John Mark Keyes, Executive Legislation, 2d ed (Markham: LexisNexis, 2010), pp 611. ISBN 978-0-43-346025-1

Arthur Allen Leff once said that there can be a real joy in “doing something very well which is very hard to do at all.” As I put down this book, I could not help but feel that John Mark Keyes must be a very happy author. The second edition of Executive Legislation is a real triumph. Several features, both substantive and technical, stand out: the comprehensiveness of the coverage, the quality of the analysis, the rigour of the organizing framework, the care with which the subject of the book is delineated, the detailed and well-organized index, and the extraordinary bibliographical apparatus (legislation considered, cases cited, textbooks and treatises referenced, articles discussed). Together these characteristics guarantee that this monograph will be an outstanding resource for judges, lawyers, public servants, agency administrators, legal academics, and law students. The foreword by Professor Ruth Sullivan, herself the reigning doyenne of Canadian scholars of statutory interpretation, notes the experience and insight that John Mark Keyes brings to this endeavour. Following years of service as a legislative drafter and later director of professional development in the Department of Justice, he has for some time now been chief legislative counsel of Canada. His erudition, good judgment, on-the-ground experience, policy wisdom, and theoretical insight into what might be called “the law and practice of law-making” are evident on every page. Before I turn to some brief comments about the monograph itself, I should like to insert an aside. It is worth noting with pride, and feeling gratitude about the fact that the cause of law and justice in Canada is so well-served by public servants like John Mark Keyes. Let me now discuss several commendable characteristics of Executive Legislation. First, the author deserves compliments on the structure of the work. The sophisticated division of the narrative into five general parts, fifteen chapters, and eighty-seven sections comprising twice that number of highly detailed subsections, is a model of how a complex subject can be made accessible and comprehensible through a well-conceived, rigorously elaborated organization. This conceptual structure, when combined with a carefully constructed ten-page analytical index that crosscuts the subject matter headings of the table of contents, enables the reader to quickly locate where a given topic is discussed, even when the specific location of the theme one seeks to explore does not figure nominately in the traditional doctrinal vocabulary of delegated legislation. Here is an example. Some years ago I had the occasion to submit a brief to a parliamentary committee examining proposed revisions to the Statutory Instruments Act that would have permitted the executive to circumvent the constitutional requirement of bilingualism in delegated legislation by incorporating unilingual instruments by reference. I scanned the index of Executive Legislation to see whether there had been further developments in this field and was pleased to discover a specific notation under the heading “incorporation by reference—process requirements” to the topic “unilingual incorporation by reference” (pages 466-69). Due to the care with which the index was assembled, it was possible to quickly find a substantial discussion of an arcane but constitutionally important question that does not figure in any orthodox conceptual organization of the subject. Moreover, this monograph is no mere “user’s manual” about an extremely technical area of the law. Technical matters are, of course, dealt with thoroughly, but always within an overall theoretical, policy, and legal-constitutional context. Keyes begins with basic constitutional principles, exploring both the how and why of delegated rule making, and the manner in which the deployment of delegated legislation has evolved over the years. In part 1, the meaning of the expression “executive legislation” …