The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council's Decentralizing Jurisprudence Hinders Canada's New Deal

This decentralizing jurisprudence was welcome in Quebec and other provincial capitals. But it was anathema to policy-makers in Ottawa and constitutional scholars in English-speaking Canada. To deal with the economic crisis of the Great Depression, Bennett, the Conservative prime minister, fashioned a legislative package modelled on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Before moving forward with the Canadian New Deal, the ever-cautious King, whose Liberals defeated the Bennett Conservatives in the 1935 election, referred the legislation to the Supreme Court of Canada for an opinion on its constitutional validity. The Supreme Court and, on appeal, the JCPC found that most of it fell outside the federal Parliament's jurisdiction. In the mid-1930s a spate of law journal articles written by eminent scholars such as Frank Scott and W.P.M. Kennedy argued that the Judicial Committee's emasculation of federal powers was rendering Canada incapable of dealing effectively with the social and economic malaise the country faced in the Great Depression.

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 243-244.