The other development in the Court's constitutional docket, not captured by these tables, is the increase in the Court's decision making on the judicial branch of government itself. Relying on the judiciary to settle disputes between the branches of government is as bad for the health of the body politic as relying on it to settle disputes between the levels of government. Other quantitative dimensions of the Supreme Court's Charter work show remarkable continuity. Actions of executive branch officers, mainly the police, rather than legislation continue to be the target of just over one-half of the Charter challenges coming before the Court. While the democratic sting in judicial review of executive acts is less pronounced than in judicial review of legislation, it should nonetheless be noted that the frequency of the Supreme Court's review of legislation is considerably higher than in Charter cases dealt with in the lower courts.
Federal legislation continues to be challenged a little more frequently than provincial legislation.
This is in marked contrast to the situation in the United States, where state legislation is challenged much more often than federal statutes. Though federal legislation is reviewed more often in Canada, it is overturned, proportionately a little less often than provincial legislation. Aggregate success rates in Charter cases coming before the Supreme Court really cannot tell us very much. This, despite the very high rate of success reported for 1997, is a little below the overall success rate of 33 percent recorded for all Charter cases since 1984. When we do this, we find in the data for recent years as in the data for all of the Court's Charter decisions since 1984, that success rates are significantly higher in cases involving legal rights than in the other two categories.