Tribunal Standing on Judicial Review

Co-authored by Christiaan A. Jordaan. The Ontario Court of Appeal's 2005 decision in Ontario (Children's Lawyer) v. Ontario (Information & Privacy Commissioner) (2005), 253 D.L.R. (4th) 489 (Ont. C.A.) inaugurated a change to the law regarding when an administrative tribunal should have standing on a judicial review of its own decision. Formerly, tribunals were usually permitted only to make submissions on jurisdictional issues. Afterward, the scope of a tribunal's participation will depend on contextual factors, and in particular by whether its submissions will be of assistance to the court. A continuing trend away from formalism and toward a more flexible and practical approach to this issue continues to be apparent. The authors prepared this paper for the Canadian Institute's Fundamentals of Administrative Law & Practice, and previously presented papers on this topic to the same conference in each of 2009, 2010 and 2011.