On January 23rd Canadian Bar Association President Guy Joubert sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper (PDF) asking for Omar Khadr to be repatriated to undergo judicial process here in Canada. From the CBA letter: . . . [more]

Yesterday, Nicole Baute of the Toronto Star covered a new social networking analysis company, Sysomos. The Canadian company gathers data from Twitter, Facebook, and 30 million blogs. Yes, 30 million.

It’s a new start-up by a UofT prof and one of his grad students, and they received financial support from the province to get things going.

They claim to go beyond brand monitoring by identifying what people are saying, who these people are, and what their tone is.

One recent practical application is mentions of Stephen Harper when parliament was prorogued. They also say . . . [more]

CanLII always seems to release the good news late on Friday… Maybe it’s that as the weekend approaches the pressure to finish the project gets it done just in time. Maybe it’s some impulse to drop the bomb and run.

This time it’s their new database for legislation, over on their beta site, and the really good news is that you can do point in time searching and comparisons of different versions. This function is currently available only for federal, Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan legislation, but as the bugs get removed from the new system, other jurisdictions will be . . . [more]

I’m working on my segue skills (no, no that Segway):

News arrived yesterday that the WTO has a new database, The RTA-IS, which collects existing and announced Regional Trade Agreements, as well as “Pre-Defined Reports”. If you’d like to know what those, are, see the User Guide.

Or perhaps you have other legal education needs regarding the WTO? Why not try CALI’s new open access Legal Education Commons? I found these materials introducing TRIPS. . . . [more]

I’m English, and so teeth have always been a problem. Which is why, perhaps, the dentists’ mantra has stuck in my head since I first heard it many, many cavities ago:

[Product X will help you] when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care. ((And it’s still a byword: see the Canadian Dental Association Seal of Recognition page.))

Of course, that’s what advertising is meant to do: stick things into your head that wouldn’t otherwise find a footing there, so to speak. So I thought it might be amusing to take a look . . . [more]

The Legal Marketing Association sponsored a webinar by Rich Klein of Beckerman Public Relations on January 24th called “Crisis Communications and Web 2.0”. That webinar is available for replay here (it will start as soon as you click on the link). It is about 1 hr 15 min in length. I believe it may only be available for a limited time, possibly to the end of February.

Hat tip to the Law Marketing Network. . . . [more]

GMDesk is a little Adobe Air application that lets you run your Google apps in a stand-alone browser. This could be handy for some folks, particularly those who frequently close their browser and would lose contact with Google Mail or Calendar or Docs this way: it lets you treat Google as a separate matter conceptually, in effect. As you’d imagine, there’s a menu (and easy shortcuts) that let you switch between the various Google applications you use.

Given that browsers load so quickly now (I’m assuming that IE loads fast), it’s not so clear that there’s a need for a . . . [more]

Those Slawyers in or near Toronto might like to know that Richard Susskind, author of “The End of Lawyers: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services,” will be speaking at the National Club on Wednesday, February 11 at 5 p.m., courtesy of the Canadian Bar Association. Those wishing to attend can let the organizers know here. The first chapter of Susskind’s book is available on the CBA site in PDF.

The CBA announcement of his impending talk also said that Susskind

has recently agreed to share his expertise with the Canadian Bar Association in the role of Special Adviser. He

It’s been almost two years since I referred to George Orwell’s 1984 in a Slaw Post, entirely too long. Apparently, the mayor of Montreal is a Slaw fan and felt it had been far too long since I made such a reference and Montreal council is considering banning….words! Montreal may ban insults to police …and here. Use of the words such as “pig” and “donut eater” could be outlawed (on a complete side note, for all you hockey fans out there, imagine if Jim Schoenfeld and Don Koharski ran into each other in Montreal, could be a bad scene). . . . [more]

A wave of spending is about to take place pretty much all round the globe, and some of that money will be directed to improving “infrastructure,” the underpinnings required for businesses and individuals to prosper. A portion of infrastructure spending will, in many places, be devoted to bettering the internet and our access to it, typically described as improving “broadband” access.

The recent federal budget made scant mention of this as a goal:

The Government will advance Canada’s knowledge advantage by:

…Providing $225 million over three years to develop and implement a strategy on extending broadband coverage to unserved communities.

Just a quick note about some of the newest additions to LawBlogs.ca. Since our update in November, we’ve added 14 new Canadian law blogs to the ever-growing list at LawBlogs.ca. In no particular order, they are:

Many thanks to Dan Michaluk at All About Information for the heads up that the Privacy Commissioner has new Guidelines for Processing Personal Data Across Borders.

Processing? According to the Commissioner:

PIPEDA does not distinguish between domestic and international transfers of data.

Processing
“Processing” is interpreted to include any use of the information by the third party processor for a purpose for which the transferring organization can use it.

Here at Slaw we have talked about outsourcing on occasion. It is somewhat comforting to have a document to point our sources at to guide the way Canadian personal information . . . [more]