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Since the inception of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) 20 years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has considered the adult sentence applications framework on only one occasion in R v DB, 2008 SCC 25. Additionally, Parliament enacted a major legislative overhaul of the provisions related to adult sentence applications in 2012. Without further input from the SCC, trial and appellate courts across Canada have filled the gaps in interpreting section 72 of the YCJA. On November 23, 2023, the SCC has announced they will hear the appeals of R v IM, 2023 ONCA 378 and R v SB, 2023 ONCA 369 and revisit the issue the presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness. The adult sentence application provisions are arguably the most important provision within the Act, given the serious jeopardy that goes along with an adult sentence. Courts across Canada have struggled to give constitutional effect to the age-based presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness. In this thesis, I present a critical examination of the current approaches to adult sentence applications and outline the best practices for youth court judges, Crown attorneys and defence lawyers. In support of this end, I have conducted a survey of 20 years of trial level adult sentence decisions from across Canada tracking the age, race, gender, support structures, and cognitive and mental health challenges, among other factors. I have framed this inquiry with the Critical Legal Studies tradition. However, given that adult sentence applications touch on a broad range of complex issues, portions of this thesis engage other legal and interdisciplinary theories including Critical Discourse Analysis, Law and Emotion Theory, Critical Race Theory and Disability Legal Theory. Ultimately, this thesis highlights the importance of respecting the letter and spirit of the law set forth by Parliament and by the Supreme Court of Canada in DB, in anticipation of the SCC’s upcoming consideration of these very important princ

An uncontested plea allows criminal defendants to self-convict without requiring the state to prove its case against them. Uncontested pleas may be inculpatory, exculpatory, or non-inculpatory. Guilty pleas are inculpatory uncontested pleas. When a defendant pleads guilty sincerely, they formally take responsibility for the offence and accept the consequences. Exculpatory and non-inculpatory uncontested pleas include best-interest pleas like \textit{Alford} and nolo contendere pleas, respectively. When a defendant enters one of these pleas, they agree to self-convict without formally taking responsibility for the offence. Statutory language formally forbids exculpatory and non-inculpatory uncontested pleas like nolo contendere pleas in Canada. I argue that the legal and ethical objections to these pleas and plea bargaining generally in Canada are largely misplaced. Nolo contendere pleas open new avenues of plea bargaining for defendants and prosecutors to explore, creating new opportunities for certainty, factual accuracy, agency, and mutual advantage in otherwise highly adversarial proceedings. Although formally forbidden, defendants may still enter nolo contendere informally and surreptitiously. I conclude by arguing that these pleas be formalized and proposing ways to do so.

This thesis reviews the effect of the democratic rights contained in the Charter of Rights on the political constitution, being the extra-legal rules that have traditionally structured Canadian democracy. This thesis investigates the possibility that the political constitution is now augmented by the democratic Charter rights and that the historic prerogative powers, traditionally viewed as being plenary and not subject to judicial scrutiny, may now be legally restricted and judicially reviewable. This thesis does so based on a novel interpretation of section 3, focusing on the representative and institutional elements referred to in the text of this provision. Specifically, that the “right to vote” is meant to result substantively in democratic outcomes and that the members elected to the House of Commons must have a role in perfecting the outcome of an election. Section 3 is also analyzed in the context of the unwritten constitutional principles and the related democratic Charter rights set out in sections 4 and 5 of that instrument. This thesis finds that section 3 provides not simply the right to vote in elections, but it also provides a right to an executive government with democratic legitimacy based on the confidence of the House of Commons. This thesis concludes that such a right to democratic legitimacy might create a correlative duty on the Crown when exercising prerogative powers relating to democracy and the democratic process. For instance, there might now be a legal framework surrounding prerogative matters, such as the appointment of a prime minister and control of the Parliamentary process. This thesis also explores justiciability of prerogative powers and potential judicial remedies for breaching section 3. This thesis finds that courts may limit justiciability of certain prerogative decisions to protect the democratic process from undue litigation and that the democratic process could be further protected by limiting tangible legal remedies to only