The Future of the Federal Court of Appeal

• Author: Chief Justice Marc Noël
• Pages: 615-624

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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 at The Federal Court of Canada — An Evaluation

Symposium, 26 June 1991) [unpublished].