The Future of the Federal Court of Appeal
Author | Chief Justice Marc Noël |
Pages | 615-624 |
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18
The Future of the
Federal Court of Appeal
Chief Justice Marc Noël
Court of Canada, Trial Division, in , roughly
twenty years after its creation. ose who led the court at the time left us with
a collection of papers that commemorated the Federal Court’s short history
and attempted to foresee its future. A similar exercise took place five years
later when the court celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary.
In those commemorative texts, the vision was of a bilingual and bijural
national court applying federal law across the land in a uniform manner, e-
cient and accessible to all, with specialized expertise in complex areas of law.
On the court’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the Honourable John N Turner, who
spearheaded the creation of the Federal Court, made predictions that turned
out to be stunningly accurate. In a paper presented in ,1 he said that the
Federal Court would bring about consistency and uniformity in decision-
making while also relieving the appellate workload of the Supreme Court
of Canada. He predicted that the court would serve as a more accessible,
quicker, and less expensive alternative to provincial superior courts, while
developing and applying specialized knowledge in areas of law such as intel-
lectual property, federal administrative law, and admiralty law. e previous
1 John N Turner, “The Origin and Mission of the Federal Court of Canada” [Turner,
“Origin”] (Paper delivered atThe Federal Court of Canada — An Evaluation
Symposium, 26 June 1991) [unpublished].
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