Introduction
Democracy Watch touts itself as “the most effective and successful national citizen advocacy group in Canada at winning systemic changes to key laws since […] 1993.”[1] But it has certainly not met with success in its quixotic crusade against the true nature of Canada’s fixed-date election laws. On the contrary, Democracy Watch, the dissolution-chasing advocacy group undaunted by a series of judicial defeats, has now suffered its sixth rout since 2009 and has come one step closer to proving the colloquial definition of insanity as trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Justice Russel W. Zinn’s ruling in Democracy Watch et al. v Prime Minister of Canada et al. follows closely on the heels of Democracy Watch v New Brunswick (the Attorney General), where Justice E. Thomas Christie delivered Democracy Watch another embarrassing defeat on 29 October 2021.[2] The Federal Court of Canada has upheld his own previous Conacher ruling from 2009, deferred necessarily to the decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in 2010 on the same Conacher case, and sustained the two Engels rulings by Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench in 2019 and Court of Appeal in 2020, as well as New Brunswick’s Court of Queen’s Bench in 2021.[3] Canadian courts have now, as of February 2022, upheld the correct interpretation of fixed-date election laws for the sixth time.
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