The BBC is reporting that late Thursday night a convoy of lawyers left the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore to converge on the capital Islamabad to demand the reinstatement of judges who were removed last November. The government is undecided as to how to reinstate the judges, or even if they should. The lawyers are planning a peaceful sit-in after their 270 km motorized trip through various towns along the way to Islamabad.

According to the BBC report:

Organisers said the struggle of the lawyers had now reached a “decisive phase”. The lawyers have been joined by some civil

Today’s The Daily from Statistics Canada reveals new 2007 data from the Canadian Internet Use Survey. Interesting findings include:

• Digital divides in Internet use persist, specifically on the basis of income, education and age.
• High-speed connections are becoming far more popular.
• More Canadians are participating in blogging, chatting and downloading.
• Internet use rates are highest in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.

This was the first time the survey included Canadians aged 16 and 17. . . . [more]

It has now been posted on the Canadian Parliament website:

Bill C-61 – First Reading

Hat tip to John Sadler, Chair of the Copyright Committee of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit who shared the link via the CALL listserv. . . . [more]

Minister Jim Prentice is about to table the government’s new copyright law, Bill 61. Although the text is not available at this time — 12.11 p.m. — it should be online shortly, once Parliament deals with a few other matters.

The press ban is lifted, however, and you can read what the Globe and Mail and the CBC have to say about the proposed legislation.

If someone could post the link to the bill as a comment to this post, that would be great. . . . [more]

From cbcnews.ca (June 12, 2008):

The federal government has introduced legislation to make it easier to prosecute people who download copyrighted material from the internet.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice tabled amendments to the Copyright Law in the House of Commons Thursday. Individuals caught downloading copyrighted files would be fined $500 under the proposed amendments. The current copyright law — intended to catch commercial cheaters — carries a maximum fine of $20,000 for infringements.

The bill has been in limbo since the Conservatives first put it on the Commons order paper in December. Prentice was caught between business interests who wanted

After having solicited suggestions from all and sundry, the U.K. Law Commission has chosen seven projects to work on. According to an article in today’s Times Online these include marriage contracts and separation agreements (referred to by that irritating, to me, Americanism “nups”) the law on intestacy, consumer rights of redress, laws on residential care, treason and level crossings.

Only in Britain could an institution seriously combine interests in treason and level crossings.

The Law Commission’s own Tenth Programme of Law Reform is available as a PDF.

It interests me that the Commission has explicitly chosen to avoid issues such . . . [more]

Even though I’ve got an iPod Touch, I’m still casting an acquistive eye in the direction of the iPhone, now that it’s coming to Canada. (…at usage rates that will doubtless be some multiple of the U.S. rate of about $70 for voice and data, but that’s another story…) But, not being a BlackBerry person and not having to be in constant touch with a firm wherever I am, I’m unclear about the various modalities of wireless communication now literally floating around. The new version of the iPhone boasts that it’s 3G, of course, and so I was really glad . . . [more]

Late-breaking news:

OTTAWA, June 11, 2008 — The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, and Minister for La Francophonie, will deliver brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling of a bill to amend the Copyright Act. Members of the media will also be able to attend a technical briefing and lock-up prior to the tabling of the bill to amend the Copyright Act.

Date: Thursday, June 12, 2008

Industry Canada News

It looks as if the media lockup will be over by . . . [more]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper presented a formal apology today on behalf of the Canadian government for the damage done to generations of aboriginal Canadians who went through Indian residential schools.

The apology was read to a packed House of Commons in which many aboriginal leaders had been invited to sit. The apology ceremony was broadcast live on TV, radio, and the Internet.

From the 19th century until very recently, in total, about 150,000 aboriginal, Inuit and Métis children were removed from their communities and forced to attend remote boarding schools run by Christian congregations under government contract. Countless children were . . . [more]

The Globe and Mail features an article in yesterday’s paper about the Supreme Court Advocacy Institute, an organization that puts together mock sessions to help lawyers who are about to appear in front of the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Institute organized mock court hearings for 20 percent of all the cases heard last year by Canada’s highest court, according to the newspaper. Some of Canada’s top litigators volunteer their time to act as judges:

“Like musicologists discussing a classical composition, the ‘judges’ then take apart a lawyer’s arguments and suggest where they may fall flat, distract the judges

Strange days in Canadian legal publishing.

We wonder what to make of reports that there’s been a major executive blood-letting at one of the big three legal publishers.

Perhaps its mere coincidence that a CEO, an Exective VP and the VPs of Customer Service, sales and marketing all appear to have left within a matter of weeks.

Perhaps its all business as usual and this is natural staff progression. Perhaps the profits aren’t flowing in from the Canadian market.
Perhap the company is imploding.

We’re just asking. . . . [more]

This is pretty cool: give Lingro a URL and it hotlinks every word on that page to a dictionary, and it offers you the ability to translate the word you’re looking up into one of a number of other languages. As you can see below, I gave it the current home page on Slaw, clicked on “superior” and asked for a French translation. This would be really helpful I imagine if you were reading a text in a language with which you weren’t very familiar and needed to get the definition for a lot of words.

There’s review of Lingro . . . [more]