Floods and wildfires have displaced thousands. BC’s heat dome killed 600. It is not an exaggeration to say that climate change is having a profound impact on the rights of Canadians. At the same time, climate cases currently moving through Canadian courts are raising questions regarding whether and how citizens can hold governments to account for authorizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that violate their Charter rights.

The common law has long said that for any right, there is a legal remedy. Increasingly, people facing climate change threats are turning to the courts, in a wave of climate litigation that has . . . [more]

The plain language movement in law has been in full swing for many years now. A plain language approach to legal drafting is taught in most law schools, and members of the judiciary are urged to generate decisions for parties in plain and ordinary language. This contrasts with the historically legalistic and complex language of law understood exclusively by lawyers, judges, and the academics who study law. Underlining the plain language movement is the belief that law, including the articulation of submissions made to court, the decisions rendered by judges, and even the legislation drafted by legislators, ought to be . . . [more]

The Mobile Rural Law Van and Indoor Winter Venues

This brief article is another report on the mobile rural law van and the fixed-location winter locations, referred to together as the “law van’, as the project goes through the process from pilot project to implementation as an on-going part of the delivery model. The story of the law van is one of effective innovation. It illustrates how, at its best, innovation is an on-going process. The successes and challenges, the lessons learned of an innovation are building blocks in an on-going process of helping people bring troubling problems closer to . . . [more]

The buried children have been haunting me. It’s difficult to celebrate the turning of the year while thousands of children remain lost in the rubble of humanitarian catastrophes caused by disasters, political turmoil, and armed conflicts around the world.

In 2023, apocalyptic stories of children and families lost through earthquakes, landslides, wildfires, atrocities, and war crimes filled the news. The Middle East and Ukraine dominated headlines while Afghanistan, Myanmar, and other places were pushed from attention.

An insistent question began to intrude. “What if it was your kids under the rubble?” In late November 2023 this . . . [more]

This is a brief summary of the Impact Assessment Act reference case by Anna Johnston, counsel for the intervenors West Coast Environmental Law Association and Nature Canada on the file. You can find a more detailed analysis here.

On October 13, 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada released its opinion on the constitutionality of the federal Impact Assessment Act (IAA), with a 5-2 majority, led by Chief Justice Wagner, finding that the main scheme of the Act is unconstitutional.

West Coast intervened in the case along with Nature Canada, so we had a front-row seat to the arguments. In . . . [more]

The Canadian justice system experienced an unprecedented transformation during the Covid pandemic, when court and administrative proceedings across the country moved from in-person to remote hearings. Much discussion ensued on the implications of this transformation for the judiciary, the legal profession and their clients, as well as access to justice more broadly. However, self-represented litigants were not directly engaged in most of these discussions and as such, their perspectives and experiences respecting remote proceedings did not form part of the access to justice assessment. Early on in this process shift the NSRLP started hearing from SRLs anecdotally about their experiences . . . [more]

As Noel Semple, wrote earlier this year here on Slaw, each year, over 100,000 Ontarians seek justice from Tribunals Ontario which, as he points out, is far more people than will start civil lawsuits in the Superior Court of Justice each year.

In Ontario, adjudicative tribunals have jurisdiction over matters ranging from housing and tenancy disputes to employment law matters, social benefits disputes, and other types of legal matters, so when we talk about everyday legal problems – increasingly captured in legal needs surveys such as the recent Statistics Canada Legal Needs Survey and the CFCJ’s Cost of Justice Project . . . [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]

Need to Vulnerability: A Global View

In a summary of recent global developments in access to justice delivered by Professor Avrom Sherr, Director of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in London at the International Legal Aid Group Meeting in Boston in June 2023, Professor Sherr observed that there is a movement in service delivery evident in many places recasting the idea of need to include vulnerability. The innovative work being done by the Mobile Rural Law Van in Wellington County and North Halton illustrates this development.

The greater attention to vulnerability is a is part of a wider re-focusing . . . [more]

The search for legal information and assistance

The current design of our legal services delivery system makes Ontario’s access to justice crisis worse. Far too many Ontarians who cannot afford a lawyer struggle to find help from a disjointed cluster of private and public legal service providers. Rather than participating in an integrated intake and referral process that could direct people to the appropriate resource based on the type of problem they are experiencing, their eligibility, and the level of intervention they require, front-line agencies (struggling to keep-up with rising demand) waste thousands of precious hours each year interacting with . . . [more]

By: Jennifer Koshan and Deanne Sowter, cross-posted to Ablawg.ca

Case Commented On: Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, 2022 ONSC 1303 (Can LII); 2023 ONCA 476 (CanLII)

Intimate partner violence (IPV) takes many forms, all of which cause harm to survivors (who are disproportionately women and children). In August, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada declared that gender-based violence is an epidemic. However, only certain forms of IPV were subject to legal sanction historically – primarily physical and sexual abuse, although sexual assault against a spouse was only criminalized in 1983 (see Criminal Code, RSC 1985, . . . [more]

On August 30^th each year, the world is reminded that hundreds of thousands of people in at least 85 countries don’t know where their loved ones are, or even whether they are alive or dead. For the victims of enforced disappearance and their families, every day is the Day of the Disappeared.

The unrelenting uncertainty and anguish of not knowing the truth of what has happened to their family member is a recognized form of torture for both the disappeared and their families. The crime of enforced disappearance cuts off the disappeared from any access to legal . . . [more]