As the Constitution is the supreme law of Canada and any law that is inconsistent with its provisions is, to the extent of the inconsistency, of no force or effect, it is impossible to interpret legislation conferring discretion as conferring a power to infringe the Charter, unless, of course, that power is expressly conferred or necessarily implied. Such an interpretation would require us to declare the legislation to be of no force or effect, unless it could be justified under s. 1. Although this Court must not add anything to legislation or delete anything from it in order to make it consistent with the Charter, there is no doubt in my mind that it should also not interpret legislation that is open to more than one interpretation so as to make it inconsistent with the Charter and hence of no force or effect. Legislation conferring an imprecise discretion must therefore be interpreted as not allowing the Charter rights to be infringed. Accordingly, an adjudicator exercising delegated powers does not have the power to make an order that would result in an infringement of the Charter, and he exceeds his jurisdiction if he does so. 23 Following this schema, it is first necessary to decide whether the legislation impugned in the present appeal can be interpreted in conformity with the Charter. In Slaight, it was clear that the legislation granted the adjudicator a broad discretion. It was thus easy to conclude that it did not, either expressly or by necessary implication, confer a power to infringe the Charter. In the present case the task is more difficult. Indeed, in the court below the argument proceeded on the basis that the legislation was under-inclusive; that it violated s. 15(1) by failing to include medical interpreter services for the deaf in the definition of "benefits", in the case of the Medical and Health Care Services Act, and "general hospital services", in the case of the Hospital Insurance Act. 24 During the hearing before this Court, however, counsel for the appellants proposed an alternative argument akin to the framework set out in Slaight. She suggested that both statutes could be read to conform with s. 15(1). Under this theory, it is not the legislation that is constitutionally suspect, but rather the actions of delegated decision-makers in applying it. In my view, this is the correct approach to the Charter application issue in this case. In order to understand how I reach this conclusion, it is necessary to consider the statutory context of this appeal in some depth. With the exception of hospitals, which are the responsibility of the provinces by virtue of s. 92(7) of the Constitution Act, 1867, health is not a matter assigned solely to one level of government; see Schneider v. The Queen, [1982] 2 S.C.R. 112, at pp. 141-42 (per Estey J.). It is generally agreed, however, that the hospital insurance and medicare programs in force in this country come within the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces under ss. 92(7) (hospitals), 92(13) (property and civil rights) and 92(16) (matters of a merely local or private nature); see Hogg, supra, at p. 6-16, and the Canadian Bar Association Task Force on Health Care, What's Law Got to Do with It? Health Care Reform in Canada (1994), at p. 15. 25 This has not prevented the federal Parliament from playing a leading role in the provision of free, universal medical care throughout the nation. It has done so by employing its inherent spending power to set national standards for provincial medicare programs. The Canada Health Act, R.S.C., 1985, c. C-6, requires the federal government to contribute to the funding of provincial health insurance programs provided they conform with certain specified criteria. (The constitutionality of this kind of conditional grant, I note parenthetically, was approved by this Court

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