What have our governments been up to lately? According to a recent study, it is not always easy to find out, with the federal government often responding with a glacial slowness to requests for information.

Last week, Newspapers Canada, a joint initiative of the Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association, released its 9th annual National Freedom of Information Audit report:

“The 2015 FOI audit sent almost 450 access requests to federal government departments and crown corporations, ministries, departments and agencies in all provinces and territories, and to municipalities and police forces. As in previous audits, identical

It sometimes seems that efforts to improve access to justice follow the age-old pattern of “One step forward, two steps back.” No sooner is a gap identified than a committee is struck to propose and develop gap-filling solutions, often without regard to the possibility that those solutions may themselves create new gaps.

Legal Aid Manitoba recently announced a significant change to its financial eligibility criteria. The Notice to the Profession, issued earlier this month, sets out the current income guidelines for eligibility and re-introduces a partial user-pay system for those outside the regular guidelines but within expanded financial criteria. . . . [more]

Family law cases involving sincere allegations of parental alienation are difficult, highly emotional and profoundly conflicted. Although a certain number of these cases were likely to be high-conflict anyway, adding allegations of alienation to the mix makes conflict a near certainty. I can, however, imagine an alternative, more child-centred approach to these cases that just might encourage negotiation and curb the usual headlong rush to trial.

Allegations of alienation are extraordinarily painful to all involved, and it seems to me that it is the intensity of our emotional response to such allegations which sparks the fight-or-flight response spurring conflict and . . . [more]

People proclaim that our courts are stuck in a bygone era. Ontario lacks electronic filing at all levels of court. The fax machine dominates as the preferred method of communication. Lawyers attend Scheduling Court. Appellate proceedings go unrecorded on video. Even judges are beginning to voice concern about our courts.

In Bank of Montreal v Faibish, 2014 ONSC 2178, Justice Brown called out lawyers and courts for treating our judicial system “like some fossilized Jurassic”, causing the public to lose respect for our justice system. “How many wake-up calls do the legal profession and the court system need before . . . [more]

Over breakfast last week I was reading the recent issue of the UofT Magazine and saw a short article by Alec Scott talking about the right to health. Scott begins by pointing to one of the recommendations from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission asking governments “to recognize and implement the health-care rights of Aboriginal people as identified in international law and constitutional law, and under the Treaties.”

This article resonated in part because of the recent story about the Neskantaga First Nation community who have been living under a boil water advisory for twenty years. That was a . . . [more]

The September 28, 2015 issue of The New Yorker has an article on Ralph Nader’s Tort Museum.

It is actually called the American Museum of Tort Law and it opened recently in Winsted, Connecticut.

The museum is the idea of the famous American consumer advocate and lawyer Ralph Nader who comes from there:

“Nader’s consumer-protection advocacy is the lifeblood of the museum. In the center of the museum sits a cherry-red Chevrolet Corvair, the car Nader disgraced in his 1965 book ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’.”(…)

“In an unfortunate irony for the museum, its building is located directly across the

The Indian Supreme Court is to deal with a challenge to evidence of the complainant in a rape case that was taken by Skype. The complainant is Irish and is now in Ireland, and does not want to return to India for the trial.

The accused submits that the quality of the recording is not good enough to admit the evidence.

Does anything about the use of Skype in this case, or in general, make you uncomfortable?

Can there be a firm rule about the admissibility of private (or quasi-public) systems of video evidence, or should it depend on the . . . [more]

With the federal elections coming up on October 19th, many organizations have been producing lists of priorities, demands and positions on issues relevant to them and canvassing the major political parties to respond.

The legal community is no exception.

The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) has produced an Election Engagement Kit that will “put equal access to justice on candidates’ radar and publicly call for enhanced federal leadership in this area”.

The Kit includes tips for members on how to:

• Ask questions when candidates come knocking on your door.
• Attend and raise these issues at all candidates’ meetings.
• Contribute to the

Last week’s comment by English Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption that it may take another 50 years to achieve a gender-balanced roster of judges in England brought the issue of gender equality to the front pages. Not content to raise a minor storm, Lord Sumption went on to urge patience:

We have got to be very careful not to do things at a speed which will make male candidates feel that the cards are stacked against them. If we do that we will find that male candidates don’t apply in the right numbers. 85 per cent of newly appointed judges

It would be really easy to read last week’s report from the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Working Group on Alternative Business Structures as thoughtful and considered.

Afterall, it has all the hallmarks of a judicial decision – using all the right words and heck, even using numbered paragraphs; no surprise given that Convocation is over-weighted with litigators, many of whom aspire to be judges themselves.

But if you scratch beneath the surface of the report, one quickly finds that all the judicial language in the world cannot hide what really happened in the LSUC Star Chamber amid the fine . . . [more]

When I was at law school, many years ago, Stephen Lewis visited as a speaker.

At the time he was Canadian ambassador to the UN. He flew up from New York for the afternoon.

There are two things I still remember about his talk.

The first is a humerous anecdote about his experience at law school. He told of how he went to the library to research an assignment and when, after some difficulty, he found the volume that contained the key case for the topic, the relevant pages had been torn out. This convinced him to quit law school, . . . [more]

If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s a Federal election going on. How and where to Canadian lawyers fit into this equation?

A new study in the Journal of Legal Analysis examines the political leanings of American lawyers by using the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) to track the financial contributions of lawyers to political campaigns. The contributions were then matched using an algorithm to lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Directory. The result was a “CFscore” to identify the political leanings of the contributor, who could be identified based on their position the legal system. . . . [more]