Hinse v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 35 features some familiar fixtures, one drawn from daytime television — the innocent man wrongly imprisoned for a crime he did not commit — and one drawn from the common law — the officer(s) of the Crown exercising prerogative powers. Here, the Supreme Court of Canada’s sympathy for […] Read more

The decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in Paradis Honey Ltd. v. Canada, 2015 FCA 89 is quite remarkable. A majority of the Court developed a new test for public authority liability in tort, casting off the previous unwieldy private-law framework in favour of an approach that relies exclusively on public law concepts. The […] Read more

* This is a second extract from a forthcoming essay of mine on the policy/operational distinction in Canadian tort law, “The Policy/Operational Distinction — A View from Administrative Law“. Download a draft here. See my first extract, a post on the Imperial Tobacco case, here * An administrative lawyer is comfortable in recommending that the […] Read more

* This is an extract from a forthcoming article, “The Policy/Operational Distinction — A View from Administrative Law“. Download a draft here. * The uninitiated might look at the Supreme Court’s recent decision in R. v. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., 2011 SCC 42, [2011] 3 S.C.R. 45 and suggest that the policy/operational distinction is no longer […] Read more