Daniel Dickson (Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy) , Louis-Robert Beaulieu-Guay (Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy)
Contemporary understandings of public policy include both what governments do and do not do. This allows that governmental activity can occasionally fall somewhere in between action and inaction. Such is the case with framework legislation, where policy design is intentionally underspecified to enable the articulation of pertinent policy details by the public service. This is what we call “delegated power” legislation, where, through regulation, bureaucrats add flesh to the bones and themselves articulate, under the supervision of the executive branch, the provisions that will shape the law into public policy.
However, these laws can also deliberately maintain vague and imprecise language. This ambiguity essentially serves to mask a lack of political will and leads, at the implementation level, to weak, hollow policies. These are what we call skeleton laws, where, under the guise of good intentions, the government establishes empty policy designs that are neither developed through regulation nor through the implementation of concrete policies or programs.
Using a mixed-methods approach that combines a case study of the Accessible Canada Act and a text-based analysis of the Canadian regulatory corpus, we seek to gain insight into the purpose and extent of framework legislation in Canada. To this end, we both assess the prevalence of framework legislation over the past 25 years of federal policymaking, and propose a novel schema to distinguish skeleton laws from more effective forms of delegated power legislation.