LAW, COURTS AND DEMOCRACY IN CANADA

The 1990s have seen increasing public concern for democracy and democr atic participation. Yet the same decade has also demonstrated a greate r public policy role for courts - usually attributed in Canada to the 1982 entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, alth ough the more global dimensions of this tendency call for less localiz ed explanations. The authors use the results of interviews with most o f the Appeal Court judges in Canada to illustrate some of the issues r aised by this apparently paradoxical development. They argue that a st rong judicial role is not incompatible with a notion of democracy that goes beyond a simple fixation on majority rule, but suggest that the price may well include changes in the process of judicial selection an d to the concept of judicial independence. This is an uneasy trade-off that may well leave the Canadian courts more important, but also more vulnerable and more exposed to public criticism, than ever before.