Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin spoke last week at the University of Toronto’s Access to Civil Justice for Middle Income Canadians Colloquium about how ordinary people risk being priced out of the justice system. In her speech, she called on governments, academics, judges and lawyers to work to ensure better access to justice for all Canadians.

Her speech and the colloquium attracted some media attention:

• Access to justice becoming a privilege of the rich, judge warns (Globe and Mail, February 10, 2011)
• Legal system doesn’t work for ordinary people, top judge says (Vancouver Sun, February 14, 2011)

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The Toronto Star is running a front-page story today about Jaime Laskis, a former associate at the New York offices of Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt, alleging discrimination. The Statement of Claim, filed in the District Court of New York by Liddle & Robinson LLP, can be viewed here.

Laskis complained about the allegedly discriminatory behaviour, and the individual responsible was eventually removed from the position of Legal Professional Committee (LPC) representative, and internal review committee within the firm. However, Laskis claims that she continued to be underpaid and treated unfairly even after this removal.

She was eventually . . . [more]

I came across R. v. Finley, 2011 SKPC 16 (CanLII) and it struck me as extemely interesting given the brouhaha over the long form census.

On January 13 , 2011 Whelan, J. of the Provincial Court of Saskatchewan decided:

[1] Ms. Finley, the Defendant/Applicant, was charged pursuant to s. 31(b) of the Statistics Act for failing to complete and submit the 2006 Long Form Population Census. Section 31 imposes, upon conviction, maximum penalties of a fine, not exceeding five hundred dollars, or imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months or both. She did not dispute the factual underpinnings of

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This is a follow-up post to a previously published Slaw post on a case in which two members of the Church of the Universe claim that the Ontario’s marijuana prohibition violates the freedom of religion protections in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Members of the Church of the Universe believe that smoking marijuana brings followers closer to God and use the drug as a sacrament.

As readers may recall, a few weeks ago a delegation of Sikhs, invited to the Quebec National Assembly to make a presentation to a committee, was turned away by security when they declined to surrender their kirpans. Subsequently the Parti Québécois tabled a motion yesterday respecting kirpans, and today Quebec’s Liberal government has said it will support that motion.

The motion put forward by the PQ is rather more narrow than has been reported in the press, which speaks simply of “a ban”; it reads as follows:

Que l’Assemblée nationale appuie sans réserve la décision prise par sa Direction de

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The UK Press Complaints Commission, a non-governmental, self-regulatory body fielding complaints about the content of British newspapers, ruled today that material published on Twitter is not private and did not violate the editorial code of practice. The Daily Mail republished some of Sarah Baskerville’s tweets. She is employed by the Department of Transport and as a civil servant is bound not to “call into doubt the impartiality of the civil service,” which, the Daily Mail felt, some of her tweets did.

From the adjudication:

The article referred to the fact that the complainant had in her tweets: described the

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Update on Egyptian online sources of legal information.

Mediation is frequently promoted on the ground that it reduces the cost and delay inherent in litigation, and in this way it increases access to justice.

Leave aside the issue of whether mediation reduces cost and delay. Does it increase access to civil justice? . . . [more]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), based in Strasbourg, recently released its annual report for 2010.

The ECHR hears complaints from individuals living in any of the member states of the Council of Europe about violations of the European Convention of Human Rights. The Council of Europe is one of the continent’s oldest political organizations, founded in 1949. It has 47 member countries.

Among the statistical highlights of 2010:

• approximately half of the judgments delivered by the Court concerned four of the Council of Europe’s forty-seven member States: Turkey (278 judgments), Russia (217 judgments), Romania (143 judgments)

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Bruni v. Bruni, 2010 ONSC 6568 (CanLII), a recent decision of the Superior Court of Justice in a family matter, noted (literally, in a footnote (23)):

In recent years, the evidence in family trials typically includes reams of text messages between the parties, helpfully laying bare their true characters. Assessing credibility is not nearly as difficult as it was before the use of e-mails and text messages became prolific. Parties are not shy about splattering their spleens throughout cyberspace.

Is that your experience? Does a multiplicity of informal electronic communications help or hurt assessment of credibility? Is . . . [more]

According to SpiegelOnline:

A regional politician in Germany has been sentenced to pay a fine of 1,500 euros or spend 50 days in prison because he allegedly called Thilo Sarrazin, the author of an incendiary book about Muslim immigrants, an “ass.” If he loses his appeal, the Left Party official has vowed to opt for the jail term.

That’s “ass” as in donkey, mind you. But just in case that didn’t cover the field, Helmut Manz, the politician in question, subsequently told the Bild newspaper, “All racists, which therefore includes Mr. Sarrazin, are assholes.” The German “Arschloch” is a . . . [more]

Many class action and competition law lawyers will be anxiously awaiting whether the Supreme Court of Canada will grant leave tomorrow regarding the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Quizno’s Canada Restaurant Corporation v 2038724 Ontario Ltd, 2010 ONCA 466.

Most commentators regard the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal as making it easier for plaintiffs to have their class action lawsuits certified when claiming damages under the Competition Act.

At issue in that decision were allegations by some franchisees that the franchisor was overcharging for the food and supplies provided to franchisees and that this constituted, . . . [more]