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Claiming that the criminal justice system fails to effectively prohibit protest and civil disobedience, corporate lawyers embrace the pervasive use of injunctions and contempt of court charges in struggles over resource extraction in British Columbia, dubbing this approach the “new normal.” Yet even a cursory review of protest policing in Canada reveals that state intervention in resistance movements is alive and well and that Indigenous peoples and allied social movements are made subject to repression, surveillance, and criminalization through the mechanism of injunctions and contempt, among other legal tools. Based on my direct experience with injunctions and contempt in BC as an activist legal support organizer and a settler ally, this article argues that the reliance on injunctions by extractive industries embroils the courts and police in struggles over public and/or collectively held lands and resources that are nonetheless constructed by the law as private disputes, largely insulated from the reach of constitutionally-derived Aboriginal rights. After tracing the long history of BC’s “injunction habit,” I examine the judicial and policy practices that make the “new normal” claim possible—and show how it is ultimately not accurate. As crucial tools in the legal arsenal of settler-colonial states, injunctions and the subsequent use of contempt charges carve out a distinctly colonial space within Canadian law for the criminalization of Indigenous resistance, facilitating access to resources and lands and easing the operation of extractive capitalism.

Moving people into community will protect health, free up valuable resources, and reduce overcrowding for those who remain inside institutions—all part of preventing the spread of COVID-19

This paper analyzes the constitutionality of the Law Society of Ontario’s (now repealed) Statement of Principles requirement. First, this paper conducts a statutory analysis of the requirement. It explains how the requirement merely obligated that licensees acknowledge extant professional and human rights obligations, rather than creating novel obligations. Second, this paper conducts a theoretical analysis of the requirement. It applies a critical race theory lens to unveil the ways in which liberty claims relating to free speech obscured how significant resistance to the requirement’s modest obligation was galvanized by opposition to diversity and denial of systemic racism. Third, this paper conducts a constitutional analysis of the requirement. It explains why the requirement did not violate freedom of conscience or freedom of expression. In contrast with prior scholarship, this paper argues that the Statement of Principles requirement failed every stage of the legal test that designates state activity as compelled speech. Specifically, the requirement failed to compel an expression with non-trivial meaning (Step 1) and failed to control free expression in Canada, when such control is properly construed through a purposive rather than colloquial lens (Step 2). This paper concludes by noting how the requirement’s self-drafted structure provided an innovative opportunity for licensees to reflect on their perhaps unwitting participation in systemic racism.

There have been 12 injunctions spawned by Coastal GasLink's original injunction on Wet'suwet'en territory, all of them granted over the past 2 ½ weeks in response to solidarity actions across the country in support of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary leadership.

By: Joshua Sealy-Harrington PDF Version: (Dis)Proving Racism: A Rebuttal to Klippenstein’s Critical Review of the Law Society of Ontario’s Report on Challenges Facing Racialized Licensees Document …

Changes to the criminal law are needed so that complainants like Caitlan Coleman are treated with greater compassion and respect.

Robots are an increasingly common feature in North American public spaces. From regulations permitting broader drone use in public airspace and autonomous vehicle testing on public roads, to delivery robots roaming sidewalks in major U.S. cities, to the announcement of Sidewalk Toronto – a plan to convert waterfront space in one of North America’s largest cities into a robotics-filled smart community – the laws regulating North American public spaces are opening up to robots. In many of these examples, the growing presence of robots in public space is associated with opportunities to improve human lives through intelligent urban design, environmental efficiency, and greater transportation accessibility. However, the introduction of robots into public space has also raised concerns about, for example, the commercialization of these spaces by the companies that deploy robots; increasing surveillance that will negatively impact physical and data privacy; or the potential marginalization or exclusion of some members of society in favour of those who can pay to access, use, or support the new technologies available in these spaces. The laws that permit, regulate, or prohibit robotic systems in public spaces will in many ways determine how this new technology impacts public space and the people who inhabit that space. This begs the questions: how should regulators approach the task of regulating robots in public spaces? And should any special considerations apply to the regulation of robots because of the public nature of the spaces they occupy? This paper argues that the laws that regulate robots deployed in public space will affect the public nature of that space, potentially to the benefit of some human inhabitants of the space over others. For these reasons, special considerations should apply to the regulation of robots that will operate in public space. In particular, the entry of a robotic system into a public space should never be prioritized over communal access to and use of that space by people. And, where a robotic system serves to make a space more accessible, lawmakers should be cautious to avoid providing differential access to that space through the regulation of that robotic system.

