Gillian Calder

Postcard from the Edge (of Empire)

This article in scrapbook form represents the endeavour of the eight authors to document a recent, collective, academic journey. The project was one embarked upon as a means to explore tensions between the ideas of embodiment that connected our work, and the rigidities of academic convention. Using various media, this article strives, in substance and form, to provoke, challenge and confront its audience into dialogue, while simultaneously asking questions about the limits of our own legal imaginations.

Insite: Right Answer, Wrong Question

I have entitled my five-minute comment: “Insite: Right Answer, Wrong Question.”1 The focus of my comments is on the division-of-powers approach used in the reasoning of Justice Huddart of the British Columbia Court of Appeal. Although asked to determine whether the legislative regime at issue was enacted validly, that is, whether it was either federal or provincial—the question that she wanted to answer, and did answer, was whether the matter should be federal or provincial. My reading of the majority reasons is that Justice Huddart (with Justice Rowles concurring) used the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity (“IJI”) to reach the conclusion that she deemed to be the just outcome—that “the supervision of self-injections of illegally-possessed drugs in a provincially authorized and supported health care facility is dictated by the public interest in health care”2 and thus falls exclusively within provincial jurisdiction.