How the US and Canada Lock In Big Decisions for Years

Analysis · North America

The United States and Canada this week reminded the world of the two most powerful ways democracies lock their big decisions into place, and they used them on the same forty-eight hours. Every working system invents ways to make its decisions stick.

In Washington, the Supreme Court released a pair of six-to-three rulings on Thursday June twenty-fifth that will reshape American immigration and gun policy for years. In Ottawa, today marks exactly one year since the Building Canada Act received royal assent, and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office spent the week marking the anniversary with a status report on the first projects the law was meant to fast-track.

Both governments are trying to lock in a decision. They are doing it through radically different machinery.

One uses the courts; the other uses new laws. Each method has its own physics, its own failure modes, and its own lesson for the rest of the democratic world.

What the Supreme Court actually did this week

The Supreme Court’s term ends in early summer, and the final weeks always carry the largest rulings. Thursday delivered three of them.

In Mullin v. Doe, the conservative majority ruled six to three that President Donald Trump could end the Temporary Protected Status programme for Haitians and Syrians. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, held that the president has effectively unreviewable authority to terminate the programme created in 1990 for people who cannot safely return to countries in conflict or disaster.

The decision opens the way for the deportation of well over one million people who have been working and paying taxes in the United States, in some cases for decades. The court’s three liberals dissented, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench, with Alito then publicly rebutting her in a courtroom exchange that stunned observers accustomed to silent decorum.

In a separate ruling the same day, the court cleared the Trump administration to revive an asylum policy that limits how migrants at the southern border can claim protection. That ruling will further reduce the number of people who can request safe haven in the United States.

In Wolford v. Lopez, the same six-to-three majority struck down a Hawaii law that had required gun owners to obtain permission before carrying firearms onto private property open to the public. The court held that the requirement burdens the right to carry, and four other states with similar laws — California, Maryland, New York and New Jersey — will have to rewrite them.

Five further cases of considerable consequence remain undecided as the term winds down. The court has not yet ruled on Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, nor on his effort to dismiss Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, nor on the Slaughter case which could end the independence of federal regulatory agencies, nor on the Watson challenge to mail-in ballot deadlines.

The court has signalled more opinions on Monday. It has not yet declared the term over.

What is already settled, however, is the technique. The conservative majority is using the bench to fix in place decisions a president took alone, decisions that no act of Congress now defends.

That is the bench’s particular strength. It is also its specific risk.

Why Canada chose the other path

Eight hundred miles north, Mark Carney’s government picked the opposite tool. Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, received royal assent on June twenty-sixth of last year and turns one today.

The Act contains two distinct statutes. The Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act removes federal barriers to interprovincial trade and labour, accepting comparable provincial standards as automatically federal-compliant.

The Building Canada Act creates a new framework to designate and fast-track projects “in the national interest,” compressing what had been a five-year federal review timeline into two years for designated projects. It also doubled the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Programme from five to ten billion dollars and put forty million dollars over two years into a new Major Projects Office for Indigenous consultation capacity.

Carney unveiled the first slate of designated projects in September 2025. The Act was the legislative spine of his response to the trade war with the United States and his bid to make Canada, in his words, “the strongest economy in the G7.”

Underneath the statute sits a parallel commitment Carney made at the NATO summit in The Hague the same week the bill passed. Canada pledged to raise defence spending to five percent of gross domestic product by 2035, with three and a half percentage points for core military capabilities and one and a half percentage points for critical infrastructure and dual-use security investments.

That pledge implies a defence budget of around one hundred and fifty billion Canadian dollars per year by the target date. It was, in domestic-fiscal terms, the largest reordering of the federal budget envelope in a generation.

The cornerstone, in other words, is not just the Building Canada Act. It is the entire architecture Carney built around the idea that Canada must construct its own industrial and security base, and that the only way to make that decision survive a change of government is to bake it into law before the next election.

A year on, the early returns are uneven. The Major Projects Office has begun work, but Indigenous groups led by the Assembly of First Nations are challenging the cabinet powers the Act confers, and West Coast Environmental Law has filed extensive critiques.

The bill passed the House of Commons three hundred and six to thirty-one with Conservative support, but progressive MPs likened the fast-tracking provisions to the Harper era and one Liberal voted against it. The first designated projects are not yet under construction.

Two methods, two pathologies

The differences between the two approaches go deeper than mechanics. They reach into the political economy of trust.

A court ruling is faster than a statute and harder to undo. Once five justices have made a decision permanent in a written opinion, that decision binds every lower court in the country and survives elections, administrations and even congressional majorities — until the court itself reconsiders.

That is the bench’s particular strength. It is also the source of the warning legal scholars have begun to issue with increasing volume.

