Manitoba’s Public Utilities Board (PUB) this week issued a report containing a series of recommendations to the Government of Manitoba on Manitoba’s payday loan regulations and the payday loan industry.

The report is the result of a public review and consultation process undertaken pursuant to the authority given the Board under s. 164 of The Consumer Protection Act and The Public Utilities Board Act.

Payday loans are extremely costly to borrowers. According to the accompanying news release:

A $17 fee on a two-week, $100 loan is equivalent to paying 442% annually as the cost of borrowing.

This seems particularly . . . [more]

Readers of SLAW know that, as a rule, librarians are passionate about their collections, and despite negative stereotypes, they embrace the electronic resources and developments with alacrity, often way ahead of the pack. (For example, in 1998, the librarian community were among the earliest adopters of, and overwhelmingly enthusiasts for, the new Google search engine, with is simple clean lines and lack of advertising – such a contrast to the AltaVista, Ask Jeeves  and Excite interfaces in use at the time.)

Where practical and useful for the organisation, librarians equally maintain the book resources for which they have responsibility. . . . [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. Exposoft Solutions Inc. (Re) 2013 ONSC 5798
   

   [1] This was a motion which should never have been. It also involved the smallest amount of money I have encountered to date in a Commercial List matter – less than $5,000. But, being a motion brought in the Toronto Region, about two inches of materials were served and filed, and four cases handed up during

I am a landlord. My spouse and I try very hard to be great landlords, fair, responsive, and reasonable. We have excellent tenants. Responsible, reasonable, and fair. I honestly have no idea how I would deal with a situation such as the on recently in the media from Calgary. According to various media reports (here, here, here, and here) a landlord C is having issues with a tenant P who has claimed that the rental property he lives in is a sovereign embassy.

The matter crosses all kinds of legislative paths, the Residential Tenancies Act, . . . [more]

By now, the proposed Quebec Charter of Values and the enforced secularism it promotes have been debated in the media, on blogs and around the water cooler consistently for the past few weeks. For the most part, the debate has centered around the proposed ban on conspicuous symbols worn by public sector employees. Most of what has been written is scathing and attacks the irrationality of the proposal, not to mention its blatant systemic discrimination, if not its direct discrimination (it is certainly not a coincidence that Christians do not wear conspicuous religious symbols or clothing, but that Muslims, Jews, . . . [more]

“The conundrum that regulators have is that we are to all intents and purposes recognizing entry-level competence,” Tim McGee, CEO of the Law Society of British Columbia told a CCCA lunchtime panel at the 2013 CBA Legal Conference in Saskatoon, discussing what the role of the regulator should be in ensuring competence in the legal profession.

His point was that despite CLE requirements, lawyers aren’t actually assessed by regulators as their careers progress – it’s assumed that if they attend an accredited law school, get a certain degree and pass a bar exam, law students are competent to become lawyers. . . . [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 technology, research and practice.

Technology

Legacy Apps Now Available for Older iPhones, iPods and iPads in the App Store
Dan Pinnington

Some of us have older iPhones, iPods and iPads which will not run newer versions of iOS. Needless to say, newer version of many apps also won’t run on these older devices. That changed today. Apple now lets you access earlier versions of apps for your older hardware. This is how it works: . . . [more]

There are many excellent recommendations in the CBA’s Reaching Equal Justice report. 

As a law professor and a member of the Legal Education and Training Team of the CBA’s Legal Futures initiative, I naturally focused on those relating to law schools, including this one:

All graduating law students should have a basic understanding of the issues relating to access to justice and know that fostering access to justice is an integral part of their professional responsibility.

This sounds great but there is a problem. Reaching Equal Justice assumes that access to justice is part of a Canadian lawyer’s professional . . . [more]

Back in April, I posted about a case where the failure of a real estate lawyer to check their fax machine cost their purchaser client a $100,000 deposit. My post is here if anyone is looking for a refresher on the facts.

The purchaser recently appealed the decision to the Court of Appeal who, in a very short decision, upheld Justice Lederman’s decision. . . . [more]

This article is by Nora Rock, corporate writer and policy analyst at LAWPRO.

From a malpractice claims perspective, criminal law may not be as safe an area of practice as you might think: LAWPRO sees over 30 criminal law claims per year on average. These claims are sometimes complicated by steps taken by lawyers who take certain dangerous DIY steps in the name of claim “self-repair”.

One of the most common bases for claims against criminal lawyers is “ineffective assistance of counsel”. This allegation, not uncommon as an appeal ground in criminal court, may also be cited in a malpractice . . . [more]

Shortly after being disappointed that Oxford’s Constitutions of the World wanted money from me — my university background and the ethic of free knowledge can’t be taken out of the boy, it seems — I learn about Constitute. Here, too, are the world’s constitutions, but absent any fee.

Now, Constitute doesn’t promise to update according to a schedule (they claim they’re up-to-date as of September 2013), and though all the constitutions I’ve had a quick look at are set out in English, there’s no indication of how or by whom they were translated from their original language, this is . . . [more]

Those of you who are into legal informatics will like to know that there’s a proposal to form a new technical committee at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) to work on “an open standard for machine-readable tagging of legal citations.” Legalcite, if the draft proposal is approved, will come up with a “tagging model” that would let content producers affix a variety of metadata to a case or statute citation in such a way that a computer could, first, recognize that the citation was just that: a legal citation; and then “understand” a number of things . . . [more]