One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

Barafield Realty Ltd. v. Just Energy (B.C.) Limited Partnership, 2015 BCCA 421

AREAS OF LAW: Privity of contract; Novation; New issues on appeal; Money had and received

~Where a party seeks to enter into an agreement which is dependent on it making a payment that it disputes, and the party has time to seek a determination of the validity of the payment but chooses not to do so, then . . . [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.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Lino Zambito est condamné à une peine d’emprisonnement avec sursis de deux ans moins un jour sous chacun des chefs de complot pour abus de confiance, de corruption dans les affaires municipales, d’intimidation, de fraudes et de complot en vue de commettre une fraude à l’endroit de . . . [more]

I don’t know about you, but I often like to bang on things . . . make a noise, as rhythmically as possible. Not very, in my case. Drumming. It’s the old heart beat thing, I suppose, which leads to dancing (the reason, so the joke goes, that Baptists — or is it Methodists? — are opposed to pre marital sex¹). Staying still was a hard-learned lesson for most of us, I’d wager. And staying quiet even harder. If you have hung around little children for any length of time, you’ve probably been entertained by a kitchen concert . . . [more]

As we’ve posted in our previous column, this summer, the UNCITRAL working group on ODR – which we have discussed extensively in previous blogs – has been given an ultimatum: “the Working Group was given a time limit of one year or no more than two Working Group sessions to undertake this work, after which the work of the Working Group will come to an end, whether or not a result has been achieved”. In other words, the Working Group will most likely have no more than five months left (the two sessions are scheduled for 30 November-4 December 2015, . . . [more]

A lot of attention is being paid these days to cyberthreats and cybersecurity. It seems widely accepted that such threats and security questions cannot be confined to the IT department any more, but they involve sufficiently critical threats to organizations that boards of directors have to get involved. When boards get involved, they turn to their counsel.

Some enterprising law firms in the US have published books on the topic. The blurb for this one strikes me as a bit over the top – and the threats they sketch have been real for years (off-the-shelf attack software available for . . . [more]

The Charbonneau Commission mandated to look into corruption and fraud among the construction industry, unions and government, tabled its final report on November 24, 2015. The report proposes 60 recommendations that lead commissioner of the inquiry, France Charbonneau, called “concrete solutions” to ensure government contracts are fairly managed. . . . [more]

The cynical phrase, “Let Them Eat Cake,” is more appropriately attributed to Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV, 100 years before Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI of France, about whom such royal indifference to starving peasants pleading, “bread, bread,” is alleged most frequently. If they were begging for bread, they certainly didn’t have cake. So to prevent a law society from appearing to be equally indifferent to the suffering of people who cannot afford lawyers, how should law society benchers explain their intense promotion of alternative legal services, and the resulting cynical phrase: “let them . . . [more]

Cybersecurity was a major topic at the recent Canadian IT Law Association conference. It can be a daunting subject to ponder when dealing with various types of services, cloud providers, and the methods, standards and assurances available to lower the risk of a security breach. Cyber insurance to cover some of these risks is a growing field.

This Cyber Security Report Card (pdf) is a good high level summary of the things that businesses should think about when considering security issues for their organization. It was provided by one of the luncheon speakers, John Millar of Digital Boundary Group, . . . [more]

A Toronto web design company recently published a job posting for a writing job indicating that “female candidates are preferred”, seemingly time-warping back to the Mad Men era… Specifically, the position was for a content writer and search-engine optimization specialist on LinkedIn. However, the posting also indicated that the successful candidate will need to fulfill the “responsibilities of a receptionist, so female candidates are preferred.”

Not surprisingly, the job posting has attracted negative attention on twitter and news outlets have picked up the story. The company responded on Twitter and LinkedIn by stating that they “did not mean to discriminate . . . [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. R. v. Hecimovic, 2014 BCCA 483

[50] The trial judge expressly dealt with, and dismissed, the Crown’s theory that the respondent drove in a deliberately dangerous manner, within the meaning of s. 249(1)(a) of the Criminal Code. The question on this appeal is whether the trial judge erred in law in the manner in which she addressed what remained of the . . . [more]

On September 15, 2015 the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ) published Civil Non-Family Cases Filed in the Supreme Court of BC – Research Results and Lessons Learned. This study is one piece of a larger, five year “Cost of Justice” research initiative being undertaken by CFCJ with the goal of defining the economic and social costs of justice on two fronts: the cost of delivering access to justice, and the cost of not delivering access to justice.

The study was conducted by Focus Consultants of Victoria, B.C. in 2014 and 2015 in the Supreme Court of . . . [more]

The holiday season is an important season to focus on good will and the profound messages that the holidays celebrate. Many organizations use the holiday season to communicate with clients and associates to share that sentiment. For example, an organization may wish to invite individuals to a holiday-themed party, or simply send a seasonal greeting. What many organizations may not have considered is whether these benign-seeming messages will attract seven-figure liability.

Canada’s Anti-Spam Law, more commonly known as CASL, generally provides that a sender must obtain the consent of a recipient before sending a “commercial electronic message,” or “CEM,” to . . . [more]