Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

Finding Ministerial Orders
Susannah Tredwell

Ministerial Orders refer to orders “created under the authority granted to a minister under a statute or regulation that are made by a Minister” as opposed to Orders in Council which are issued by the Governor General of Canada or the Lieutenant Governor of a province. For that reason it’s generally harder to find Ministerial Orders than Orders in Council, although . . . [more]

Access hesitancy is a widely acknowledged and persistent barrier to providing access to justice services. The people-centered approach that is integral to the Legal Health Check-up (LHC) can identify disadvantaged people with problems and provide them with help, in a manner that they will hopefully perceive as providing fair and just resolutions to the problems with which they are struggling. In that way, the LHC model offers a one good solution to the problem of access hesitancy.

The original Legal Heath Check-up project, carried out by Halton Community Legal Services (HCLS) began with the objective of recruiting community organizations . . . [more]

Last week, I mentioned steps taken by the Supreme Court of Canada to make the law more accessible to the public. This includes case summaries provided by the Court, to provide an unofficial and streamlined overview of the case.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario has recently adopted a similar approach in Restoule v. Canada (Attorney General), 2021 ONCA 779 (CanLII), providing its own summary of the 300 page decision on its site.

Beyond the length of the decision, the case involves an are of significant public interest, involving the Robinson-Huron Treaty and the Robinson-Superior Treaty. The appeal involves . . . [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) : Le fait que le procureur de la poursuite et la juge aient utilisé le français comme langue d’usage au cours du procès qui devait se tenir en anglais constitue une violation importante des droits linguistiques de l’accusé énoncés aux articles 530 et 530.1 C.Cr.

Intitulé : Dhingra . . . [more]

Each Friday, we share the latest job listings from Slaw Jobs, which features employment opportunities from across the country. Find out more about these positions by following the links below, or learn how you can use Slaw Jobs to gain valuable exposure for your job ads, while supporting the great Canadian legal commentary at Slaw.ca.

Current postings on Slaw Jobs:

• Litigation Legal Assistant (Full-time) | Chilliwack, BC
  (Waterstone Law Group)
• Junior/Intermediate Solicitor (Full-time) | Vancouver, BC
  (Owen Bird Law Corporation)
• Corporate Tax Lawyer (Full-time) | Vancouver, BC
  (Thorsteinssons LLP)
• Senior Conveyancer (Full-time) | Chilliwack, BC
  (Waterstone Law Group)
• Corporate Services

To address the growing problem of trade secret theft hurting Canadian businesses and innovators, the federal government needs to consider a major legislative reform to its existing IP laws. It is time to start thinking about passing a federal Canada Trade Secrets Act.

The idea of a legislative answer to the problem of trade secret theft in Canada is not new. The Alberta Law Reform Institute proposed model legislation in 1986. The Uniform Law Conference of Canada did the same in 1987. Although these early model laws were for adoption by the provinces, they could easily be . . . [more]

Based on a SLAW post I wrote in 2017, I was recently asked to speak at a conference for women lawyers on leadership. The article focussed on how to effectively lead practice groups and client teams. The date of the original article serves as evidence that I’ve been encouraging leadership skills development in lawyers for a long time, but it really began in the early 2000’s when I developed my initial processes for practice group management. Back then, I quickly realized that most of my training and support would need to be with the practice group leaders. They set the . . . [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. Lavergne-Poitras v. Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FC 1232

[58] The Attorney General concedes that forced medical treatment, including forced vaccination, would engage liberty and security of the person interests under section 7 of the Charter. However, the Attorney General argues that the supplier vaccination policy does not mandate vaccination, and that section 7 does not protect purely economic interests, including an . . . [more]

In Innocon Inc. v. Daro Flooring Constructions Inc., 2021 ONSC 7558, Justice F. L. Myers writes that “Parties should expect case conferences to be used to resolve summarily procedural issues with greater frequency. With current backlogs and resource limitations, there is simply no judicial time available to schedule short motions especially those which, like here, are tactical and do not advance the resolution of the case on its merits”.

Case conferences are on the rise for good reason. They help move cases forward by:

• (a) providing an opportunity for issues to be settled without a hearing,
• (b) providing an

Artificial intelligence is briskly transforming consequential decision-making, disrupting democratic institutions. Most recently, some 26 000 Dutch parents of immigrant background or members of cultural communities stood wrongfully accused of defrauding their government with disastrous consequences, including suicide. It later surfaced that the authorities had naively procured an algorithm to more efficiently detect the fraudulent obtention of child benefit subsidies. Unbeknownst to the AI deployers or its victims, the procured algorithm insidiously factored ethnic origin in its assessment, thereby effectively disproportionately singling out immigrants or those holding dual citizenship. Disturbingly, this occurred notwithstanding multiple stringent, time-honoured legal prohibitions on such practices . . . [more]

INTRODUCTION

A group of lawyers have entered the fray against Covid-19 restrictions, issuing a document with the ringing title, “Free North Declaration” (“Declaration”) (see here for the version dated November 23, 2021). A strident endorsement of individual freedom, the document picks up on the canards that have permeated the debate over these many months.

By identifying themselves as “Canadian lawyers”, one assumes the originators of the Declaration seek to give it a veneer of authority that many protests against the various Covid-related restrictions governments have imposed lack. Here I explore the document, identifying what in my own view are legitimate . . . [more]