The amendments to the Indian Act over the past forty-four years have done very little to assist First Nations women and their children in their fight to reclaim their identity and their connections to their ancestry. The Act, originally enacted in 1876, has had a few amendments since that time. In 1982, the Constitution Act of Canada was legislated and with it came the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so the federal government was designated to remove any discrimination in all of its legislation. This included the Indian Act. The amendments following were in 1985, commonly referred to as Bill C-31 as well as C-3 in 2011 and S-3 in 2017. These amendments have resulted in many heated and disturbing conflicts amongst First Nations people, including First Nations women and their children who have been directly affected by the sexually discriminating sections of the Act. This chapter provides a historical overview of the Act, its origins and its inherent racist and sexist policies. As well it discusses those amendments affecting First Nations women and her descendants, specifically the registration and membership provisions that continue to discriminate against First Nations Women and her descendants who are both male and female.

This article examines the use of Facebook’s Libra as a substitute for fiat money. It considers Libra’s prospects for success in light of the fact that it purports to substitute trust in a technology for the traditional legal supports that bolster public trust in traditional fiat currencies. The legal doctrines that support fiat currencies do so for the purposes of recognizing the economic functions that money performs and are also meant to support public policies that promote monetary stability, protect consumers and help to enforce anti money laundering statutes. It is argued that Libra will result in unintended challenges for monetary authorities that will subject the world financial system to greater consumer transaction risks, increase systemic risks, and make it more difficult to combat money laundering efforts. The ultimate question is whether the public can place its trust in Facebook and its partners to manage a global currency, or is that trust better placed in the hands of central banks?

Remedies: Cases and Materials, 8th Edition is a comprehensive casebook that covers recent developments in both the law of damages assessment and the granting of equitable remedies. This publication examines all areas of remedies law in Canada, including damages, injunctions, specific performance, and equitable relief. Coming into its eighth edition, Remedies has become a reliable resource, providing updated case reports alongside detailed academic commentary. This edition was written by leading authorities on remedies, each of whom offer their expertise in specific areas. It also reviews recent Supreme Court of Canada cases and outlines how these decisions impact the law of remedies in Canada.

Volume 51, Issue 1

This study analyses interviews with frontline service workers employed in agencies in Windsor, Ontario, Canada who work with persons without immigration status. Through these interviews, frontline service workers provided insights into their work with persons without status, including the significant barriers to effective service provision requiring 'covert practices' as part of their work. The interview subjects ultimately conclude that an access without fear (AWF) policy would indeed bolster their efforts to work with persons without status, buttressing claims that an AWF policy can be a useful tool to support the basic needs of persons without status. However, the interviews also raise questions about how the law is understood by frontline service workers and the very real potential that AWF might be yet another unmet promise. Underlying these interviews were also questions of trust and relationship-building that re-emphasise both the need and limitations of policy.

Using Palestine as its case study, this chapter posits that judicial trustworthiness represents an important ameliorating factor for transitional justice to take hold and that judicial education constitutes an ameliorating factor that can nurture judicial trustworthiness. Distinguishing trust, distrust and trustworthiness, we explain the importance of judicial institutional trustworthiness as an ameliorating factor. Drawing on literature that identifies institutional trustworthiness as a function of three features: ability, integrity and benevolence, we then explore how the Karamah model of judicial education helped build judicial institutional trustworthiness. Karamah was developed in Palestine and adopted dignity as its overarching theme. Working with an interdisciplinary and international team through Karamah, Palestinian judges invoked dignity as a legal principle, a statement of shared political values and an aspect of their professional identity. In the process, they articulated a framework for thinking about the ability, integrity and benevolence of the Palestinian judiciary. Finally, we chronicle the ways in which the Karamah model of judicial education impacted the judiciary and the judiciary system in Palestine. We end with a note of caution: if rule of law programming, judicial reform and judicial education are substituted for transitional justice measures, conflicts can become even more intractable.

Price is an essential term at the heart of supplier-consumer transactions and relationships increasingly taking place in “micro-marketplace chambers,” where points of comparison with similar relevant products may be difficult to discern and time-consuming to make. This article critically reviews recent legal and economic academic literature, policy reports on algorithmic personalized pricing (i.e. setting prices according to consumers’ personal characteristics to target their willingness to pay), as well as recent developments in privacy regulation, competition law, and policy discourse, to derive the guiding norms that should inform the regulation of this practice, predominantly from a consumer protection perspective. Looking more closely at algorithmic personalized pricing through prevailing and conflicting norms of supplier freedom, competition, market efficiency, innovation, as well as equality, fairness, privacy, autonomy, and transparency, raises important concerns about certain forms of algorithmic personalized pricing. This article provides parameters to delineate when algorithmic personalized pricing should be banned as a form of unfair commercial practice. This ban would address the substantive issues that algorithmic personalized pricing raises. Resorting to mandatory disclosure requirements of algorithmic personalized pricing would address some of the concerns at a procedural level only, and for this reason is not the preferred regulatory approach. As such, our judgment on the (un)acceptability of algorithmic personalized pricing as a commercial practice is a litmus test for how we should regulate the indiscriminate extraction and use of consumer personal data in the future.