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. Fraser v. Canada (Attorney General), 2020 SCC 28 (CanLII)

[1] In 1970, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada set out a galvanic blueprint for redressing the legal, economic, social and political barriers to full and fair participation faced by Canadian women for generations. Many of the inequities it identified have been spectacularly reversed, and the result has been enormous progressive change for women in this country. But despite the sweep of legislative initiatives and the positive realignment of many social expectations, the long reach of entrenched assumptions about the role of women in a family continues to leave its mark on what happens in the workplace.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

2. Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), [1999] 2 SCR 817, 1999 CanLII 699 (SCC)

1 L’Heureux-Dubé J. — Regulations made pursuant to s. 114(2) of the Immigration Act, R.S.C., 1985, c. I-2, empower the respondent Minister to facilitate the admission to Canada of a person where the Minister is satisfied, owing to humanitarian and compassionate considerations, that admission should be facilitated or an exemption from the regulations made under the Act should be granted. At the centre of this appeal is the approach to be taken by a court to judicial review of such decisions, both on procedural and substantive grounds. It also raises issues of reasonable apprehension of bias, the provision of written reasons as part of the duty of fairness, and the role of children’s interests in reviewing decisions made pursuant to s. 114(2).

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

3. Akelius Canada Inc. v. 2436196 Ontario Inc., 2020 ONSC 6182 (CanLII)

[26] The implication of this Court of Appeal ruling for the case at bar is significant. After all, what the Plaintiff accuses the Defendants to have done is precisely to have retained the property in order to make more money down the road than they were going to make on the current sale. In argument at the hearing, counsel for the Plaintiff contended that the Defendants only seem to have realized when they were half-way to closing that discharging the mortgages would result in a significant loss of profits. At that point, they determined that they would benefit by waiting for a more profitable future sale. In a nicely executed Canadianism, Plaintiff’s counsel submitted that the Defendants then “ragged the puck” until the closing buzzer sounded. I feel compelled to add that what followed is the current donnybrook.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

The most-consulted French-language decision was Pharmaciens (Ordre professionnel des) c. Grenier-Naud, 2020 QCCDPHA 41 (CanLII)

[100] La détermination des sanctions doit aussi tenir compte du principe de la parité des sanctions. Selon le jugement du Tribunal des professions dans Chbeir[17] qui reprend les enseignements de la Cour suprême dans l’affaire Lacasse[18], les fourchettes des peines doivent être considérées comme des outils visant à favoriser l’harmonisation des sanctions et non comme des carcans.

(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.