced than previously understood.