How can it be that we have never had a full-fledged treatment of the reference power enjoyed by Canadian governments? There have been some journal articles, to be sure, often focussing on specific examples or on very precise questions, such as the Court's right to refuse to answer, but few have stepped back to provide a broader framing and a full chronology, with perhaps the closest being a now-dated article in an American law journal.

It is not as if reference cases have been obscure “inside baseball” things; quite the contrary. Examples spring immediately to mind: the Reference re Resolution to Amend the Constitution (Patriation Reference), the Reference re Secession of Quebec and the Reference re Securities Act, to name only a few—blockbusters all, gripping public attention and forcing major rethinks of government undertakings. But if this is the tip of an important iceberg, what does the rest of the iceberg look like and how did it come to be floating in Canadian waters?

Have no fear, Kate Puddister is here—with the first book-length academic treatment of the phenomenon, and it's well worth the wait: all your lingering questions answered, as well as some you might not have thought of. Where did the reference power come from? What other countries have a similar practice, and what similar countries do not? How was it intended to be used, and how has it been used? How often has it been used, and by whom, and when, and with what sorts of results? How does it work? How political is it? When and why do governments find a reference case preferable to normal litigation? What are its advantages? And if there are such advantages, why isn't it used more often? What are the problems, and what adjustments would resolve them? It's all here. The sequence of chapters is logical, the treatment of issues is balanced and thorough without ever becoming bogged down in detail, and a solid conclusion includes proposals for change. And all this is accomplished in 200 pages of very readable prose.

I have only two reservations. First, I kept hoping for a “when it goes wrong” chapter, which never materialized. (Chapter 5, “Why Not Refer Everything?,” addresses a somewhat similar point but very obliquely and with dated examples.) The general argument, completely persuasive, is that the reference power is used in jurisdictional skirmishes of various kinds, usually to good effect. But “usually” denies “always”; sometimes it backfires. The obvious example is the Reference re Securities Act, where the federal government expected to strengthen its hand for a negotiation process and instead badly weakened it. And in the Reference re Secession of Quebec, the federal government's easy question about whether Quebec had a right to secede unilaterally got not only the obvious answer (“No”) but also a working framework for non-unilateral Quebec independence.

My second and stronger reservation concerns the “by the Court” question. The author rightly dismisses any idea of a tight connection between references and decision anonymity but concludes too casually that there is no useful connection at all. One has to look past the from-the-bench one-paragraph brush-off examples to find the real innovation of “by the Court” in its much rarer use for reserved judgments. Similarly, one must not be distracted by American per curiam decisions, which are neither a model for nor a parallel use of multiauthored anonymity. For a start: those decisions are almost never unanimous, typically including several much longer sets of author-attributed minority reasons—in this respect Bush v. Gore is not an outlier; it is typical. The undergrowth cleared, we can make two observations: first, considering their small share of the caseload, a disproportionate number of federal (but not provincial) references since the 1960s have been delivered “by the Court”; and second, considering their small share of the caseload, a disproportionate number of substantive “by the Court” decisions have been used for federal (but not provincial) references. But if the Canadian “by the Court” practice is atypical (even unique) for a common law court—more like the routine anonymous unanimity of civil law courts—this simply reinforces the author's telling point that the reference power itself gives Canadian appeal courts an atypical role, more like the courts of civil law systems than its common law counterparts; this is less error than missed opportunity.

That said: this is an excellent book that completely fills a major and unfortunate lacuna in the academic literature. It is well organized, well written, thorough and balanced, and it winds up with recommendations for better squaring the practice with judicial independence concerns. A first book, you say, and by a very junior author? It certainly doesn't read that way—this is a polished work of mature scholarship. I recommend it highly.