The Supreme Court of Canada and intergovernmental relations: The impact of litigious and political transaction costs on federal-provincial conflicts over offshore petroleum resources in Canada, 1958-1985

Beginning in the early 1960s, federal-provincial relations in Canada became more visible and increasingly acrimonious. Indeed, the competition between both orders of government over natural resources was particularly evident in a series of disputes over the proprietary and jurisdictional rights to offshore petroleum resources off Canada's West and East Coasts. In these disputes, once the intergovernmental negotiations failed to produce any resolution to the conflicts, at least one of the governments resorted to litigation as a means of breaking the bargaining impasse and acquiring thereby legal control over the offshore. However, while the federal government emerged victorious from the Supreme Court of Canada in each case, it later failed to exploit the full implications of the Court's ruling and in its place proposed a joint occupancy agreement with the relevant provincial government. Each agreement provided the province with a considerable measure of decision-making and administrative powers in the policy field.;This dissertation borrows some insights from the Coase thesis and uses the concepts of litigious and political transaction costs to ascertain the reasons why the governments resorted to litigation and the strategies and actions of the governments that followed the Court's rulings. It is argued that a determination of this sort will enable political scientists to better assess the role of the Supreme Court of Canada in federal-provincial relations.;The federal-provincial conflicts over offshore petroleum resources between 1958 and 1985 are documented. The conflicts involved the federal government and the government of British Columbia over the West Coast offshore, and the federal government and the government of Newfoundland over the East Coast offshore. Each case study commences with an examination of the early exploration efforts by private oil firms off each coast, and the resulting attempts by both orders of government to impose a regulatory regime in the offshore petroleum sector. The extent of the legislative entanglement in the policy field is discussed, as well as the various ad hoc intergovernmental meetings and First Ministers' Conferences which were established to resolve the disputes. As the negotiations failed to produce any settlement, the case studies discuss the variables which induced at least one of the government's to place a Reference case before their final appellate courts. The legal arguments of both governments and the decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada are presented. Each case study discusses the variables which compelled the federal government to propose an intergovernmental agreement over the offshore in lieu of exploiting the implication of the favourable Court decision.;In the light of these events, the dissertation argues that the decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada in these federal-provincial conflicts illustrates the limited ability of the Court (and by extension judicial decisions) to settle intergovernmental disputes in a direct fashion. As a result of a number of political goals and external pressures which confronted the federal government, the Court's decisions were not executed de jure. However, it is also submitted that the Court was not irrelevant in these conflicts. While serving primarily as a vehicle through which both governments sought legal control of offshore petroleum resources, the Court did function in part to facilitate indirectly a compromise solution between each order of government.