PM announces nominee for Supreme Court of Canada
30 September 2013
Ottawa, Ontario

Prime Minister Stephen Harper today announced the nomination of Mr. Justice Marc Nadon for the Supreme Court of Canada. Mr. Justice Nadon will replace Mr. Justice Morris Fish, who resigned from the Supreme Court of Canada effective August 31, 2013.

“I am pleased to announce the nomination of Mr. Justice Nadon, whose extraordinary body of legal work – as a longtime judge on both the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal; judicial member of the Competition Tribunal; expert in maritime and transportation law with almost . . . [more]

By now, the proposed Quebec Charter of Values and the enforced secularism it promotes have been debated in the media, on blogs and around the water cooler consistently for the past few weeks. For the most part, the debate has centered around the proposed ban on conspicuous symbols worn by public sector employees. Most of what has been written is scathing and attacks the irrationality of the proposal, not to mention its blatant systemic discrimination, if not its direct discrimination (it is certainly not a coincidence that Christians do not wear conspicuous religious symbols or clothing, but that Muslims, Jews, . . . [more]

Shortly after being disappointed that Oxford’s Constitutions of the World wanted money from me — my university background and the ethic of free knowledge can’t be taken out of the boy, it seems — I learn about Constitute. Here, too, are the world’s constitutions, but absent any fee.

Now, Constitute doesn’t promise to update according to a schedule (they claim they’re up-to-date as of September 2013), and though all the constitutions I’ve had a quick look at are set out in English, there’s no indication of how or by whom they were translated from their original language, this is . . . [more]

Occasionally here at SLAW I feel the need to represent the East Coast with an appropriately themed post. Earlier this week an interesting event happened when a Greenland Shark was brought back to Halifax in order to be examined. Why is this interesting? Because this is a shark that can grow over 6 metres in length, weigh over 2000 lbs, (perhaps larger than Great Whites) and we (meaning science type folk) know virtually nothing about it! This animal lives in the coldest, deepest parts of the ocean and a study from the 50’s estimated that they could live to be . . . [more]

Slaw readers who are also hockey fans might be aware of this new NHL penalty: 2 minutes for removing your helmet before a fight.

Well, last night we were given a little reminder to “not judge a pugilist book by its cover”; along with “the code” among hockey fighters. Not impressed with the new rule, Krys Barch of the Islanders and Brett Gallant of the Devils found themselves a loophole — they took each other’s helmets off. Here’s the video clip:

Given the number of physical gestures leading up to the fight, one would assume they hadn’t discussed the . . . [more]

Constraints are important. They can define the nature of what we see, as when you drop a frame onto an image, suggesting, at least, that what is framed is now “art”, or when you slap some numbers and lots of indentation onto a patch of text, making it look like legislation. Poetry used to have constraints — rhyme schemes, meter, number of feet and lines, etc. — which, I suppose, was one way you knew it was poetry; and haiku is among the few surviving examples of constrained poetry in common use today.

So long as you adopt the 5-7-5 . . . [more]

The recent controversy over the Sam the Record Man sign, Ryerson University and the City of Toronto is interesting on a number of levels. There is the heritage aspect of the matter and there is the legal contractual element – Ryerson agreed to find a place to hang the sign, then decided that it didn’t want to do so.

Much has been written about the above.

What interests me personally, and as an adjunct professor at a law school, is the ethical element.

Ryerson is an institution of higher learning. It teaches students.

And so, call me old-fashioned, but . . . [more]

100 years ago, in 1913, the Hon. Sir William Ralph Meredith, Q.C., LL.D, at the time Chief Justice of Ontario, tabled his Workers' Compensation report in the Ontario Legislature. From this report emerged the Meredith Principles, which are the tenets upon which the Ontario workers' compensation system was built, the impact of which was felt gradually throughout Canada.

On Tuesday, September 10, 2013, Quebec’s Parti Quebecois government led by Pauline Marois released its proposal for a Charter of Quebec Values, which would decree the religious neutrality of the state and its employees and management of religious accommodation. This is not the province’s first attempt. In 2009 and 2011, Marois presented bills “to assert the fundamental values of the Québec Nation,” which we wrote about previously on Slaw. Going further back, the Quebec government says these measures sprouted naturally from the seed planted over 50 years ago in the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille).

I stumbled upon today’s Lifehacker post, Don’t Do Research When You Hit Your Writing Groove by Eric Ravenscraft while on a brief break from report-writing this afternoon. It was well-timed and a useful reminder that when inspiration hits and the writing is easy, the details can wait.

Ravenscraft concludes by saying:

If you hit a stride while you’re writing, don’t ruin it with Google.

While perhaps obvious, this advice is much harder to implement than one would hope and for that reason, I would add that its probably best to close your web browser altogether when you find yourself in . . . [more]

The Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on the Status and Future of Canada’s Libraries and Archives sent a notice about consultations on the value Canadians place on libraries and archives.

The panel’s mandate is:

1.To investigate what services Canadians, including Aboriginal Canadians and new Canadians, are currently receiving from libraries and archives.
2.To explore what Canadian society expects of libraries and archives in the 21st century.
3.To identify the necessary changes in resources, structures, and competencies to ensure libraries and archives serve the Canadian public good in the 21st century.
4.To listen to and consult the multiple voices that

. . . [more]

September 10, 2013 is World Suicide Prevention Day

It only took one day for the Ohio prisons director, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, to launch two separate reviews into the suicide of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland kidnapper who was sentenced last month to life in prison, plus 1,000 years, for crimes relating to the kidnapping and sequestration of three women over the course of a decade. Castro had been taken off suicide watch during his trial, after authorities determined he was no longer at risk of taking his own life. While public opinion was far . . . [more]