One Sunday each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, to which you may subscribe. It’s a summary of all appeals as well as leaves to appeal granted so you will know what the SCC will soon be dealing with (November 21 – December 18, 2020 inclusive).

Oral Judgments

Banking: Fraud; Insurance
Co-operators General Insurance Co. v. Sollio Groupe Coopératif, 2019 QCCA 1678; 2020 SCC 41 (38938)

Kasirer J. “We are all of the . . . [more]

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.

FAMILLE : Le juge de première instance était fondé à attribuer une indemnisation à l’intimée en raison d’un enrichissement injustifié; au terme de la vie commune des parties, l’appelant s’est retrouvé avec une part disproportionnée de la richesse accumulée grâce aux efforts combinés des parties.

Intitulé : Droit de la . . . [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:

• Legislative Affairs Specialist (Full-time) | Remote/within commuting distance to Victoria, BC
  (Ecojustice)
• 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)

Over the past decade, many commentators, myself included, have argued that lawyers should have a duty of technological competence. This duty now exists: in October 2019, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada amended its Model Code rule on competence to include explicit reference to technological competence. Several provincial and territorial law societies have incorporated this amendment into their respective codes, and more will hopefully soon follow suit.

The fact that there now exists a formal duty of technological competence raises the question of what, exactly, does this duty entail? What does this duty require from lawyers? In a strict . . . [more]

Written by Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

Neil Patzwald was an engineer who worked at FMC Corporation from March 2011 to September 2013. His short tenure was marked by multiple lengthy absences for medical reasons, disagreements with his superiors about his abilities and suitability for his position-culminating in an acrimonious end to the employment relationship. Since it became apparent the employee had a disability, the case became centered on the employer’s duty to accommodate Mr. Patzwald. The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal determined that the company did not discriminate against Mr. Patzwald on the basis of disability contrary . . . [more]

Earlier this fall, the Law Society of British Columbia made headlines when it announced the creation of an “Innovation Sandbox” that would allow unauthorized providers of legal services to deliver those services in BC on a pilot-project basis while the regulator assesses their reliability and effectiveness. From The Lawyer’s Daily:

Proposals to enter the innovation sandbox must include a summary of the services that the provider is proposing to pilot, who are expected to be clients, how the services will increase access to justice, as well as information about the provider and an assessment of any risks to the

The Temporary Resident Visa application (a.k.a. Visitor Visa) system is broken. This is not a controversial statement. Currently, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration is in the midst of reviewing the system and, in particular, section 179 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (IRPR). I gave testimony and they have heard from many experts. Officers often abuse their discretionary powers per R179 which may cause extreme hardship for applicants and their families. Over the past few years, Canada has developed a reputation of being extremely difficult for visitors, even for individuals who want to reunite with Canadian . . . [more]

[The content of this article is closely related to six of my previous posts on Slaw, dated: July 25, 2019; April 9, 2020; May 29, 2020; August 6, 2020; October 22, 2020; and October 24, 2020. See also the full text on the SSRN. And, the articles cited below without authors named, are mine.]

The responses being advocated for the access to justice problem (the A2J problem) of unaffordable lawyers’ services, do not involve solving the problem. Instead, they propose using: (1) “lesser legal services providers”—people of lesser qualifications as to education and . . . [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. Canadian Appliance Source LP v. Ontario, 2020 ONSC 7492 (CanLII)

[27] However, I have little understanding of the public interest assessment behind the Covid-19 regulatory regime. Everyone sees the apparent unfairness of small stores closing while big box stores remain open. Are there issues about trying to change the public’s habits during the shutdown? That is, are stores shut down not . . . [more]

As we get ready to say good-bye to 2020 (yay!), it is time to reflect on our goals for the ensuing years. In “A Post-Pandemic Survival Kit for the Legal Industry“, author Mark Cohen writes about adapting to new ways of providing legal services. Legal work “is under renovation. Lawyers are not its architects or builders”.

In preparing for our future work, Cohen recommends that we ask the following questions:

• What do we sell?
• Should we be selling it?
• What do customers think of our services and/or products and how do we stack up with known and potential

In my November 17th Slaw post “Making the Hard Decisions: Ethical Lawyering”, I discussed Dean Embry’s refusal to make certain arguments and call certain evidence and witnesses in his representation of James Sears, editor of Your Ward News (YWN), a community newspaper. Sears was convicted of spreading hate and, despite his accepting these views about what might be successful in his defence, a ground of his appeal was that Embry was incompetent because of his (Embry’s) failure to argue the truth of the content of YWN. In this post, I’m raising another issue related to the trial decision in the . . . [more]

Reaching December means that it’s time to look at the year in review and share what most interested you in the preceding twelve months through the lens of what court decisions you were all reading. 2020 feels like it’s been a year like no other, but there are things that have been constant and Canadians accessing case law via CanLII has been one of them.

That said, there are four current cases on the top ten list this year, compared to three in 2019, and none in 2018. It seems this is because of a break with prior . . . [more]