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Abstract
New Governance theory or Experimentalism is a significant school of contemporary public law theory, yet its influence in Canada has been limited. In this dissertation, I bring New Governance theory to bear on some fundamental questions in Canadian public law and in so doing, I hope to sharpen the contours of the theory and present it as an alternative to contemporary strands of Canadian public law scholarship. In particular, I derive from New Governance theory and its pragmatic antecedents normative arguments that counter public choice-inflected claims about the purposes of Canadian public law and that answer perfectionist accounts of that body of law. Moreover, in deploying these arguments, I offer proposals that draw heavily on the institutional design insights of the New Governance literature. These normative argument and these institutional proposals form the core of this dissertation's contribution to the field of Canadian public law.