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Not Too Late
Back in February, I wrote about the Court of Québec’s judgment in R. v. Cloud, 2014 QCCQ 464, in which Justice Patrick Healy sharply criticized the “victim surcharge” which recent amendments to the Criminal Code require courts to impose in all criminal cases on top of any other sentence. Mr. Cloud, the accused, had not challenged…
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The Power of Google
I seem never to have blogged about the “right to be forgotten” enshrined into European law by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a judgment issued in May. An interesting recent blog post by Paul Bernal allows me to do offer a few random observations on the matter. Better late than never, right? In…
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Where Credit Is Due
In a recent decision, R. v. Safarzadeh-Markhali, 2014 ONCA 627, the Court of Appeal for Ontario invalidated yet another piece of the federal government “tough on crime” legislative programme, namely subs. 719(3.1) of the Criminal Code, which has the effect of preventing judges from granting enhanced credit for pre-sentence imprisonment to offenders who are not released on…
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Ideology and Canadian Judges
In case you missed my self-promotion yesterday, my new post a the CBA National Magazine’s blog is up. It argues that we need to change the ways in which we think about and study judicial ideology in Canada. Simply importing American models, which rely on using the party of the president who appointed a judge, or…
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Raising Issues
Normally, a common law court decides a case brought before it on the issues raised by the parties. But sometimes it can ― and occasionally even has to ― raise an issue on its own. When it can do so, and how it must go about doing this are the main topics discussed in R.…
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Hate Speech in Context
Exactly one year ago yesterday, a mosque in the Québec town of Saguenay was vandalized with what the vandals claimed was pig blood. The attack was clearly intended to show Muslims that they were not welcome in Saguenay (and perhaps in Québec generally), which is, according to Jeremy Waldron, precisely “the harm in hate speech” which…
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Felix Peccatum
There was an interesting piece in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, in which Ethan Zuckerman argued that we should, as the subtitle would have it, “ditch the [internet’s] ad-based business model and build a better web.” Accepting internet content should be free to access, online services free to use, and that the costs of…
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Questionable Limits
Jim Prentice, the leader of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party (and would-be Premier), has proposed limiting the time provincial politicians can serve in office. Members of the legislature would be limited to three terms; the premier to (an additional?) three. The wisdom of this proposal has been much criticized. (Aaron Wherry, of Maclean’s, a critic himself, has…
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Challenging Succession, Round 2
Yesterday, in Teskey v. Canada (Attorney General), 2014 ONCA 612, the Court of Appeal for Ontario rejected a Charter challenge to the Succession to the Throne Act, 2013, a law that purports to “assent[] to” the changes to the rules of royal succession laid out in a British bill (and agreed to by the heads…
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Shifting the Culture of Rationing
As Justice Karakatsanis observed in the opening paragraph of her reasons (for the unanimous Supreme Court) in Hryniak v. Mauldin, 2014 SCC 7, [2014] 1 S.C.R. 87 “[t]rials have become increasingly expensive and protracted.” For the Supreme Court, the length and expense of trials is an access to justice problem. But (at least some) provincial governments, notably that…
Double Aspect 