When Judges Become Social Engineers

Send us Fan Mail When judges become social engineers, democracy starts to wobble. Gavin and Stephen examine the Waterloo homeless encampment decision as a major example of courts moving beyond traditional Charter review and into the realm of public policy design. What began as a dispute over a municipal bylaw and a public parking lot becomes, in their view, a much larger warning about judicially engineered social outcomes, the constitutionalization of housing policy, the weakening of el...