The new year starts with a lot of news about wages.

As reported in various newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and La Presse, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has published a report entitled “Canada’s CEO elite: the 0.01%” (available here) regarding the annual compensation of Canada’s highest paid 100 executives in 2010. The titles of the newspaper articles alone reveal that these salaries are not insignificant.

Of interest is also the fact that Gildan Activewear Inc.’s Board of Directors will offer shareholders an advisory vote during the 2012 annual shareholders’ meeting on the corporation’s approach to executive . . . [more]

right? right?

Members of the legal fraternity could start with the second right.

On the other hand, as reported on the Globe and Mail’s web site

The Harper government is preparing to carve out a new role for Canada as a champion of religious rights abroad …

Early in 2012, the Tories will finally flesh out a campaign promise to install the Office of Religious Freedom within the secular confines of the Department of Foreign Affairs …

The article adds

The new Conservative office – which will publicly criticize regimes that mistreat religious minorities – is in part a workaround

Last May I attended a talk by Ron Deibert, Director of Citizen Lab, part of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, at the annual Mesh Conference in Toronto. He talked about cyber crime having become one of the world’s largest growth sectors, with savvy young coders from poorer nations leading the way. Cyber crime, he explained, takes advantage of:

• mobile networking and reliance on the web for our computing
• lack of controls (i.e. regulation and legislation) internationally
• proper security practices and policies not yet in place

Deibert has written a report for GISWatch (Global Information . . . [more]

When Heather Peters was dissatisfied with the proposed class-action settlement for her 2006 Honda Civic hybrid, which didn’t provide the promised fuel economy, she opted for Small Claims Court instead.

She is taking Honda Motor Co. to court this Tuesday in in Torrance, CA for $10,000, the new limit in California starting January 1, 2012, which by far exceeds the $100 and rebates she would have received from the class action. Best of all, the rules of the jurisdiction require Honda to provide an employee representative who is not a lawyer,

Small Claims Court is a special court where you

I’m feeling lazy this Friday — something to do with too much holiday merriment, I’m certain. So today’s fillip is pretty much a do-it-yourself flip to the week’s end. All I’ll do is point you to a site that gathers sites, some of which in turn gather sites. . . .

My target website is Open Culture, and, as you might suspect from the name, it’s a place where you can find free access to a lot of interesting stuff. As Dan Colman, site founder (and incidentally Director & Associate Dean of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program), says:

Open Culture

I visited my local Service Ontario office recently to do something the government requires of me every five years: renew my driver’s license. Fifteen minutes, a few signatures and a couple of photographs later, the deed was done, and I received my new license by registered mail a couple of weeks afterward. Couldn’t have been easier.

I did have to prove a number of things before I could get my new license, mind you. I had to bring in my passport and birth certificate, attest in good faith that I was a citizen of Canada, that sort of thing. Interestingly . . . [more]

Teaching and learning are pretty constant activities for legal professionals. Some of the learning — most, perhaps — takes place when you’re alone, and the teaching when you’re with one other person; and at the other end of the scale, a lot is now managed by professional societies, responsible for providing CPD to large groups. But there are also times when a course of instruction is needed for a group that falls somewhere in between the very small and the very large. It’s with that middle-sized, ad hoc occasion that Coursekit might be helpful.

Post-secondary education makes fairly consistent use . . . [more]

Voice recognition has been getting lots of press recently, thanks to the release of the Siri software with the latest Apple iPhones. It has been a mainstay of discussions around legal technology for more than a decade and yet continues to be a point of uncertainty for lawyers. In particular, how do they use voice recognition in their practices. Ben Schorr discussed some of the challenges of using voice recognition earlier this year. I also received a question at a recent seminar about voice recognition so I thought I would take another look at it.

Speech to Text Conversion Software . . . [more]

If you’re a first-time smartphone shopper or a current smartphone shopper approaching an upgrade, you may be curious about the mobile platforms that are available. Everyone knows about the iPhone and iPad, and everyone knows about “Droids” (Android is the platform, Droid is one specific brand on Verizon). Often overlooked is the newcomer, Windows Phone. (Interesting that BlackBerry didn’t make the list, but that is a topic for another day…)

So how do these three mobile operating systems stack up?

This article from Geek.com, Android vs. iOS vs. Windows Phone 7: A mobile showdown, looks at these three platforms . . . [more]

I stumbled into this career and it has been a blast! I did not plan to specialize in foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarianship. I just wanted to be the world’s greatest general legal reference librarian (ah, youth!). But, here I am, enjoying doing work I never imagined.

Because I’ve been in the profession for a while, I get asked from time to time – how does one become an FCIL librarian? Here’s what I would have done to research career opportunities as an FCIL librarian (besides reviewing job postings to see what current employers are expecting from FCIL . . . [more]

As I am in the holiday spirit, I thought it would be good to post a quick reminder about how statutory holidays work in La Belle Province. I’d also be curious to know how this might differ from other provinces or countries altogether.

According to the Québec Labour Standards Act, employers can require that employees work on statutory holidays. However, if they are required to work, employees must be paid an indemnity equal to 1/20 of the four weeks’ wages preceding the holiday, in addition to your regular salary. If the employee makes commission, the indemnity would be . . . [more]

My parenting partner and our progeny were creative with their gifts this holiday season. I thought I would share some photos of their labour. Since many Slaw readers are library folk, you might enjoy seeing “The Coffee Book Table”.

The Coffee Book Table is a storage cabinet with a drawer. The Mireaus have been brainstorming on titles to add to the books. So far we have come up with:

• A Table of Two Cities
• Aesop’s Tables
• A Tall Table
• Tables from the Crypt

Any other title ideas? . . . [more]