Courts and Late-Modern Security Crises: Judicial Deference, Temporary Emergency Power and the Rule of Law in Quebec and Northern Ireland

Historically, in the common law jurisdictions examined in this study, judicial responses to emergency powers in times of real or perceived emergencies have consistently shown patterns of deference to executive government authority, although there are notable exceptions. This dissertation seeks to ground recent debates around the legal responses to national security threats and further conceptualize contemporary theoretical and constitutional issues in historical examples from Canada and Ireland, and in particular, Quebec and Northern Ireland in the 1970's. A comparative examination of the 1970 October Crisis involving the FLQ in Quebec and the extended conflict in Northern Ireland involving the IRA through the 1970s and 1980s analyzes the effects of temporary emergency measures and related accommodations of the regular criminal law. While the legal regulation of political power in times of crisis is pertinent to the continuously evolving national security narrative, there are other important checks, including enhanced parliamentary controls, re-imaginings of the rule of law and entrenched rights, which are referred to here but also warrant further study.