The majority opinion established that independent compensation commissions are required to help set salaries free of political manipulation.

The reference was the amalgamation of three different sets of challenges to the impartiality and independence of provincial court judges in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and Alberta.

The powers of the provincial legislatures to reduce the salaries of the provincial court judges was challenged as a violation of section 11(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gives an accused the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty "in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal".

In Prince Edward Island and Manitoba, the salaries of judges were lowered along with those of other civil servants to help combat deficits.

In Prince Edward Island, various challenges of the judges' consequent independence were raised by defendants, causing the government to bring two reference questions to its Supreme Court.

[3] (The Supreme Court only briefly addressed this, saying Klein's words were "unfortunate and reflect a misunderstanding of the theory and practice of judicial independence in Canada".

with L'Heureux-Dubé, Sopinka, Gonthier, Cory and Iacobucci JJ, allowed the appeals in part, stating that there was constitutional protection of judicial independence and impartiality for all judges.

Although Lamer recognized case law such as the Patriation Reference which noted the preamble technically has no binding effect in itself, he also found the preamble reveals the "basic principles which are the very source of the substantive provisions of the Constitution Act, 1867" and "invites the use of those organizing principles to fill out gaps in the express terms of the constitutional scheme".

This is why academic Jeffrey Goldsworthy attacked the decision as "a self-contradiction, a vague reference to 'evolution' combined with a plainly false analogy, and an evasion".

It is possible, Lamer found, to interpret each of the three requirements in light of the two types of independence; this case, in particular, would explore how financial security belongs to both a judge and the court as a whole.

[10] Provincial courts should benefit from this independence, as demonstrated by their handling of important cases such as R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd. in 1983.

[14] In order to ensure the government would not deliberately let judges' salaries fall below the cost of living, in relation to inflation, it was also decided that the commissions should meet regularly, for example once every three to five years.

Turning to the facts of the case, the Supreme Court faulted the governments of Prince Edward Island and Alberta for neither consulting salary commissions nor having such bodies to begin with.

[19] La Forest J., alone in dissent, rejected the majority's finding of an unwritten constitutional principle that protects a right to judicial salary commissions.

[26] He also said courts should have clearer grounds for limiting legislative actions, casting previous decisions such as Switzman v. Elbling (1957), which relied on the Implied Bill of Rights, into doubt.

He pointed to Attorney General for Canada and Dupond v. Montreal (1978) as a prior Supreme Court decision questioning the Implied Bill of Rights.

[27] If an implied bill of rights existed, it should be found in the creation of Parliament, in section 17 of the Constitution Act, 1867, and should allow for Parliamentary supremacy instead of limiting it.

[28] In this case, La Forest pointed to Valente and R. v. Lippé to show section 11(d) does not guarantee a type of independence that is most favourable to judges.

[29] The conclusion in Valente that judicial compensation committees were not needed was therefore valid; section 11(d) left room for determining what methods can be used to achieve independence.

He wrote that "It assumes that there is a real possibility that judges would violate their oath of office and decide cases wrongly (for example, by convicting an innocent person or imposing an unduly harsh penalty) in order to obtain some (highly speculative and likely trivial) advantage at the negotiating table.

[37] The study of unwritten rules is also said to have surfaced in the Supreme Court decisions New Brunswick Broadcasting Co. v. Nova Scotia (Speaker of the House of Assembly) (1993) and Reference re Secession of Quebec (1998), and one scholar called it a "very old and venerable" feature of common law.