Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Le ministère public échoue dans son appel du jugement de la Cour du Québec ayant acquitté une gardienne en milieu familial sous une accusation d’homicide involontaire coupable après qu’un jeune enfant de près de 11 mois placé sous sa garde eut été secoué.

Intitulé : R. c. . . . [more]

Each Friday, we share the latest job listings from Slaw Jobs, which features employment opportunities from across the country. Find out more about these positions by following the links below, or learn how you can use Slaw Jobs to gain valuable exposure for your job ads, while supporting the great Canadian legal commentary at Slaw.ca.

Current postings on Slaw Jobs:

• Research Resources and Inclusivity Initiatives Librarian (Full-time) | Ithaca, New York
  (Cornell University Law Library)
• Legal Content Developer (Full-time) | Toronto, ON
  (CLEO – Community Legal Education Ontario)
• Indigenous Law and Indigenous Outreach Librarian (Full-time) | Victoria, BC
  (University of

By Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

In a recent decision under the British Columbia, under the Workers Compensation Act, an investigations legal officer dismissed a worker’s prohibited action complaint. The worker decided not to report to work as a bartender out of concern of contracting COVID-19. The case, reported here, examines the sufficiency of evidence required to prove a prima facie complaint. In dismissing the case, the WorkSafeBC officer clarifies the employee’s duty to be physically present at the workplace while his or her claim of unsafe working conditions is dealt with under the established procedure. . . . [more]

Virtual private networks (VPN) are very standard these days. But they are riddled with vulnerabilities – and subject to a “man in the middle attack.” They have wreaked havoc in 2020 in a work-from-home environment.

Enter zero trust network access (ZTNA).

An October 2020 Forrester study (commissioned by Cloudflare) offered some key findings.

Working from home compelled firms to transform how they operated in the cloud. However, 80% of the IT decision-makers interviewed said their companies were unprepared to make the transformation. Existing IT practices made it difficult to support employee productivity without security compromises.

As a result, 76% of . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Anglin v Resler, 2020 ABCA 184 (CanLII)

[16] Vicarious liability is not a distinct tort but “a theory that holds one person responsible for the misconduct of another because of the relationship between them”: 671122 Ontario v Sagaz Industries Canada, 2001 SCC 59, para 25, [2001] 2 SCR 983. The Supreme Court in Bazley v Curry, 1999 CanLII 692 (SCC), . . . [more]

In identifying professional misconduct, legal regulators are heavily reliant on client complaints and receive relatively little help from practitioners. For example, 71% of complaints to the Law Society of Ontario in 2019 were brought forward by members of the public (typically clients) while only 12% came from legal professionals. The problem is that there are many forms of professional misconduct that only professionals, and not clients, can readily identify. Misconduct therefore goes undetected, leaving clients and others to be victimized by bad lawyers who should have been caught after previous offences.

This is especially true in practice areas where clients . . . [more]

In my November 3rd Slaw post on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Fraser, I considered the division on the Court relating to the interpretation of section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The majority decision, written by Abella J., emphasized a broad interpretation, stressing the significance of adverse effects discrimination and the goal of substantive equality. In their dissent, Brown and Rowe JJ. applied a narrower interpretation, as did Côté J. in her separate dissent. Now we have Ontario (Attorney General) v. G, which not only reminds us of the cleft in . . . [more]

It’s December 1st and that means one special thing in my world: the Clawbies are on!

15 years ago, I sat at my desk and wrote up an inaugural “Canadian Law Blog Awards” (styled awkwardly for the first many years as CLawBies – glad we scrapped the camel case!).

That first edition was inspired by Dennis Kennedy’s Blawggies and was meant to be a playful homage to the unsung blogging heroes sharing Canadian perspectives on all things legal. It felt important to recognize how they made our community a little stronger and more connected.

It’s safe to say we’ve never . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

More Miscellaneous Misuses
Neil Guthrie

Annoying little things that have crossed the radar. Air on the side of caution: Uh, no. It’s err. But, as the poet said, to err is human, to forgive divine. … . . . [more]

During the Covid-19 pandemic scams have not stopped and appear, by many accounts, to be on the rise. As a result, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has continued its enforcement action under Canada’s Anti-Spam Law^[1] (CASL).

Most recently the CRTC conducted an investigation of Notesolution Inc. doing business as OneClass (OneClass). OneClass is an online educational platform for crowdsourced university course content. OneClass seeks to build a global interactive library for educational content across all levels of education.

The CTRC alleged that OneClass violated several provisions of CASL^[2], namely violation of:

(a) the electronic communications . . . [more]

I’m no palaeontologist, but being the father of a 7-year-old boy, I talk about dinosaurs more than the average human. My son doesn’t necessarily have that of a great interest in our prehistoric friends themselves, but his thirst for knowledge about the circumstances of their disappearance is seemingly insatiable.

Those father-son discussions about the extinction of dinosaurs led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole only to discover the existence of such a thing as the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. This boundary is a line of dark dust with high concentrations of iridium, which, according to the leading hypothesis, came from the . . . [more]