The Prime Minister decided this week to send Canadian aircraft to Iraq and possibly to Syria to strike ISIS targets in these countries. The attacks will be exclusively by air and will not involve land troops. The motion is expected to be debated in Parliament tomorrow.

The threats posed by ISIS is certainly unique, and is not easily solved. Nobody suggests that these airstrikes alone will eliminate the problem. Opposition groups have already rejected the plan, indicating that the case for such involvement has not been properly presented. The self-defence basis and humanitarian grounds for doing so have already been . . . [more]

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) : Les requérants, qui ont omis d’invoquer en première instance l’inconstitutionnalité de la Loi sur la responsabilisation des contrevenants à l’égard des victimes, laquelle prévoit notamment l’imposition de suramendes compensatoires, ne pourront le faire en appel.

Intitulé : R. c. Cloud, 2014 QCCA 1680
Juridiction : Cour . . . [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:
Securities Regulation / Civil Rights / Police / Criminal Law / Courts

Walton v. Alberta Securities Commission et al. 2014 ABCA 273
Securities Regulation
Summary: The Alberta Securities Commission, in a decision reported as Re Holtby, 2013 ABASC 45, found G. Walton, B. Holtby, Burdeyney, Randy Kowalchuk and Shepert (the appellants) culpable of insider . . . [more]

The Canadian Library Association (CLA) and the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) recently wrote a joint letter to top federal government officials to uphold the fundamental right of people who are incarcerated to read, learn, and access information:

Literacy and the prison library play an important role inside institutions as well as in reintegration planning. The prison library has the opportunity to mirror the outside world and help prepare the incarcerated person for release.

People serving their sentences have not given up the right to learn and to access information, including legal information. Inmates should therefore have access

. . . [more]

There has been a fair bit of discussion recently about the pros and cons on online dispute resolution (ODR).

Using technology to help people resolve disputes does have many advantages. It can increase access to justice –both collaborative (mediation) and adjudicative (arbitration). It can be faster and cheaper than other options.

The availability of ODR tools is an important factor in consumer confidence for electronic commerce. People are simply more willing to buy things online if they know there is a way to resolve problems.

But there is one inherent problem with many ODR systems. You can’t look your opponent . . . [more]

Emergent phenomena aren’t really predictable. They’re the result of the interaction of complex forces that don’t combine in a simple or linear fashion. So you don’t know what you’ll get until it arrives.

Certainly no one predicted — or could predict — that the combination of a large number of online photographs would be a formless blur of orange. Jim Bumgardner, “a senior nerd at Disney Interactive Labs,” happened to be puzzled when his summations of a lot of Flickr photos all produced this bronzy, beigey orange each and every time. Since his original observation way back in 2005, . . . [more]

Despite concerns from many that the government was lagging in its enforcement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario (ADO) has been issuing orders to comply with the Act, particularly the section 14 requirement to produce and file an accessibility report with the directorate.

Let me start with a confession: I detest marketing terminology. Like any jargon, it obscures meaning. My clients hate it too: they roll their eyes and start looking at their smart phones whenever anyone talks about content channels, verticals, or market segmentation. So when the term “content marketing” came into play, I could feel my lip curl. So now it’s ‘content creation’, rather than writing? That reminds me of when the term ‘data entry’ came into vogue: as one frazzled HR manager commented, “No matter what you call it, it’s still typing.”

Today, law firms and their marketing departments are . . . [more]

This announcement from Louis Mirando was posted via the CALL listserv earlier today:

The Osgoode Hall Law School Library is pleased to announce the official launch of the Osgoode Digital Commons (http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/), the Osgoode Hall Law School’s official, open-access institutional repository. The launch was part of the Osgoode Research Celebration held held today as the first official event of the Osgoode @ 125 celebrations to mark the School’s 125th anniversary.

With the launch of its Digital Commons, Osgoode has become the first law school in Canada to provide free online access to its legal scholarship. The Osgoode

. . . [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. McKesson Canada Corporation v. The Queen, 2014 TCC 266

[4] As detailed below, I have, of my own motion, decided that I am compelled to consider whether I need to recuse myself from the two remaining issues before this Court. A consideration of this issue is required because I became aware that the Appellant and Appellant’s counsel, together with its co-counsel . . . [more]

Neighbouring rights rarely get much judicial review so the case of Re: Sound v. Fitness Industry Council of Canada 2014 FCA 48 gives some insight as to this regime.

Neighbouring rights[1], rights near to copyright, in this context are rights to “equitable remuneration” in published sound recordings (performers and makers) for the performance in public or the communication to the public by telecommunication in Canada of their recordings under Section 19 of the Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42. Re:Sound is a not-for-profit collective society authorized under the Act to administer the performance rights of performers and . . . [more]

Many large law firms in Canada and the U.S. have begun to implement legal project management initiatives, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Jim Hassett’s latest book – Client Value and Law Firm Profitability – provides new insights into why some firms have had much more success than others. Over the last eighteen months, Jim conducted confidential interviews with law firm leaders from 50 AmLaw 200 firms. Forty-two percent were chairs or managing partners, and the balance were senior partners and executives.

Study participants were promised that they would not be quoted by name, which led to some unusually frank . . . [more]