Guarantee of provincial superior court jurisdiction

Although section 96 deals with appointment of judges, it has been interpreted as a restriction on the jurisdiction which can be conferred on courts which are not superior, county or district courts. The argument is that if the Constitution intends that the federal government has the power to appoint those judges, the appointing power would be circumvented if governments could assign the jurisdiction of those courts to other courts or agencies whose judges are not appointed by the federal government.

Adjudication of constitutional issues

The Supreme Court has held that section 96 confers a certain core of jurisdiction on the provincial superior courts, which cannot be taken away by either Parliament or the provincial legislatures. One of the most important of these is the jurisdiction to determine constitutional issues. The provincial superior courts have the authority to determine constitutional issues, and that power is constitutionally entrenched. The federal Parliament can create federal courts under section 101 of the Act, and give them jurisdiction to consider constitutional issues, but that jurisdiction cannot be exclusive. The grant of jurisdiction to the federal courts cannot eliminate the jurisdiction of the provincial superior courts to determine constitutional issues.^[8]

Provincial courts

In one of the first cases that dealt with the jurisdiction of provincial courts, Reference re Adoption Act, the Supreme Court confirmed that the provinces could not assign jurisdiction away from the superior courts to courts where the judges were appointed by the provinces. However, the Court held that the statutes in question dealt with matters which had not been in the exclusive jurisdiction of the superior, district and county courts at Confederation, and therefore those subjects could be assigned to provincially appointed judges.^[9]

The Supreme Court has held that the monetary jurisdiction of provincial small claims courts is not frozen in time as of Confederation in 1867. The provinces can increase the monetary jurisdiction to recognise the effects of inflation.^[10] However, the Court has held that increases in monetary jurisdiction and related procedural changes cannot be so great as to turn the provincial court into a parallel court to the provincial superior court. A parallel civil jurisdiction infringes section 96.^[11]

Administrative agencies

The issue also arose in the case of administrative tribunals: could provinces create administrative tribunals, such as labour relations boards, and give them powers similar to those of a court? In 1948, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (at that time the highest court of appeal in the British Empire) held that provincial legislatures could give administrative agencies some powers similar to that of courts, provided the overall function of the administrative agency was sufficiently different from that of a court. The Judicial Committee held that the Labour Relation Board of Saskatchewan met this test, and therefore the Legislature could give it powers similar to that of a court to enforce its decisions, without infringing section 96.^[12]

The Supreme Court provided much more detailed guidance in the Residential Tenancies Reference, creating a three-step test to analyse whether a grant of ancillary judicial powers was consistent with section 96:

(1) Is the power in issue identical or analogous to powers exercised by the "Superior, District, and County Courts" at the time Canada was created in 1867? If not, the power can be conferred on a provincial tribunal.

(2) If the power was analogous to court powers, was it being exercised as a “judicial power”? If not, the power could be conferred on a provincial tribunal.

(3) If the first two steps did not decide the issue, it is necessary to review the tribunal's function as a whole, in its institutional setting of the administrative tribunal. A provincial scheme is only invalid where the adjudicative function is a sole or central function of the tribunal.^[13]