The most recent legal aid data are now available in tabular form on Cansim rather than in the familiar publication , Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, which has been discontinued. Keeping track of trend and change in legal aid has never been more important. Legal aid is by far the largest part of the access to justice landscape in Canada. Even with constraints of the current fiscal realities, or perhaps because of them, legal aid systems have the infrastructure, the expertise and the resources to contribute significantly to expanding access to justice in Canada.

The good news . . . [more]

When I was younger I had a fondness for big ideas — or, a few of them, at least. Only natural in a tyro trying to learn how to dance to the ineffable ruck and roil of life itself and looking for some Arthur Murray guidance.

Now, Big Ideas are potentially dangerous, as that originating interesting concept expands to a full-blown idea, idea inflates to Big Idea, which in turn can bloat to ideology, gripping the mind and wresting all awareness away from the pragmatic to the programmatic. Perhaps I’m too intellectually lazy ever to have worked my way up . . . [more]

In the last couple of weeks, two laws with contentious moral underpinnings have made headlines. The first is Ottawa’s proposed prostitution laws that criminalize the purchase of sexual services and much of the communication, including advertising, which surrounds it. The other is Quebec’s law legalizing physician-assisted dying, adopted following a free vote with support from all parties in the National Assembly. Both laws raise serious concerns as to their constitutionality and raise an important point about law-making in Canada today: Are our elected lawmakers doing their constitutional due diligence?

Bill-36 was the federal government’s response to last year’s Bedford decision, . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has published a new comparative law report on Restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms.

The report analyzes legislation on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically modified (GM) plants and foods in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, England and Wales, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States.

There is also a bibliography.

Earlier comparative law reports from the Law Library of Congress have covered topics such as:

• Adjudication of Sexual Offenses in Military Justice

. . . [more]

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has ruled that employees of Ontario’s Office of the Worker Adviser and Office of the Employer Adviser who provide legal services relating to the Occupational Health and Safety Act must be licensed paralegals. The Offices of the Worker and Employer Advisers provide certain legal services under the OHSA to employees and employers in non-union environments.

In Canada parties should understand that rights in marks can arise through use of the mark in commerce even without registration. This complicates clearance of marks and is a reason for doing clearance searches to identify any prior users before the adoption of a mark.

What happens when a user of a mark for one category of goods begins to use that mark in another category of goods – in which a second party has a registered mark. Can those uses survive, continue and co-exist when such conduct occurs over a long period of time?

Canada’s Federal Court addressed this . . . [more]

This year’s CALL/ACBD conference ended about two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few posts on impressions of the conference and selected sessions.

A frequent highlight is the pre-conference workshop and the opportunity it offers to dive deeply into a topic in which colleagues specialize. This year, as noted previously on Slaw, F. Tim Knight of Osgoode’s library and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII offered a timely presentation on the semantic web and legal information.

I wasn’t able to attend it because of another commitment. However, thanks to the institutional repository at York, Creative Commons licensing, and—most notably—the generosity 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. R. v. Bal & Sidhu, 2014 ONSC 3063

[36] Guided by the principles of sentencing set out in ss. 718, 718.1 and 718.2 of the Code and specifically recognizing the fundamental principle of proportionality set out in s. 718.1, the sentence to be imposed must be in keeping with the gravity of the offence and the degree of the offender’s responsibility. . . . [more]

The practices of some “form-filler” companies who assisted residential school survivors with filing their claims under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) were described as “unconscionable” in a decision from the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench issued last week.

The form-filler companies were charging a contingency fee of some 15-25% of settlement amounts paid to claimants under the Agreement. The terms of the IRSSA permit lawyers to charge a maximum legal fee of 30% of a settlement, of which the federal government will pay up to 15%. Where form-fillers were used, many claimants paid fees over and above the . . . [more]

Canada’s law societies have long had a reputation for being slow, if not resistant, to change. I’ll leave it to others to argue the extent to which this has been, in the past, a fair characterization. Looking at current initiatives like the Nova Scotia’s Barristers’ Society’s Transforming Regulation consultation and the work of the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Working Group on Alternative Business structures, it is apparent that right now there is significant “big picture” thinking going on at Canadian law societies about how to innovate and modernize lawyer regulation.

It remains to be seen, of course, if . . . [more]

Lawyers may have recently found themselves giving advice to clients about the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. It’s not mandatory, but this new standard is beginning to receive attention as a convenient source of best practices for employers who want to create a psychologically healthy (and lawsuit-resistant) workplace.

It is one of the first of its kind in the world, and has been adopted by several high-profile organizations, including Bell Canada, Rogers, Great West Life Insurance, Manulife Financial, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and some of Toronto’s major hospitals.

But are law firms . . . [more]

Each June, business publications offer up an array of professional etiquette do’s and don’ts. The timing seems right, given the golf tournaments, office barbeques and memos reminding us of “appropriate summer office attire”.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between good manners, etiquette and civility, after fielding a few client queries about social norms. According to Judith Martin (otherwise known as Miss Manners) and her son Nicholas Ivor Martin, manners are “the principles of courteous behaviour” and etiquette “the rules that apply to a particular situation.” Civility, according to Johns Hopkins University Professor and Author P.M. Forni, is “a . . . [more]