Monday’s Mix

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from more than 80 recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. First Reference 2. David Whelan 3. Excess Copyright 4. Michael Geist 5. National Magazine

First Reference
No tolerance for zero tolerance policies

I have spent far too much of my career analyzing the law regarding summary dismissal in Canada, and I am confident in saying that the one absolute rule is that there are no absolute rules regarding what will constitute just cause for dismissal. That is because every situation must be assessed based upon its own particular circumstances and with regard to all relevant factors. As I have often said, two employees could engage in the exact same misconduct, but a court could find that there was just cause to dismiss one but not the other. …

David Whelan
The Place for Expertise

I have been reading The Big Con, a book that looks at large consulting organizations and their impact on their clients, especially public ones like government. I’ve long been skeptical about how consulting fits into business operations, libraries or otherwise. This book spoke to me, reinforcing my concerns about expertise and knowledge loss, and especially hollowing out of organizations. We make decisions all the time about where to put resources and the book shows how we can make the wrong investment. …

Excess Copyright
The Shrill Shrieking of Access Copyright and the Coming Copyright Confrontation

For the second time in recent weeks, the Globe Mail – supposedly Canada’s “newspaper of record” – has published highly misleading and embarrassingly over the top op eds from authors who really should know better, given their notable backgrounds. No doubt they mean well and aren’t beholden to Access Copyright – but their opinions are so over the top and poorly informed that they have a very bad look: …

Michael Geist
Backdown or Bailout?: What Comes Next for the Government’s Epic Bill C-18 Miscalculation

Meta’s announcement this week that it has started to block news links in Canada on both Facebook and Instagram due to Bill C-18’s mandated payments for links approach has sparked a flurry of commentary and coverage. News outlets such as Le Devoir have joined the Globe and Mail in expressing doubt about the government’s approach, news coverage has examined why the Meta ad boycott hasn’t taken off (hint: the government’s own party is still launching new ads) or why the Australian experience hasn’t been replicated in Canada (hint: different law, different time). Meanwhile, the political response has been discouraging with the government pretending to forget the Conservatives’ actual vote against Bill C-18 in the House of Commons, …

National Magazine
Demanding a right to repair

In 1988, the poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry published an essay — “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” — that read like a manifesto for aggrieved technophobes everywhere. “How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature,” he wrote, “if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape?” Berry may have worn his Luddite badge with pride, but he knew enough to put his finger on a core problem of modern consumption: the more complicated products become, the more difficult they are to fix. Sometimes, the difficulty is by design. …

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*Randomness here is created by Random.org and its list randomizing function.