Preface to the second edition

• Author: Craig Forcese - Aaron Freeman
• Pages: 15-16

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Preface to the Second Edition

There are times when one would prefer to write and teach history, not law.

Just over a year after the f‌irst edition of this book was completed in March

2005, the new Conservative government in Ottawa introduced its Feder-

al Accountability Act. T hat instrument received royal assent in December

2006, and revamped the Canadian law of government accountability — es-

pecially, but not exclusively, that dealing with ethics. While the core archi-

tecture and many of the details of the laws of government accountability

remain unchanged, th is overh aul — the single largest reform project in this

area in recent history — rendered at least two chapters of our f‌irst edition

obsolete. Subsequently, in t he intervening years between 2006 and today,

other ref‌inements to the legal superstructure supporti ng democratic gov-

ernance at the federal level have been put in place. By 2010, the time had

come for a second edition to this book.

In crafting this second edition, we have done our best to complete a

thorough update to the many subjects covered by this book. In so doing, we

have retained the basic struct ure of the f‌irst edition while expandin g the

discussion in many areas and reducing it in others that have been dealt with

by recent legal developments. We have also entirely eliminated the chapter

on democratic governance in times of emergency, and the section in the Ac-

cess to Information Ac t chapter on national security a nd secrecy, topics that

one of us has covered in greater detail in another book, National Secur ity

Law (Irwin L aw, 2008).

The slight reduction in the size of this second edition is not to say that

we believe the law of democratic governance in Canada to be a completed

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