Wednesday: What’s Hot on CanLII

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. Anspor v Neuberger, 2016 ONSC 75

[1] This application involves a dispute over who owns two Toronto Maple Leafs (the “Leafs”) season tickets (the “Tickets”).

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

2. Ramdath v George Brown College, 2016 ONSC 3536

[2] This is that rare class action that actually went to trial and in doing so generated new law in consumer protection and aggregate damages. The class counsel team worked tirelessly and deserve special commendation for their legal acumen, their unrelenting commitment to the best interests of the class members and for the superior results that were achieved.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

3. R. v Moodie, 2016 ONSC 3469

[6] It should be obvious to any outside observer that the income thresholds being used by Legal Aid Ontario do not bear any reasonable relationship to what constitutes poverty in this country. As just one comparator, in a report issued last year, Statistics Canada calculated the low income cut-off, before tax, for a single person living in a metropolitan area (more than 500,000 people) for 2014 at $24,328, or more than twice the figure that Legal Aid Ontario uses[1]. The low income cut-off is the level of income below which persons are paying a disproportionate amount of their income for basic necessities (food, shelter and clothing). Some people equate this figure with the “poverty line” although Statistics Canada expressly states that this is not a measure of poverty. The reason for that is simple. There is no accepted definition of “poverty”. As Statistics Canada says “Decisions on what defines poverty are subjective and ultimately arbitrary”[2]. Nevertheless, the fact that a person, below the low income cut-off, has his or her income largely consumed by those basic necessities obviously means that they do not have sufficient income to allow for extraordinary expenses, such as the fees necessary to retain a criminal defence lawyer to provide representation in a criminal jury trial.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

The most-consulted French-language decision was Biocad Médical inc. c. Panthera Dentaire inc., 2015 QCCS 6555

[9] Subsidiairement, et sans préjudice à leur argument principal qu’ils ne l’ont aucunement contrefait, si le Tribunal conclut néanmoins qu’ils ont violé des droits d’auteur des demanderesses sur le logiciel Nobel, les défendeurs demandent qu’il exerce son pouvoir discrétionnaire et n’ordonne pas la remise ou la destruction de leur(s) logiciel(s), ou qu’il ordonne la destruction ou la remise des seules parties jugées contrefaites.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

* As of January 2014 we measure the total amount of time spent on the pages rather than simply the number of hits; as well, a case once mentioned won’t appear again for three months.