You may be baffled by the gun registry decision, even having read my earlier explanatory post. You might think along the following lines: the federal government set this registry up in the first place, using its power to enact criminal laws, by making it an offence not to register certain weapons. If that is so, […] Read more

Major kudos must go to the Québec government’s team of lawyers, who masterminded the challenge which resulted yesterday in the grant of a permanent injunction against the destruction of the long-gun registry data by the federal authorities. The challenge was not taken seriously by most public lawyers when it was first mooted. Personally, I always […] Read more

Blogging has been light recently: teaching, writing and administrative commitments, allied to some technical problems, have been holding me up.One interesting recent case, which I consider a useful launching pad for a consideration of justiciability, is Guergis v. Novak, 2012 ONSC 4579. Ms. Guergis is a former minister in the federal cabinet: you can read […] Read more

Over at slaw.ca, Simon Fodden points us in the direction of the Canadian Judicial Council’s website, which has a collection of documents relevant to the Douglas Inquiry. For those of you who have been dwelling under rocks, this Inquiry is into a sad and sordid tale involving Justice Douglas and her former partner. Like Simon, […] Read more

The Manitoba Court of Appeal, in London Limos v. Unicity Taxi Ltd., 2012 MBCA 75, recently discussed whether market participants in regulated industries have any procedural rights when new companies apply to enter the market. The answer in this case was some, but not many. London Limos applied to the provincial Taxicab Board for licences […] Read more

Volochay v. College of Massage Therapists of Ontario, 2012 ONCA 541, involves a masseur, (alleged) extra-marital sex, (alleged) intimidation of a witness and (allegedly) a vengeful government agency. A story interesting enough, then, to survive even the following injection of administrative law principles.A former patient of the applicant’s made a complaint against him, on the […] Read more

Julian Assange is currently hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he may be for some time. The British government’s suggestion that he could be arrested there is wide of the mark, however. The Foreign Secretary does have statutory powers under the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act, 1987 to remove the diplomatic or consular status […] Read more

I’ve commented previously on administrators’ interpretations of their own regulations. In a recent Federal Court case, Moya v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2012 FC 971, the question of how reviewing courts should treat such interpretations arose again.The applicants were members of a Colombian family, variously born in Colombia, the United States and Canada (having been […] Read more

A decision from the Irish High Court in the long-running saga of Dontex Ltd. v. Dublin Docklands Development Authority, [2012] IEHC 318 is a useful example both of the division between private law and public law and of judicial reluctance to bar claims on the basis that the parties have chosen the wrong juridical route.At […] Read more

A helpful way to keep up with recent legal developments in Canada is to follow the output of the country’s leading law firms.From Fraser Milner Casgrain comes a nice note on a decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal involving an investigation by the tax authorities. As the Court explained in R. v. He, […] Read more