Williams v. British Columbia (Superintendent of Motor Vehicles), 2012 BCSC 1976 featured an unsuccessful argument that the respondent, the statutory decision-maker who follows up on road-side penalties administered by the provincial police force, had jurisdiction to grant Charter remedies. The applicant complained that his right to counsel had been violated because he had not been […] Read more

Decision-making by municipal councillors has garnered plenty of headlines in recent months due to the travails of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (see my posts here and here, and my Financial Post op-ed).  The issues in Ford’s case are principally ones of statutory interpretation. A recent decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal, Beaverford v Thorhild […] Read more

I open with a warning: I find the Supreme Court of Canada’s causation jurisprudence hard to fathom, so it is with some trepidation that I venture out to comment on Alberta (Workers’ Compensation Board) v Alberta (Appeals Commission for Alberta Workers’ Compensation), 2012 ABQB 733. The case is about an individual who contracted asbestos-related disease […] Read more

My essay on the Supreme Court of Canada’s copyright pentalogy will be published around Easter in a volume edited by Michael Geist, the working title of which is The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law (see page 18 here). You can download my paper here. Here […] Read more

For those of you wondering where I have been, I have been partly resting on my laurels since my runner-up award at the Clawbies and partly plotting the overthrow of this year’s winner in the Best Law Professor Blog category, ABlawg, the Calgary Law Faculty’s blog. Normal service should resume over the next couple of […] Read more

Since starting in May, I have now reached the 100 post mark. I am not gloating! In fact, I would not even mark the occasion were it not for the fact that the Clawbies nominations are due in by, well, today. Karim Renno has very graciously nominated me. So I won’t have to cause an […] Read more

I have posted previously about Sean Rehaag’s empirical analysis of immigration decisions. He also authored an analysis of refugee claim data for 2011: Data obtained from the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) through an Access to Information Request reveals vast disparities in refugee claim recognition rates across IRB Members in 2011. In 2011, some Members […] Read more

The Supreme Court of Canada decided two interesting terrorism cases last Friday. R. v. Khawaja, 2012 SCC 69 has been grabbing most of the headlines because the Court upheld (though narrowly defined) anti-terrorism offences enacted shortly after 9/11. There were constitutional issues in the companion case of Sriskandarajah v. United States of America, 2012 SCC […] Read more

But, I told you so. In my piece on the Supreme Court of Canada’s copyright pentalogy (to appear next year in Michael Geist’s edited collection), I predicted that the concurrent jurisdiction innovation would cause confusion. Sure enough, counsel for the losing party in Pastore v. Aviva Canada Inc., 2012 ONCA 887 made an application for […] Read more

I have posted previously about the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Doré v. Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12. It is a very important decision about the importance of Charter rights in administrative decision-making and judicial review. But there seems to be a difference between the French and English versions of the decision, written […] Read more