This Ottawa Citizen article on the appointment of Kevin Whitaker to review the Ontario ban on unionization of part-time College workers went out on the CAUT Contract Academic Staff wire today.

The past decade has seen great strides in unionization of part-time (aka Sessional or Contract Academic Staff) university teachers. While some full-time faculty associations have acquired rights for these additional units, many are organized by national unions such as CUPE (which tend to hold rights for Teaching Assistant units as well). The article indicates that the “newly formed Organization of Part-time and Sessional Employees of the Colleges of Applied . . . [more]

The British Broadcasting Corporation has a report about a survey to choose the most bizarre and ridiculous laws still on the books in the UK.

Some 4,000 people took part in the poll by the British television channel UKTV Gold.

Among the silliest laws, according to the vox populi (or is that vox dei?):

• It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament
• It could be regarded an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British king or queen’s image upside-down
• In the UK, a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants
• It is

Last week I was fortunate to attend the international conference Law Via the Internet held in Montreal, hosted by the good folks at LexUM who bring us our CanLII system.

Law Via the Internet coincides with the annual meeting of the Legal Information Institutes (or LIIs) from around the world.

Here are some of my take-away thoughts from the conference:

• free public access to law is key to helping developing countries eliminate poverty. Simply put, making the law accessible allows lawyers in a country do their job representing people, helping fight for people’s rights. Furthermore, organizations wanting to financially support

TIFF, the word was all over the Canadian media a week or so ago. For those of us that are technically inclined we might have wondered; at first glance, why our media of choice suddenly got so interested in a computer image format. Once we removed the indents of our keyboards from our fingers, we realized that the ubiquitous TIFF, was the Toronto International Film Festival. Alas, TIFF is not the only “FF” around, in these parts TIFF is merely the signal that the Atlantic Film Festival is about to start(AFF?). So with all the FF talk around . . . [more]

Startling news, to say the least, in the Globe’s Business section today. Telus and Bell paid two lawyers at McCarthy Tétrault to draft a model telecommunications bill that’s been offered to the government as a template for a new Telecommunications Act. You could be forgiven for wondering if the next amendments to the Canada Health Act will be brought to you by RJR Nabisco.

But I think there’s more to it than that. As the article points out, the drafting lawyers are enormously respected and the companies have reportedly had no input whatsoever into the content of the model . . . [more]

The Washington Post reports in the Sept. 7/07 article Judge Invalidates Patriot Act Provisions that a judge has declared portions of the U.S. Patriot Act to be unconstitutional: . . . [more]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced yesterday he has asked Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue the current session of Parliament. The session was originally supposed to start again on September 17th. This means the Parliament would not sit again until October 16th, starting the Second Session of the 39th Parliament. See the Prime Minister’s Sept. 4th announcement.

According to a report by the CBC:

the move sets the stage for a non-confidence vote that could trigger an election campaign — a vote and election campaign that could turn on Canada’s commitment in Afghanistan.

Opposition parties must decide whether