A democracy that locks in the largest decisions through the courts hollows out the political institutions that are meant to make them. Congress stops legislating in the contested areas because it knows the court will eventually have the last word.

The presidency stops negotiating in those areas for the same reason. The voter loses the habit of demanding answers from elected representatives on issues that have migrated to the courthouse.

Public confidence in the court itself comes to depend on whether it rules the way the public wants, which is precisely the wrong basis for a body whose authority is supposed to rest on the separation of law from politics. The temperature in the courtroom on Thursday, when the senior liberal justice read her dissent from the bench and was publicly rebutted by the majority’s author, was a small but vivid sign that the institution itself is paying a price.

The legislative method has its own pathology. A statute is slower to pass than a ruling is to write, requires the manufacture of a parliamentary majority, can be amended in the next session, and can be repealed by a future government with the political will to use the same machinery in reverse.

The Building Canada Act could be unwound by a Conservative government that disliked its industrial-policy bias. The defence-spending commitment could be quietly missed by every minister of finance between now and 2035 until the original promise is just a footnote.

Statutes also have a delivery problem. The whole point of fast-tracking is the speed of permits and the certainty for investors, and the early evidence is that the Indigenous-consultation provisions of the Act — which are not optional under Canadian constitutional law — are reasserting themselves and stretching the timetable back out.

The Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, the sole Liberal who voted against Bill C-5 last year, said at the time that the Act would “make Harper blush.” A year on, with the first projects still in their consultation phase, his more enduring criticism is that the law was sold as a delivery mechanism and has so far functioned as an announcement.

What the two methods share

For all their differences, both methods sit on the same uncomfortable foundation. They are responses to political volatility.

Democracies lock in decisions when they no longer trust the next election to confirm them. The Supreme Court majority is rushing through immigration and gun cases now because it knows the political map may not look the same in two years.

The Carney government is signing statutes and pledging multi-decade defence budgets now because it knows the Conservative opposition is one election away from holding the same pen. Both methods reveal that the normal cycle of democratic deliberation is no longer producing decisions that can be trusted to last.

That is the real story this week. Not which method is better, but the fact that both major North American democracies are racing to lock things in.

The counter-case, taken seriously

The honest reply is that permanence in democracies is always partial, and that should be a comfort rather than a worry. Supreme Court rulings can be narrowed or overturned, as the court has done on segregation, sodomy and abortion within a generation.

Canada’s Building Canada Act could be amended, hollowed out by non-implementation, or repealed outright by a future government.

History is full of decisions that looked unshakable in the year they were made and were reopened by the next political generation. The system bends, and it has always bent.

That is the strongest case against worrying too much about the entrenchment race.

Why Latin America should read this carefully

The two methods of locking in decisions, through courts and through laws, are not abstractions for the region. They are the daily texture of its political life.

Brazil’s most consequential political decisions of the past decade — from Operation Car Wash to the question of whether Lula could run again — have been made on the bench, in some cases by judges who became national political actors in their own right. Mexico’s Sheinbaum government is in the middle of a confrontation with the courts over the boundaries of judicial review, with constitutional consequences that are still being argued out.

Colombia’s tutela system gives ordinary citizens direct constitutional access to the courts in a way North Americans do not enjoy. Argentina’s Milei government is governing largely by emergency decree because the legislature cannot give him a stable majority.

Chile is still arguing, more than three years after the rejection of its proposed constitution, over which institutions should hold the country’s deepest decisions. Across the region the question of whether democracies should lock in decisions through courts or through laws is not theoretical, and the consequences of getting it wrong have not been theoretical either.

For Latin American executives, jurists and finance ministers reading the Washington and Ottawa news this week, the lesson is not which method to copy. The lesson is that the race to lock in decisions itself, the rush to make moments permanent because the next moment cannot be trusted, is a sign that the deliberative habits of democracy are eroding.

That erosion is exportable. The region has imported a lot of it already, and may yet import more.

Frequently asked questions

What did the US Supreme Court decide this week?

In 6-3 rulings on June 25, 2026, it let President Trump end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians and revive a restrictive border-asylum policy, and it struck down a Hawaii gun-carry permit law. Several major cases, including birthright citizenship, remain undecided.

What is Canada’s Building Canada Act?

A 2025 law that lets Ottawa designate and fast-track “national interest” projects, compressing five-year federal reviews to two, and that doubled the Indigenous loan-guarantee programme to C$10 billion. A year on, the first projects are still in consultation rather than construction.

What do the two methods have in common?

Both entrench decisions because the government no longer trusts the next election to confirm them. A court ruling is fast and hard to undo, a statute slower but repealable, and both signal that everyday democratic deliberation is eroding.