In our July 2022 update on the Canada- U.S. Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) dispute over Canada’s supply management system for dairy products,[1] we referred to “new front” in the “dairy wars.“ New Zealand launched a complaint against Canada pursuant to the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP),[i] taking issue with its lack of “promised access” to its otherwise restricted dairy market.[ii]

New Zealand considers the manner in which Canada is implementing its dairy TRQs to be inconsistent with its obligations under CPTPP. …. New Zealand exporters … are not able to fully benefit from the market access that

Reports of backlogs and delays in administrative justice processes are increasingly common. While the pandemic lockdown was a contributing factor to those backlogs, our administrative justice system processes may be contributing to and exacerbating delays in the delivery of administrative justice. What can tribunals do to improve the situation? In this column I will address some of the underlying principles or a framework for reducing both backlogs and delays. Principles provide guardrails around processes that will ensure effective and fair adjudication of disputes.

We first have to start with definitions – what is a “backlog” versus a “delay”? The Action . . . [more]

Seth Godin writes in his book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable, “The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.” This is the mantra that keeps me going through every legal information content project I’ve been involved with as a knowledge engineer. But sudden and what often seem like inevitable changes in funding, timelines or resource allotment can be overwhelming. Being told to pivot or be resilient in the face of adversity without practical solutions is only so helpful.

I found myself in such a situation, as briefly . . . [more]

Service is meaningful. Service is motivating. Ask one hundred lawyers what they most enjoy about their work, and most will tell you it is helping clients.

What is meaningful to lawyers about their work is, in a word, service.

What is burning them out is servitude.

In article one of this series, I explored the factors that cause service to slip into servitude and the negative consequences of this. If you haven’t read that article, please start there. https://www.slaw.ca/2023/06/20/balance-the-scales-service-vs-servitude

In this article, I will continue to explore another powerful lever for rebalancing the scales back towards service – meaning.

The

A private members bill directed to a ‘right of repair’ is working its way through parliament. Bill C-244, “An Act to amend the Copyright Act (diagnosis, maintenance and repair)” is currently at third reading and may become law soon. The government included a “right of repair” in its 2023 budget documents and so far Bill C-244 has support from all parties.

The budget announcement said in part:

Budget 2023 announces that the government will work to implement a right to repair, with the aim of introducing a targeted framework for home appliances and electronics in 2024.

The government will

The BC Family Justice Innovation Lab and its Youth Voices Initiative [Note 1] continue to support the ground-breaking work of the Transform the Family Justice System Collaborative.

Last month, I attended the Youth Family Justice Conference, co-hosted by A2JBC, the Representative for Children and Youth, the Youth Voices Initiative, and the Society for Children and Youth of BC. Young people were involved in the planning, hosting and presentation of the entire conference and dozens attended both in person and online to consider how to improve their “meaningful participation” in decisions that significantly affect their lives.

As Chief . . . [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]

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]

Lawyers read more than ordinary people, and writing is the inverse of reading, so all of that reading ought to make great writers of us. Nevertheless, for many lawyers of my acquaintance, any sort of writing outside of the ordinary business of law can be a source of misery and self-torture. I have a suggestion for you—a book that inspired me to reject my self-created barriers to becoming a more serious and dedicated writer. The book is the second edition of How to Write a Lot, by Paul Silvia. PhD.

Dr. Silvia is a professor of social psychology at the . . . [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]

(a vent about the integrity of arbitration confidentiality)

In the world of private arbitration, the courts serve an important role. They represent a check and balance, intended to keep what occurs in the shadow of the law honest. If a participant feels that an arbitral outcome is offside, they can ask a judge to set the award aside.

With this also comes concerns of abuse by participants engaged in the arbitration process. No one likes to be on the losing side of an adversarial proceeding. If the purpose of arbitration is to bring about closure, the notion of appeal rights . . . [more]

The hype around generative AI and legal research continues, and it seems everyone has an opinion. There are concerns about use of AI in practice, but there is less clarity about how to approach finding sustainable solutions. It is however apparent that we need to consider the risks associated with using these systems, especially those that were not designed for certain uses. This is particularly important because general purpose tools like ChatGPT are likely to continue to be developed, and, given the complexity of navigating legal information, if they can be used with law they will be.

The first solution . . . [more]