High-stakes litigation often involves the use of experts, who are expected under the Rules of Civil Procedure to provide fair, objective and non-partisan evidence to assist the court to determine issues under dispute. These experts are required to limit their evidence to matters within their expertise, and it’s not uncommon to see experts in a wide range of technological, medial, and other areas.

Typically, the opinion evidence provided by an expert evidence must comply with certain requirements under rule 53.03, such as their area of expertise, qualifications and employment, and a review of the basis for which the opinion is . . . [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.

CONSTITUTIONNEL (DROIT) : En l’absence d’un objet de droit criminel, on doit conclure que la Loi sur la non-discrimination génétique édictée par les articles 1 à 7 de la Loi visant à interdire et à prévenir la discrimination génétique ne constitue pas un exercice valide de la compétence fédérale en . . . [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 (newest first):

• Policy Counsel (Contract Role) | Ottawa, ON
  (Federation of Law Societies of Canada)
• Associate Lawyer, Class Actions (Full-time) | London, ON
  (Harrison Pensa LLP)
• Litigation Support (Part-time) | Toronto, ON
  (Patrick John O’Sullivan Professional Corporation)
• Lawyer Opportunities

In a move that surprised many in the IP community, a budget bill that received royal assent before the holidays, introduced file wrapper estoppel to Canadian patent law.

Bill C-86 (link) included a number of changes to intellectual property legislation including enacting the College of Patent Agents and Trade-mark Agents Act, reforming the Copyright Board, and numerous amendments to the Patent Act, Trade-marks Act and Copyright Act.

One of the changes to the Patent Act, allows for the patent file wrapper or file history to be used to rebut claim construction of a patent. The file wrapper refers . . . [more]

On December 10, 2018, the British Columbia Law Institute (BCLI) released its final report on their independent Employment Standards Act review. The British Columbia labour minister responded to the report by pledging action in 2019 to implement certain of the 71 recommendations found in the BCLI final report. . . . [more]

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes. By Richard Ashby Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xii, 356 p. Includes bibliography and index. ISBN 978-1-107-10310-8 (hardbound) $92.00; ISBN 978-1-107-50126-3 (paperback) $34.00.

Reviewed by David Hurren
Hurren and Gibson, Fort Erie, ON
In CLLR 43:2

Incitement on Trial by Richard Ashby . . . [more]

On June 15, 2010 I wrote a column for Slaw titled “Evolution of Bilingual Judgments in New Brunswick”. The judicial process was only a part of the struggle of New Brunswick francophones against assimilation.

Francophones, speaking French at home, account for about 30% of the New Brunswick population of 730,000.

I was a practicing lawyer in New Brunswick in the 1960s when the court process functioned only in English. A trial in French was not available. The land registry was only in English, you could not file a mortgage in French. Files maintained by lawyers were only in . . . [more]

Last week, several access to justice champions involved in delivering legal aid services in the province participated in a panel on TVO’s The Agenda. In this segment, panelists discussed how critical Ontario’s legal aid system is to access to justice, not only for those who are marginalized but also, fundamentally, to a fair and participatory justice system. Julie Mathews, Community Legal Education Ontario’s (CLEO) executive director and a featured panelist, highlighted the importance of ensuring that people – particularly those who are marginalized – are able to understand and exercise their legal rights. Good legal aid includes understandable, accessible, . . . [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. Das v. George Weston Limited, 2018 ONCA 1053

[175] In the present case, the appellants assert that Loblaws assumed responsibility for the safety of the workers in Rana Plaza and anyone else attending there based on its relationship with New Wave. The argument for Loblaws’ assumption of responsibility is grounded in four essential factors: the incorporation of Loblaws’ CSR Standards into . . . [more]

The enactment of Canada’s medically assisted dying legislation in June 2017 left three areas in particular outstanding: whether mature minors could seek a medically assisted death, whether medically assisted death would be available when the reason for seeking it is mental illness and whether an individual could provide for an advance directive for a medically assisted death when they were no longer able to consent.

Here I make some remarks about advance directives, using the report from the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), which had been given the responsibility by the government to gather information about the three issues (the . . . [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

Printing Clean Versions of Web Pages
Susannah Tredwell

A very quick tip today: if you’re trying to print out a readable version of a web page, but the website doesn’t provide the content in a print friendly format, try using https://www.printfriendly.com to remove any extraneous information.

The Verb Summons: A ‘Horrible Expression’?
Neil Guthrie

Summons is one of those odd nouns that ends in –s in . . . [more]