Some months ago, the Supreme Court of Canada’s (“SCC”) ruling in Carter v Canada (Attorney General), [2015] 1 SCR 331 [Carter] made national headlines. Although all decisions of the SCC are important, this one seemed to strike a nerve or two on both sides of the playing field. In this case, as described in more detail here […]
The sanctity of the jury process must be maintained, said the Ontario Court of Appeal in a January decision. As well, an accused should not be deprived of the common law right to be tried by twelve people unless there are serious reasons for discharging jurors. In R v Kum, 2015 ONCA 36, the appellant […]
In 2009, the Conservative government introduced legislation called the Truth in Sentencing Act, SC 2009, c 29 (the "Act"). The Act, which came into force in 2010, amended the Criminal Code by capping the amount of credit judges were allowed to give prisoners for time served before the prisoners' trials. While it had been routine for judges to […]
In the wake of two recent Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decisions, the partial defence of provocation has been narrowed. The SCC grappled with the legal interpretation of particularly ‘sympathetic’ moral circumstances underlying murder charges on appeal in R v Cairney, 2013 SCC 55 (Cairney), and R v Pappas, 2013 SCC 56 (Pappas). While the […]
In an era where the bench and society recognize that judges are hard-pressed for time and resources, and given Chief Justice McLachlin’s repeated calls for increased access to justice, the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision in Cojocaru (Guardian ad litem of) v. British Columbia Women's Hospital & Health Center, 2013 SCC 30, is hardly […]
In Carrigan v Carrigan Estate, 2012 ONCA 736, a divided court addressed whether a common law partner or separated spouse should receive the pension benefits of a man who had two spouses at the time of his death.
In a unanimous decision, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in LeBlanc v Doucet and the New Brunswick Power Corporation, 2012 NBCA 88 held in favour of a plaintiff’s ability to recover interest on a loan used to pay for legal fees in a personal injury claim. On September 23, 2004, Francis LeBlanc was seriously injured […]
In Pastore v Aviva Canada Inc, 2012 ONCA 642, a unanimous Court of Appeal established a new, lower threshold for catastrophic impairment. The decision also permitted the inclusion of chronic pain in the assessment of mental disorder overturning an earlier Divisional Court decision.
Justice Bora Laskin, the first Jewish Supreme Court of Canada ("SCC)" jurist, was appointed in 1970. Justice Bertha Wilson was appointed to the SCC bench in 1982 as the first woman, which laid the groundwork for greater diversity in the Canadian judiciary. Currently, four out of the nine seats are filled by women. That being […]
In last week’s blog post, I covered the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) v Ontario, 2012 ONCA 342 (“CAMH”), a decision that has managed to intensify the debate on Ontario’s, and on a more sweeping scale, Canada’s policy on the treatment of the mentally ill in our justice system. Since then, my thoughts have turned […]