Incorporating International Law in Canadian Law

Canada’s system to incorporate international law into its domestic law has been the object of a long line of criticism. Despite an abundance of proposed solutions, the Canadian Human Rights Commission warned that Canada’s reception system is “flawed” during one Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations (2017). Similarly, one study regarding Canada’s main legislation to implement the Paris Agreement qualifies this step as a “tepid response” to the treaty (Campbell-Duruflé, 2023). A crucial gap in this context is the lack of a comprehensive understanding of how Canada’s system of international law reception functions, a colossal task because of the thousands of potentially relevant decisions by courts and administrative tribunals. In response, this SSHRC-funded project will analyze a unique database of judicial and administrative decisions from the 2001-2022 period. The research team will use existing open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models to detect how decision makers refer to international law, looking for better understandings of the legal, political, and institutional factors at play, and to proposing possible remedial interventions.