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) : Une clause d’une autorisation d’écoute électronique de nombreuses personnes, y compris de l’intimé Frank Zampino, ne protégeait pas adéquatement le secret professionnel de l’avocat; toutefois, cette violation des droits des intimés n’était pas d’une gravité telle qu’elle justifiait un arrêt des procédures, de sorte que la tenue . . . [more]

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

The recent Supreme Court of British Columbia case 2023 BCSC 1513 (CanLII) concerns the appropriate decision-making process of the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal when it must make a compensation decision in the face of multiple medical reports. . . . [more]

Businesses are deeply implicated in abuses of human rights defenders worldwide. In 2021 more than “a quarter of lethal attacks were linked to resource exploitation,” according to Global Witness. Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately attacked. Over 40 percent of fatal attacks targeted Indigenous people who make up only 5 percent of the world’s population. One in ten defenders killed were women, two-thirds of whom were Indigenous.

Canada’s record of business abuses of human rights increasingly attracts international criticism. Canada is home to about half the world’s extractive companies operating in nearly 100 countries. When Indigenous land rights defenders protest business . . . [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. 

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

1. Reference re Impact Assessment Act, 2023 SCC 23

[1] Environmental protection is a fundamental value in Canadian society and one that is shared by Canadians from coast to coast. The Canadian judiciary, in tandem with the other branches of government, has an important role to play in protecting the . . . [more]

With OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT-3 on November 30th 2022, it very quickly became clear to people that the innocent-sounding Large Language Models (LLMs) had crossed a historic threshold when it came to the intelligence exhibited by Artificial Intelligence. Many were seeing, for the first time, a computer responding to their questions and prompts with well informed and well-formed prose that, apart from the occasional “hallucination,” spoke directly to what was asked or prompted.

The immediate legal question was whether the resulting text, while certainly exhibiting intellectual properties, constituted the sort of intellectual property that the law was intended to encourage . . . [more]