I go back a bit to what Dr. Favaro has said. It's hard to know how the minister interprets that. Certainly, the public interest of the concept is very common in Canadian law generally; and at both the federal and provincial levels it's a concept in national security, in environmental law, and pipeline regulation. For the most part, I think the conventional wisdom in terms of practitioners is that the public interest is basically what the minister says it is.
On October 31st, 2016. See this statement in context.