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, Oral Judgments and Leaves to Appeal granted from January 1 – February 8, 2024 inclusive.

Appeals

Criminal Law: Stays; ss.10(b) & 7; s. 24(1) Standing
R. v. Brunelle, 2021 QCCA 1317; 2024 SCC 3 (39917)

All of the appellants have standing to apply for a remedy under s. 24(1) of the Charter even . . . [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) : Le refus sommaire du juge de première instance de tenir un voir-dire a privé l’accusé de la possibilité d’invoquer et d’établir la non-conformité de son arrestation, ce que lui garantissaient pourtant les termes clairs de l’article 495 (3) C.Cr. selon une interprétation viable des limites imposées au . . . [more]

In December, three intelligent, accomplished, and articulate University leaders embarrassed themselves and their institutions in their testimony before Congress. Each of them stumbled in responding to questions whether calls for genocide against Jewish persons would violate their school’s policies. The questions weren’t unexpected or one-offs. Yet, every time each of these Presidents was asked, they stumbled in their responses. Within a few weeks, the Presidents of mighty Penn and Harvard had publicly acknowledged their failures and resigned in the wake of the scandal. Only the President of MIT remains in the top job.

How could this happen? It certainly wasn’t . . . [more]

At the beginning of each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. R. v. Zacharias, 2023 SCC 30

[55] The impact on the Charter-protected interests of the accused is distinct from the seriousness of the Charter-infringing conduct. As this Court stated in Grant 2009, in order to assess this factor, the court must “look to the interests engaged by the infringed . . . [more]

Were you ever scolded as a child for playing too many video games? Did your parents tell you that your Game Boy was rotting your brain or that you would never make any money playing Donkey Kong? Or (perish the thought) have you ever been the parent doling out such lectures? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but these common reprises about video games—particularly about their earning potential—might be outdated by a decade or so. In fact, in the creator economy, video game content creators are among the highest paid. As far back as 2014, . . . [more]

Two more data points in the legal news recently (Canadian Lawyer, to be precise) to support the idea that we’re going about this “articling” thing all wrong.

• Former Law Society of Ontario governor Peter Wardle criticized the articling system for failing to ensure sufficient, consistent, high-quality experiential training, as well as the law society for again failing to tackle these problems effectively.
• The Law Society of Alberta is recruiting law firms to join a new program to place articling students who were driven out of their previous firms by discrimination or harassment, a program that’s straining under increased

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Legal procedures are often slow. “The slow wheels of justice,” as the saying goes. Within the immigration context, backlogs, delays, and lengthy processing take this saying to another level. Applications may take years. Families suffer from lengthy periods of separation while Visa Offices (some more than others) provide scant insight into their workflow. During the recent “modernization”, IRCC has added many online tools to address this perennial issue, including status bars, portals, and various means of communication. In certain situations, Officers are supposed to adhere to standard processing times.

For clients (or counsel) who reach a high level of frustration, . . . [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) : Le juge de la Cour supérieure n’a pas erré en rejetant l’argument de la préclusion découlant d’une question déjà tranchée; la question essentielle dont étaient saisies les 2 juges de paix magistrats, soit l’interprétation de l’article 17 du Règlement sur l’immatriculation des véhicules routiers, était une . . . [more]

In legal as in all service-based industries, client feedback can be a powerful tool that shapes a firm’s reputation and play a significant role in the firm’s success. We often look at feedback solely from a client perspective and how we can improve that client’s experience; we may be missing out on trends that our clients share. When we look at feedback at a macro level, there is information we can take away for prospects, management, competition, and clients.

For prospects:

Client feedback reflects a law firm’s general performance. Positive testimonials and reviews contribute significantly to building credibility, and potential . . . [more]

The Hague Convention on the Abolition of All Forms of Legalization (known as the Apostille Convention) is now in force in Canada. Here is a link to the text of the Convention.

The practical result is that to use Canadian public documents (including confirmation of notarial status and signatures) in about 120 foreign countries, one will not have to go through the two-step process of getting the document authenticated by the province (and/or the federal government) and then ‘legalized’ by the consulate (or embassy) of the country of destination. Here is a list of the countries that are parties . . . [more]

Many people in the legal sector are working toward making the legal profession, and society as a whole, more equitable, which has led to calls to increase diversity in the legal profession. Employers and educators have tried to achieve more impartiality by integrating quantitative metrics, such as LSAT scores, grades, and litigation statistics, into their selection processes. This is better than selecting candidates based primarily on criteria like family legacy, but these processes still aren’t perfect. The selection of athletes a a good comparison. Elite athletes are a group of people with well-defined and generally available statistics going back to . . . [more]