Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : L’ordonnance d’un nouveau procès rendue par la Cour supérieure est confirmée puisque l’appelant, qui a été acquitté par la Cour du Québec sous l’accusation d’avoir conduit son véhicule avec une alcoolémie supérieure à la limite permise, aurait dû présenter une preuve d’expert afin de repousser la présomption . . . [more]

The Ontario government is updating the accessible employment standards to make employment more accessible to people with disabilities. Consequently, the Employment Standards Development Committee would like to get interested stakeholders and the public’s feedback on the initial recommendations to the 2018 Review of the Employment Standards under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).

The following is the Employment Standards Development Committee’s initial advice and recommendations on the initial proposed Employment Standards, itemized and organized by focus area, and some thoughts. . . . [more]

One benefit of being a regular Slaw columnist is the ability to revisit previous columns. Roughly four years ago, I wrote a column titled “Why Is the Law Society Donating to Political Parties?: Some Answers and Questions” where I explored and questioned the fact that the LSO (then LSUC) made donations totalling $21,000 in 2013 to the provincial Liberal, Conservative and NDP parties, as reported in a Law Times article.

At the time, the Law Society explained, in part, that “[c]ontributions are only made through the purchase of tickets to attend events hosted by the parties and/or elected politicians” and . . . [more]

Effective Nov 1, 2018, businesses that have a privacy breach must give notice of the breach under PIPEDA – the privacy legislation affecting the private sector in most Canadian provinces. The final regulations containing the details are about to be published.

Here are the highlights.

When do I have to report?

If there is a privacy breach that “creates a real risk of significant harm to an individual”. That includes bodily harm, humiliation, damage to reputation, financial loss, identity theft. Risk factors to decide the reporting threshold are provided. The report must be made “as soon as feasible after the . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Gamoff v. Hu, 2018 ONSC 2172

[1] When the residential real estate market is a rising market, most people – perhaps with the exception of first time buyers, are happy homeowners and investors. When the market turns and drops, it is not for the faint of heart. The facts of this case tragically demonstrate how one family, presumably desperate for their . . . [more]

I’ve never had anything but the highest respect, admiration and regard for my colleagues in courthouse libraries; and, if I have any regrets about my career, one of them is that I never had the opportunity to work in a courthouse or law society library. Of all librarians, it is they who, through a network of almost 200 county courthouse libraries in Canada, remain closest to the practising legal profession. Private law librarians (ie, law firm librarians) are closely attuned to the practice in their firms, often specialized in one area of law (eg, labour or criminal or business law) . . . [more]

In the “Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies: Criminological Highlights” published by the University of Toronto, the ability of complex algorithms to predict recidivism or re-offending while on pretrial release is discussed. In a study by Julia Dressel and Hany Farid, the researchers assessed the accuracy of algorithm based prediction system COMPAS.

They looked at data from 7,214 defendants in one county in Florida. They compared the predictions made by COMPAS to two other sources of predictions: (1) Ordinary statistical predictive models and (2) Intuitive predictions by ordinary people.

Dressel and Farid found that COMPAS’s prediction of recidivism (arrest within . . . [more]

Increasingly insureds faced with cyber fraud losses are going to the courts to interpret their policies. In The Brick Warehouse LP v. Chubb Insurance Company of Canada, 2017 ABQB 413, and in Taylor & Lieberman v. Federal Insurance Company, 2017 WL 929211 (March 9, 2017 9th Cir.), fraudulent emails, as part of a social engineering attack, were sent to company employees who acted on them transferring money from the insured’s account. In both cases courts held that coverage under the Fund Transfer Fraud policy was denied as the victim knew or consented to the instructions given to its bank . . . [more]

In a recent article on legal practice Ken Grady offered this thought:

As we often hear today, lawyers need to become fans of data. The age of talking to a lawyer who gives an opinion based on the 10 or 15 cases she has handled is past (or it should be). Clients should recognize that advice based on such weak datasets is meaningless and should call out their lawyers for basing opinions on it. Excellence means knowing more than the average player. It means having that depth and breadth of knowledge that is hard to match. Law firms need to

Race is an artificial and arbitrary social construct, and there is no biological or scientific basis for the racial distinctions we make between people. It is a function of our history and our misconceptions of how people have existed or migrated around the world, and our racial definitions have changed drastically over time based on different environmental and social factors.

Given the lack of objective basis for racial definitions, some people query why we track racial statistics in society at all. Doing so has the potential to ingrain these social constructs and divisions even further, and prevent us from treating . . . [more]