As you may have heard, during the recent E-Laws website migration, the decision was taken to discontinue producing the Detailed Legislative History Tables.

In 2002, Ontario stopped publishing the Table of Public Statutes in the Statutes of Ontario. Instead the SO directed users to E-Laws for these tables moving forward.
The Table of Public Statutes has been published since 1877 as an important historical legal research tool.

Now the tables have been discontinued outright, however the E-Laws team has not yet devised a solution to take its place.

Accordingly, I have prepared a letter and petition to the Ontario Attorney . . . [more]

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time with clients helping them with Succession Planning. To put it bluntly, it appears that succession planning is an “issue” for the industry. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone since the youngest of the Baby Boomers will be passing the age of 50 in 2015 (and the oldest will turn 69). The pressures of succession planning can be felt on the shoulders of law firm senior management and they are trying to find solutions – fast.

But are they looking for solutions in all the rights places? I’ve been included in . . . [more]

The Regulation on Integrated Accessibility Standards under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) provides, in s. 14, that ‘large organizations’

‘shall meet the requirements of this section in accordance with the following schedule:
1. By January 1, 2014, new internet websites and web content on those sites must conform with WCAG 2.0 Level A.’

Are your clients or other large organizations you know of complying with this obligation? Have they sought your advice on how to comply?

I ask not in order to send in the forces of order (‘not my department’, as we say in government), but . . . [more]

Members of the public have until Friday, June 5 at 11:59 p.m. to vote online for the winner of the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.

The prize, which is sponsored by ABA Journal and the University of Alabama School of Law, is intended to recognize a work of fiction that best exemplifies the role of lawyers in society.

The three finalists this year are:

• My Sister’s Grave, by Robert Dugoni
• Terminal City, by Linda Fairstein
• The Secret of Magic, by Deborah Johnson

There is a judging panel of four:

• Roy Blount Jr., author and

Headlines get made when employers and unions wage labour war. Teachers fighting provinces, police officers fighting cities and postal workers fighting Canada Post all make for great news. Inter-union fighting makes less noise but is also fascinating when it ends up before labour tribunals. A recent case provides a great example of what happens when unions “raid” each other (“raiding” is when one union attempts to sign up members represented by another union).

The story seems to start here, with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) talking to its membership (Toronto area airport screeners) about . . . [more]

Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) is proposing significant changes to the employer Rate Group Classification System and premium rate-setting processes. Consultations are underway, and the board expects to start implementing the proposed changes starting in 2018, with full implementation by 2021. The “Proposed Preliminary Rate Framework” aims to simplify the system and make it fairer. . . . [more]

In Canada, in fact all around the world, transgender individuals face some of the highest risks of human rights violations of any sector of society. By any measure, the levels of violence, discrimination and other abuses they face are shockingly high.

It is a grave human rights problem in need of attention. More needs to be done to assure and uphold the equality rights of transgender individuals, and protect them from discrimination. More also needs to be done to keep them safe from hateful acts of violence.

For ten years there have been efforts in Parliament to do just that; . . . [more]

I heard recently about a mid-career lawyer who is a partner in a small, boutique litigation firm, and who began her career in a large firm setting. Though now well-established in her career, she still arrives at the office early each morning and rarely leaves before midnight. Those who work with her understand that this is the expectation for them as well. I suspect she’s not at all unusual in these habits and expectations.

That’s never been my approach to work and so I struggle to understand both the motivation for that kind of work-life imbalance and how it benefits . . . [more]

A common rebuke to self-driving cars are thoughts about cars behaving like computers – like freezing or rebooting while driving. Those make amusing sound bytes or twitter comments, but there is a grain of truth to it. Self driving technology has come a long way, but while computers and software can follow programmed instructions, and can learn over time, humans are still better at many things.

An article in the New York Times entitled Why Robots Will Always Need Us does a good job of putting this in context, in part by the experience of aircraft.

Author Nicholas Carr points . . . [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. Elmardy v Toronto Police Services Board, 2015 ONSC 2952

[96] The police are entitled to speak to members of the public with whom they interact. Similarly, members of the public are entitled to decline to speak to the police. Had Constable Pak approached me, I might have given him the information he wanted. I might have said, “Constable, I prefer to . . . [more]

A recent decision demonstrates once again that our Province’s residential tenancy laws are in need of an overhaul to give more protection to landlords.

By the time the case (almost) came on for a hearing on April 27, 2015:

(a) the tenant had accumulated arrears of rent from September, 2013;

(b) the Landlord and Tenant Board (“LTB”) had made several orders terminating the tenancy and ordering eviction for non-payment of rent and arrears;

(c) the LTB had also made several orders setting aside the orders mentioned in (b) above and instead installing various repayment schemes;

(d) the tenant breached all . . . [more]

Perhaps because most law firms are partnerships, we don’t pay much attention to the practical implications of the partnership structure. This is understandable as there isn’t much of an alternative in our existing system at least so far as private practice is concerned.

A law firm partnership is very different than most ordinary businesses. In most businesses, the owners of the business are not involved in the business whether as workers or as managers. In contrast, law firms are owned and managed by people who provide services to customers (often with the assistance of others). In a law firm, the . . . [more]