In the years after the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982, Canada's Supreme Court would sometimes produce more than 100 rulings a year.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The Supreme Court of Canada decided 45 cases in 2025, extending a recent trend of the country’s top court producing fewer judgments than in decades past.
The court in recent years has produced about three-quarters the number of decisions compared with previous years.
In the eight full years that Chief Justice Richard Wagner has been leading the Supreme Court, the annual average is 53 judgments. In the previous eight years, the court’s annual average was 72 decisions. This period was the latter part of former chief justice Beverley McLachlin’s long run leading the court.
The decline in cases decided extends back decades. In the years after the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982, the top court would sometimes produce more than 100 rulings a year. That fell to roughly 70 decisions a year, starting in the mid-2000s, which sparked some criticisms in the legal community at the time, before the more recent decline.
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One factor in the tenure of Chief Justice Wagner was the pandemic, which slowed courts at all levels across Canada. If the quietest pandemic years are excluded from the average, the Wagner court still has ruled on fewer than 60 cases a year.
The modern low of cases decided at the Supreme Court came in 2023, when there were 36 rulings, according to data published by the court.
Paul-Erik Veel, a lawyer at Lenczner Slaght in Toronto, conducts a yearly analysis of the Supreme Court’s output. In his review of 2025, he observed the 45 cases decided “reflects a new, lower post-pandemic normal” and stated: “That matters because fewer appeals mean fewer opportunities for the court to shape the law across the country.”
In an interview, Mr. Veel said the data help illuminate the work of the court: “It allows us to paint a pretty clear picture about what the court as an institution is doing.”
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The question of the Supreme Court’s workload came to the fore after the low of 2023.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail in late 2024, Chief Justice Wagner noted the effect of the pandemic on the lower courts, leading to fewer applications to appeal to the Supreme Court. He said the top court’s criteria to take new cases remain the same: factors such as settling matters of national public importance or solving legal disagreements at courts of appeal in various provinces.
“We want to hear as many cases as possible,” Chief Justice Wagner said.
On Tuesday, Supreme Court spokesman Daniel Byma noted that the court heard 51 cases in 2025 compared with 39 in 2024, and that the 2024 number still reflected the lull of cases in the pandemic.
Some lawyers suggest annual decisions in the range of 50 to 60 would satisfy critics who argue too few cases are being heard at the top court.
Gerard Kennedy, associate law dean at the University of Alberta, suggested in a 2024 paper that a lower number of decisions isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given that the top court’s job is to focus on the most important cases of national significance. “This may not arise frequently,” Prof. Kennedy wrote.
Among the legal trends at the Supreme Court in 2025, according to Mr. Veel’s analysis, there were more criminal law decisions than usual, about two-thirds of the total. There were only six constitutional cases, the first time there were fewer than 10 such rulings in data going back to 2016.
And in 2025, there were only seven private law decisions, rulings that resolve disputes between people or businesses, such as contracts. It is also known as civil law. Last year was the fourth consecutive year of fewer than 10 private law decisions, after an annual average of 19 in six years from 2016 through 2021.
Looking ahead, Mr. Veel also analyzed the number of new cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear in 2025, known as granting leave to appeal.
The court granted leave in 32 cases. This shows that the number of future rulings is not likely to return to the average of about 70 a year in the 2010s in the immediate future. Of the 32 new cases, about half – 15 – are public law, those that involve disputes between individuals and governments. Nine are criminal law, and eight are private law.
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Another trend in recent years is the perception of less unanimity among the nine judges of the Supreme Court compared with the 2010s.
In former chief justice McLachlin’s last two years, slightly more than half of judgments were unanimous, according to Mr. Veel’s analysis. She was in general known for driving for unanimity.
Chief Justice Wagner has long expressed the value of dissent. Last year, 38 per cent of judgments were unanimous.
Six decisions, however, were decided 8-1, with Justice Suzanne Côté being the lone dissenter in five of those rulings, according to an analysis by The Globe. Justice Malcolm Rowe was the dissenter in the other 8-1 decision.
In Supreme Court data from 1975 to 2021 analyzed in a University of Ottawa project called Decoding the Court, Justice Côté was ranked as the most prolific dissenter among more than three dozen judges. Justice Rowe was third.