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A Charter Child’s Blues
This was originally written more than three years ago now, but I am fond of the text. I thought I would repost it tomorrow, on the Charter‘s 30th anniversary, but decided to do it today. Hopefully I’ll come up with something more celebratory tomorrow. *** I am a proud Charter child. A copy of the…
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A Right to Bear Arms? Canadian Cases
Here’s something I should have done yesterday, before launching into my analysis of the Charter‘s protection of liberty and of the right to bear arms: read some actual cases! Well, better late than never. In R. v. Hasselwander, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 398, Justice Cory, writing for a 3-2 majority, opined, at p. 414, that “Canadians, unlike Americans…
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Student Protests and Election Law
Cyberpresse (La Presse’s website) has published my op-ed (en français) on the effects a possible spring election in Québec would have on the student protests against tuition fee hikes. In a nutshell, I argue that, given their explicit opposition to the Liberal government, any expenses the protesters would engage in during an election campaign would count…
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A Charter Right to Bear Arms?
My friend Michael Cust makes an interesting suggestion in a blog post asking whether there is a right to bear arms in Canada: while there is no self-standing right to bear arms, “a case could be made that it’s part of our right to liberty” protected by section 7 of the Charter, because history suggests…
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Further Gun-Registry Litigation Update
Radio-Canada reports that the safeguard order preventing the destruction of the long-gun registry data relative to Québec has been extended, presumably until the merits hearings now due to be held in June. The federal government had claimed that the safeguard order was not necessary because no data would be destroyed before August – yet both…
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Emergency Wiretaps and Privacy Rights
Well, the Supreme Court of Canada has great timing. Or maybe I do, but saying that would be immodest, right? In any case, the day after I wrote that the Court latest privacy decision was a mess, it has released its decision in R. v. Tse, 2012 SCC 16, addressing the conflict bewteen the right to privacy…
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Privacy in the Past, Present, and Future
Our own actions – individual and collective – set the upper limit of our privacy rights. We will never have more privacy rights than we care to have, although we often have fewer. One stark illustration of this idea comes in Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past,” in which a group of scientists build…
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Gun Registry Litigation Update
There is news regarding Québec’s attempt to obtain “its” long-gun registry data before it is destroyed by the federal government, about which I wrote here and here. The merits hearing was supposed to take place today. However, Radio-Canada reports that the judge was concerned that the matter is too complex and there is not enough time to…
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Purely Hypothetical Dragons
Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. … The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted…
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Federal Court Roulette
Professor Sean Rehaag of Osgoode Hall has recently posted on SSRN a disturbing statistical analysis of the Federal Court of Canada’s decisions on applications for judicial review of refugee protection determinations by the Immigration and Refugee Board. His main conclusion, based on a study of more than 20,000 cases filed between 2006 and 2010, is…
Double Aspect 