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Public Interest in Litigation
I have already mentioned the lawsuit by Aniz Alani, who is trying to have the courts declare that the Prime Minister must advise the Governor General to appoint Senators, which the Prime Minster is refusing to do. The government has filed a motion to strike his application, which will be heard about a month from
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Splitting a Baby
There came a Catholic school and a minister of education unto the Supreme Court, and stood before it. And the school said, “Oh my Lords and my Ladies, I am a private Catholic school, and am delivered of a programme for teaching a class on Ethics and Religious Culture through the prism of my Catholic faith.
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Rule and Exemption
Here’s something that has been bothering me since I’ve recently re-read the Supreme Court’s decisions in R. v. Morgentaler, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30 and in the Insite case, Canada (Attorney General) v. PHS Community Services Society, 2011 SCC 44, [2011] 3 S.C.R. 134. The two cases dealt with different topics: the former is about abortion; the latter,
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Des fois, Boisvert a tort
J’avais beaucoup de respect, de l’admiration même, pour Yves Boisvert. Il est sans doute l’un des observateurs les plus perspicaces et les plus justes du système judiciaire et des enjeux reliés au droit dans les médias traditionnels. Il a fait preuve de sagesse et de respect pour la différence lors du débat sur la Charte de la
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The Power of Google, Squared
I wrote, I while ago, about “the power of Google” and its role in the discussion surrounding the “right to be forgotten” ― a person’s right to force search engines to remove links to information about that person that is “inadequate, irrelevant or excessive,” whatever these things mean, even if factually true. Last week, the
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For a Formidable Opposition
The CBA National Magazine’s blog published a new post of mine yesterday, in which I argue that it is important that courts and their decisions be scrutinized and, on occasion, criticized. As the debate debate about “judicial activism” has been playing out in the last month or so (there are, at this point, too many
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Section 0
I wrote yesterday about the possibility that the relationship between sections 7 and 1 of the Charter might change in the wake of the Supreme Court’s assisted-suicide decision, Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5. If I am right, however, the changes will only be relevant in a limited number of cases (albeit potentially significant ones).
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Seven and One
I want to come back to Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, the Supreme Court’s decision striking down an absolute prohibition on assisting a person to commit suicide, to comment on an aspect of the Court’s reasoning that seems, as best I can tell, to have attracted little attention. The Court found that,
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A Bad Fit
I blogged about Michael Chong’s proposed “Reform Act” back when it was first tabled as Bill C-559, criticizing both the substance of the changes it sought to introduce into the Canadian democracy, and the choice of legislation as the vehicle for effecting these changes. The bill (now C-586) has been much amended, and passed by
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No Blurred Lines
Last week, I published a lament for the Charter challenge to the Canadian citizenship oath, which the Supreme Court refused to hear, over at the Policy Options blog. Philippe Lagassé has published a thoughtful response, arguing that contrary what I have been saying all along, the case really was about “the legitimacy of the Crown” as
Double Aspect 