Opposition says Premier Eby using tariff fight to give B.C. cabinet ‘unlimited power’

It’s been 800 years since the Magna Carta. Governments everywhere now aspire to tear down the concept that it helped establish: the rule of law. Last week, British Columbia’s NDP government introduced the Economic Stabilization (Tariff Response) Act, also known as Bill 7, which would allow Premier David Eby and his cabinet the power to take the law into their own hands without going through the elected legislature.

In this case, the justification is President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But the bill would authorize any action taken for the vague purpose of supporting the economy of B.C. or Canada, or responding to the actions of any foreign government, even if the actions haven’t happened yet. But according to Eby, “These are not sweeping powers.”

The project of concentrating power in the executive branch (i.e. cabinet) and usurping the role of legislators has a long pedigree. In theory, no office or officers are above the law or are empowered to make it up as they go. In practise, that theory counts for less and less. Governments, including in Canada, don’t like the rule of law.

But what, exactly, does “the rule of law” mean? Legal theorists say it’s complicated. It need not be. To see it clearly, compare it to the alternative: the rule of persons. When King Solomon decreed that a baby claimed by two women should be split in half, he had absolute power to decide what to do. When Henry VIII ordered that Anne Boleyn should lose her head, that was absolute power, too. In each case, tyrants exercised their personal rule for good or bad.

The “rule of law” is the opposite idea. No single authority has free reign to decide how the state will use its force. The rule of law limits the powers of those who govern.

It does so in part by separating powers between three branches of the state. The Supreme Court of Canada has said that the “separation of powers” is a fundamental feature of the Canadian Constitution. Legislatures legislate. The executive executes. Judges adjudicate. In principle, no single office or officer can alone decide what should be done.

But not in practise. Exceptions are so common today as to be ubiquitous. The Human Rights Commission, not the legislature, declares what constitutes discrimination. The police decide whether to enforce court orders. Environment ministry officials determine when environmental impacts are permissible. Cabinet decides when pipelines will be built.

But in these cases, decision-makers at least must keep themselves within the boundaries of their authorizing statute, which was passed by elected legislatures. Under Bill 7, the Eby government will take delegation to the next level. Its cabinet will have the power not just to exercise broad discretion in accordance with legislation, but to override legislation itself. The bill will allow cabinet to make exceptions to the law, modify the law’s requirements, limit the law’s application, or establish powers or duties in place of the law. And not just a specific law, but any enactment on the books. The cabinet’s edicts will be valid for more than two years, until May 2027.

In 1539, the Statute of Proclamations conferred on King Henry VIII the power to rule by decree, directing that the King’s proclamations should be obeyed as though they were legislation. Such provisions, since known as “Henry VIII clauses,” are controversial because they eviscerate limits on executive power. Yet they may be constitutionally permissible in Canada. Parliament cannot abdicate its functions, the Supreme Court of Canada wrote in 1918, in a case considering the government’s conscription orders under the broad powers of the War Measures Act of 1914. But Parliament can pass legislation that delegates its powers to the executive as it sees fit. As long as the legislature retains the power to reverse the delegation, the theory goes, then separation of powers remains intact.

The rule of law is inconvenient. It gets in the way of governments and officials crafting solutions to problems they perceive as important. That’s not its downside but its purpose. Even when government efforts are well-intentioned, the power of officials to solve problems can pose a more serious threat to citizens than the problem itself. As the late Alan Borovoy, former general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, once put it, “The source of the most insidious peril is not evil wrongdoers seeking to do harm, but parochial bureaucrats seeking to do good.” If the modern administrative state is incompatible with the rule of law, then the state should be required to adapt. For decades, the current has flowed strongly in the other direction.

Crises are an ideal time for the state to advance into territory from which it will not wish to retreat. COVID-19 was the previous excuse. Now the threat of American tariffs is the latest justification to declare an emergency and discard the limitations of the rule of law. Even impending calamity does not justify the tyranny of unfettered discretion. Boundless authority to respond to circumstances is an unbearable licence to dictate.

This commentary is based on previous commentaries.

Bruce Pardy

Professor of Law, Queen’s University

Related Topics:#BrucePardy #FraserInstitute BCBill7 BCPremierUnlimitedPower BCTariffResponse DavidEby TrumpTariffs

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Schools should go back to basics to mitigate effects of AI

Published on December 15, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Paige MacPherson

Odds are, you can’t tell whether this sentence was written by AI. Schools across Canada face the same problem. And happily, some are finding simple solutions.

Manitoba’s Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine recently issued new guidelines for teachers, to only assign optional homework and reading in grades Kindergarten to six, and limit homework in grades seven to 12. The reason? The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT make it very difficult for teachers, juggling a heavy workload, to discern genuine student work from AI-generated text. In fact, according to Division superintendent Alain Laberge, “Most of the [after-school assignment] submissions, we find, are coming from AI, to be quite honest.”

This problem isn’t limited to Manitoba, of course.

Two provincial doors down, in Alberta, new data analysis revealed that high school report card grades are rising while scores on provincewide assessments are not—particularly since 2022, the year ChatGPT was released. Report cards account for take-home work, while standardized tests are written in person, in the presence of teaching staff.

Specifically, from 2016 to 2019, the average standardized test score in Alberta across a range of subjects was 64 while the report card grade was 73.3—or 9.3 percentage points higher). From 2022 and 2024, the gap increased to 12.5 percentage points. (Data for 2020 and 2021 are unavailable due to COVID school closures.)

