i haven't read the trinity western case or have been following it, but it showed up on the sidebar there.

to begin with, i don't see what any of this has to do with accreditation. a school may pass rules i don't like, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether the students that have enrolled in the school have passed the proper academic requirements. if the debate is being had at the level of the question of whether accreditation should be upheld or not, i can't reasonably side with the queer advocates. and, i might point out that anybody that has graduated from this institution and met all academic requirements has quite strong grounds for a lawsuit -  the unclear question is who should be held liable for it. and, i don't think it's the school.

however, i believe that this was not the question before the supreme court. the question before the supreme court was whether the tribunal had upheld the existing precedent. and, i've framed this differently, because i think the issue is often lost in translation from legalese, as this is what a tribunal is supposed to do. the idea underlying the existence of the tribunal is that there are certain cases that come up that essentially follow the same template over and over. our legal system is based on the idea of stare decisis - that is, that new cases should be settled in the same manner as previous ones were. sending these cases to full trials is just reinventing the wheel over and over - they do not require new decisions or actual judges to work them through, but merely knowledgeable adjudicators to apply the existing precedents. and, in fact, the adjudicators cannot create new law - their scope is very narrow, defined through statue to interpret existing jurisprudence. so, the idea is that these cases are already decided, that they don't need to be decided again and that going through the rigmarole is just a waste of everybody's time. this is why when the issue appears in an actual court, the issue before the judge is whether the precedent was correctly applied - that is, interpreted in a correct and reasonable manner. the adjudicator was never supposed to produce a novel ruling in the first place...

so, if the supreme court comes back and says "the ruling is reasonable", that is not delegating responsibility to the tribunal, or removing itself from the process. what that is doing is saying "the tribunal correctly interpreted the precedent that was already set by the court, and there is consequently no need for an actual trial.". it was the court that set the precedent, and the court that consequently produced the ruling. if the court felt that the tribunal was overstepping it's bounds, that is what a ruling of incorrect or unreasonable actually means...

so, that is what the court did in this case: it said that this question was determined in a previous ruling, the tribunal correctly applied a reasonable interpretation of that ruling and there is no value in bringing the case to a full trial. the court should have then assigned costs to the party responsible for wasting everybody's time.

and, how can the system be so cold to "religious freedom" or the observance of "religious rights"? because there's no such thing, really. it's a legal fiction, often perpetuated by people that don't understand the law well. "religious freedom" is a very restricted idea that applies solely to government, it's not something that has any meaning in a conflict between individuals, or between individuals and institutions. in this case, what the university was trying to argue was that it could restrict the rights of others by denying entry on restricted grounds. they then labelled their attempt to restrict the rights of others as an exercise of their own rights. the tribunal had seen this kind of charade before, and applied the proper precedent to shut it down. end of story. its not a balancing, it's just a bad argument - and one we've been through before, at that.

so, if you have a problem with the ruling in the university case, you need to look at the existing precedent; i haven't read the case, so i don't know what that was.

now, there is a valid criticism here, in that it cements the law in place pretty strongly. before the introduction of these tribunals, the court may have overturned an argument and created new precedent. these tribunals make that a lot harder. but, it's not yet clear if that's good or bad. if the way that courts deal with these tribunals is by more rigorously enforcing their own precedents, that is probably a good thing. what i'm getting at is that the courts are now going to need to demonstrate that the existing precedent was unreasonable, before they overturn it. that should help to prevent the arbitrary overturning of precedent. and, it should hopefully feed back into the tribunals, by providing for clearer instructions in terms of more specific legal tests. in the end, you might need a math degree to be an adjudicator, as it's going to require understanding complicated theorems, with dozens of corollaries.

but, i want to go back to the legal question, as i would have rather seen the issue raised on grounds of discrimination - i would have rather seen the accreditation denied on the entrance requirements. it's subtle. but, we have a critical theory for a reason, and it works the other way when you have a liberal judiciary, as we do in canada.