By Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

Sometimes, when a period of employment comes to an end, the answers to why or how it ended become especially relevant. For example, under employment standards legislation, an employee may seek a payment on termination to which they are disentitled because of the facts leading to the breakdown in the employment relationship. This occurred recently in 2023 BCEST 17 (CanLII), where the British Columbia Employment Standards Tribunal refused the appeal of a worker who sought “length of service” compensation after finding that he quit his job. You can’t have your cake . . . [more]

Periodically on Thursdays, we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

INDIGENOUS JUSTICE: True Cases by Judges, Lawyers & Law Enforcement Officers

Publisher: Durvile & UpRoute Books, 2023
Editors: Lorene Shyba and Raymond Yakeleya
Foreword: Chief Justice Shannon Smallwood, NWT
Release Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-990735-26-4 (pbk) | 978-1-990735-28-8 (audio) | 978-1-990735-27-1 (epub)
Page Count: 288 Pages
Regular Price: 35.00 $

Excerpt: . . . [more]

As I finished teaching my class, Foreign, Comparative and International Legal (FCIL) Research, this past semester, a couple of students asked me about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence (AI). Given the ubiquitous presence of these topics in everyone’s minds, I should have expected these questions. This is clearly what everyone is talking about and my students are no strangers to these conversations. As someone who works on legal research with sources in multiple languages and from a wide range of countries, I identify myself as agnostic when it comes to technology. In the end, I decided to share with my students . . . [more]

At the beginning of each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about. La version française suit.

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Bellwoods Brewery Inc. v 1896841 Ontario Limited, 2023 ONSC 2845 (CanLII)

[4] On May 21, 2015, 1896841 Ontario Limited (the “Landlord”) and Bellwoods signed a 20-year lease agreement. Pursuant to the lease, Bellwoods would rent the glass box and part of the brick building. . . . [more]

At a recent legal awards gala, one of the categories that caught my attention was the boutique law firm of the year. As we know, a boutique firm focuses on a specific area of practice, such as intellectual property, tax, or environmental law. Unlike firms that offer a wide range of legal services, boutique law firms provide a more narrow and specialized area of expertise.

The part that caught my attention was the scale of the firms up for the award. Firms ranged in size from under three lawyers to firms with over 100 lawyers. The focus of the award . . . [more]

This post is a detour from my series on section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Superior Court of Justice and Court of Appeal Working Families decisions (see here and here (SCJ) and here (ONCA)). (See those posts here, here, here and here). In this post I provide some thoughts about a way to think about “the special rapporteur affair”. . . . [more]

My wife was assaulted by a stranger in downtown Toronto, in January of 2020. She was walking through the underground passage from the Eaton Centre into the Queen TTC station. A man suddenly ran up and kicked her in the leg. She was rattled, and her leg was bruised, but she got over it within a few weeks.

She was lucky. A few weeks later the same man attacked another woman, in the same mall. This time he approached his victim from the back and hit her on the head. This lady suffered a serious concussion, and couldn’t work for . . . [more]

Do you have a particular portion of an e-mail or an entire e-mail that you end up sending repeatedly? It could be something as simple as a reporting e-mail or an e-mail where you discuss your fees. It could also be a just a single paragraph that you use often or even just a sentence.

Let me introduce you to “Quick Parts”. Let’s say that I always use the same text for my annual return reports to my client and I didn’t want to keep typing that out over and over again.

You can go into the last e-mail that . . . [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 juge de première instance a commis une erreur de principe en retenant contre l’appelant des faits rattachés à une accusation préalablement portée qui a été abandonnée conformément à une entente entre les parties; une telle erreur a eu une incidence certaine sur la peine puisque ces . . . [more]

Written by Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

Employees who enjoy a lot of discretion and autonomy in their jobs may be tempted to submit a false expense claim. If they do, they risk upsetting the relationship of trust that is central to their ongoing employment. When that happens, even if the amount of money at issue is relatively small, the repercussions can be drastic for the employee, like the plaintiff in 2023 BCSC 635. . . . [more]

The rural mobile law van began operating in rural Wellington County, Ontario in the summer of 2019 and is now at the mid-point of a three-year extension from 2021 to 2024 in Wellington County and in adjacent Halton Region.[1] Several articles about this project have been published on The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ) web site and on Slaw. This article discusses the sustainability of the Law Van project.[2]

When people think about the sustainability of a legal services project they tend to think first in terms of financial sustainability. Does it cost more than the amount . . . [more]