In lieu of take-home work, the Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine recommends nightly reading for students, which is a great idea. Having students read nightly doesn’t cost schools a dime but it’s strongly associated with improving academic outcomes.

According to a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) analysis of 174,000 student scores across 32 countries, the connection between daily reading and literacy was “moderately strong and meaningful,” and reading engagement affects reading achievement more than the socioeconomic status, gender or family structure of students.

All of this points to an undeniable shift in education—that is, teachers are losing a once-valuable tool (homework) and shifting more work back into the classroom. And while new technologies will continue to change the education landscape in heretofore unknown ways, one time-tested winning strategy is to go back to basics.

And some of “the basics” have slipped rapidly away. Some college students in elite universities arrive on campus never having read an entire book. Many university professors bemoan the newfound inability of students to write essays or deconstruct basic story components. Canada’s average PISA scores—a test of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science—have plummeted. In math, student test scores have dropped 35 points—the PISA equivalent of nearly two years of lost learning—in the last two decades. In reading, students have fallen about one year behind while science scores dropped moderately.

The decline in Canadian student achievement predates the widespread access of generative AI, but AI complicates the problem. Again, the solution needn’t be costly or complicated. There’s a reason why many tech CEOs famously send their children to screen-free schools. If technology is too tempting, in or outside of class, students should write with a pencil and paper. If ChatGPT is too hard to detect (and we know it is, because even AI often can’t accurately detect AI), in-class essays and assignments make sense.

And crucially, standardized tests provide the most reliable equitable measure of student progress, and if properly monitored, they’re AI-proof. Yet standardized testing is on the wane in Canada, thanks to long-standing attacks from teacher unions and other opponents, and despite broad support from parents. Now more than ever, parents and educators require reliable data to access the ability of students. Standardized testing varies widely among the provinces, but parents in every province should demand a strong standardized testing regime.

AI may be here to stay and it may play a large role in the future of education. But if schools deprive students of the ability to read books, structure clear sentences, correspond organically with other humans and complete their own work, they will do students no favours. The best way to ensure kids are “future ready”—to borrow a phrase oft-used to justify seesawing educational tech trends—is to school them in the basics.

Paige MacPherson

Senior Fellow, Education Policy, Fraser Institute

Business

Fuelled by federalism—America’s economically freest states come out on top

Published on December 14, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

Do economic rivalries between Texas and California or New York and Florida feel like yet another sign that America has become hopelessly divided? There’s a bright side to their disagreements, and a new ranking of economic freedom across the states helps explain why.

As a popular bumper sticker among economists proclaims: “I heart federalism (for the natural experiments).” In a federal system, states have wide latitude to set priorities and to choose their own strategies to achieve them. It’s messy, but informative.

New York and California, along with other states like New Mexico, have long pursued a government-centric approach to economic policy. They tax a lot. They spend a lot. Their governments employ a large fraction of the workforce and set a high minimum wage.

They aren’t socialist by any means; most property is still in private hands. Consumers, workers and businesses still make most of their own decisions. But these states control more resources than other states do through taxes and regulation, so their governments play a larger role in economic life.

At the other end of the spectrum, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Florida and South Dakota allow citizens to make more of their own economic choices, keep more of their own money, and set more of their own terms of trade and work.

They aren’t free-market utopias; they impose plenty of regulatory burdens. But they are economically freer than other states.

These two groups have, in other words, been experimenting with different approaches to economic policy. Does one approach lead to higher incomes or faster growth? Greater economic equality or more upward mobility? What about other aspects of a good society like tolerance, generosity, or life satisfaction?

For two decades now, we’ve had a handy tool to assess these questions: The Fraser Institute’s annual “Economic Freedom of North America” index uses 10 variables in three broad areas—government spending, taxation, and labor regulation—to assess the degree of economic freedom in each of the 50 states and the territory of Puerto Rico, as well as in Canadian provinces and Mexican states.

It’s an objective measurement that allows economists to take stock of federalism’s natural experiments. Independent scholars have done just that, having now conducted over 250 studies using the index. With careful statistical analyses that control for the important differences among states—possibly confounding factors such as geography, climate, and historical development—the vast majority of these studies associate greater economic freedom with greater prosperity.

In fact, freedom’s payoffs are astounding.

States with high and increasing levels of economic freedom tend to see higher incomes, more entrepreneurial activity and more net in-migration. Their people tend to experience greater income mobility, and more income growth at both the top and bottom of the income distribution. They have less poverty, less homelessness and lower levels of food insecurity. People there even seem to be more philanthropic, more tolerant and more satisfied with their lives.

New Hampshire, Tennessee, and South Dakota topped the latest edition of the report while Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and New York rounded out the bottom. New Mexico displaced New York as the least economically free state in the union for the first time in 20 years, but it had always been near the bottom.

The bigger stories are the major movers. The last 10 years’ worth of available data show South Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Idaho, Iowa and Utah moving up at least 10 places. Arizona, Virginia, Nebraska, and Maryland have all slid down 10 spots.

Over that same decade, those states that were among the freest 25 per cent on average saw their populations grow nearly 18 times faster than those in the bottom 25 per cent. Statewide personal income grew nine times as fast.

Economic freedom isn’t a panacea. Nor is it the only thing that matters. Geography, culture, and even luck can influence a state’s prosperity. But while policymakers can’t move mountains or rewrite cultures, they can look at the data, heed the lessons of our federalist experiment, and permit their citizens more economic freedom.