The decision by Justice O’Donnell in R. v. Duncan (on SLAW here) has gained some notoriety in the legal community ((Katie Daubs, "Legal Decision with literary flourish and dry wit making the round…", Toronto Star, March 29, 2013) and was the subject of a SLAW post by Simon Fodden (The Judge’s Tale, April 2, 2013). In his post Simon referred to a discussion on the Canadian Legal Ethics Listserv, and to criticisms made of Duncan there. I was one of those critics, and will explain in this column my claim that when a judge writes a . . . [more]

On December 4, 2012, the Saskatchewan government tabled Bill No. 85, An Act respecting Employment Standards, Occupational Health and Safety, Labour Relations and Related Matters and making consequential amendments to certain Acts (hereinafter referred to as the Saskatchewan Employment Act) in the hope of consolidating 12 employment and labour-related laws, restructuring existing provisions, eliminating inconsistencies, and more accurately reflect contemporary employment relationships. . . . [more]

On the second Sunday in each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, SupremeAdvocacyLett@r, to which you may subscribe.

This first entry is a summary of all appeals and leaves to appeal granted (so you know what the S.C.C. will soon be dealing with) from January 1 – April 12, 2013. For leaves, both the date the S.C.C. granted leave and the date of the C.A. judgment below are added in, in case you want to track and check . . . [more]

The impacts of privacy sensitivities continue to expand and affect all manner of technology and other transactions transactions. 

Canada and the United States have a long healthy and constructive relationship in providing assistance to the law enforcement agencies of each country in the investigation of cross boarder criminal activity. Canada has, with the United States and with other countries a series of mutual cooperation arrangements (including Mutual Law Assistance Treaties or MLATs) in place between Canadian and U.S. law enforcement by which criminal and terrorist conduct can be investigated and relevant information exchanged.

Such international cooperation is routine and rarely . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week's summaries concern:
Party to a crime / Crown duty to Métis / Bankruptcy / Automobile insurance / Injurious affection / Child welfare: . . . [more]

Although we are all excited to try out the new iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S III, or Blackberry 10, few of us think what it means for us to be carrying this enormous amount of information in our pockets.

The Canadian Charter grants the "right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure," but one of the main exceptions to this is a search incident to an arrest, which allows a police officer to frisk a person who has been lawfully arrested. This exception exists largely because it has been considered a minimal intrusion on individual rights necessary to ensure . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from thirty-five 2010 & 2011 CLawBie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Clicklaw Blog   2. Small City Law Firm Tech   3. Rule of Law   4. Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog    5. Social Media for Law Firms . . . [more]

The Internet was invented by a state agency (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA) for military reasons. By design its communications divided into nodes that were intended to be self-sustaining rather than dependent on central control. The Internet initially spread outside the military through academic communities used to free speech. Its explosive growth was based on readily understood free browsers on the World Wide Web – browsers largely supplied by the private sector, whether for profit (Microsoft, Apple) or not for profit (Mozilla Foundation).

The wild west

As a result, it seemed reasonable, not to say . . . [more]

A CNET article entitled Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans' text messages says that "State and local law enforcement groups want wireless providers to store detailed information about your SMS messages for at least two years — in case they're needed for future criminal investigations."

This issue keeps coming up – the Canadian lawful access attempts are another example.

Attempts to force the preservation of this type of communication are tremendously invasive and wrong on many levels. To me, it is no different than asking phone companies to record and save phone conversations or the post office to . . . [more]

This morning, by 6 to 1, the SCC dealt with pornography on a work-issued computer and whether an employee had any reasonable expectation of privacy. The majority of the court set asise the Ontario Court of Appeal's order in R. v. Cole, to exclude the evidence on the basis that it was obatined in breach of ss. 8 and 24(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Abella J. would have continued the exclusion. A new trial will be held in any event.

Here is the headnote: . . . [more]

Yesterday, my partner Anne-Sylvie Vassenaix-Paxton gave a talk to ALAI Canada (L’Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale) on the impact the new French HADOPI laws no. 1 and 2, have had on peer to peer file sharing and protection of personal data under French law.

The acronym stands for the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet (HADOPI), a body which co-ordinates a variety of legal measures against illegal downloading including sanctions against parents of downloaders.

Two points are interesting from a North American perspective. The French Constitutional Council threw out a draft of . . . [more]

Not only is Canada long overdue in its statutorily mandated review of PIPEDA, our federal privacy protection law, but it seems as though significant elements of the law may soon be undermined significantly, as the United States Trade Representative is reportedly pushing for strict limitations on privacy protections as part of the Trans Pacific Partnership that Canada recently joined.

Much has already been written about the copyright restrictions the USTR aims to foist on Canada and other signatories through the TPP. For Canada, these are particularly poignant, as they come right on the heels of Canada's long and hard fought . . . [more]