RSS FeedTake-Back Laws…
Are you aware of “Take-Back Laws”?
Well, view the video below, and then you’ll understand why we need them!
Aligning Interests in Investment Industry
Just a brief post in response to the presentation of Claire Hill (from U of Minnesota) at Queen’s Law today.
Ms. Hill diagnosed as a major contributor to the financial crisis the misalignment of interests – i.e. if it was in the investment advisors’ interests to do the right thing, they would do the right thing. Her presentation surrounded the development or change of society’s norms as a possible solution (from a societal perspective) to the problems in the financial industry and as a method of prevention of future crises. Achieving this would come from things like the writing of (and subscription to) professional codes of conduct, ethics training in business schools, etc.
Upon further thought, however, I am left with an uneasy feeling regarding points about the aligning of interests, while at the same time advocating more ethicality on the part of financial advisors.
If the reason people misbehave is a misalignment of interests, and we can simply fix the problem by realigning them, then who is to blame when things go wrong – individuals who make selfish choices or the state/regulators who do not create proper systems to manage and align interests?
To put it another way, we want people to stop acting in their own interests, while we are trying to make their interests the same as (or at least overlapping with) the interests of others. Ultimately, we’re trying to make it so that people can have their cake and eat it too – they can be selfish because in doing so, we’ve made it that they are necessarily taking others’ interests into account as well.
But where does ethicality factor into this? Are we sure the main problem is misalignment, and do we want to train people to focus on aligning interests?
Wouldn’t a better approach be to remind people that interests may overlap but regardless of whether or not they do, an actor should take others’ interests into account or risk ethical or legal sanctions? to separate interests (at least in theory) and not roll them all into one line of self interest along which individuals may proceed?
I realize that it is always in your best interests to want to do what you should do, and aligning interests is one way of achieving that. But at the same time, sometimes an attitude adjustment is what is needed, and not a shift in interests alignment.
For more information about Claire Hill and her research, visit: http://law.queensu.ca/events/lectureshipsVisitorships.html
~ Joy
Reminiscing about the history of legal education and law schools in Canada
For those looking for an interesting reminiscence about the history of law schools and legal education in Canada, view Christopher Guly’s article in The Lawyers Weekly:
“Apprenticeship to academe: The history of law schools in Canada – Part 1 of a 3-part series” – A LOOK at the past, present, and future of legal education in Canada
http://www.lawyersweekly.ca/index.php?section=article&articleid=1255
A Legal Student – Then and Now
It’s a lot of tuition, and even more hard work. But the journey to be a lawyer in Canada just might be worth it.
In my column of this week’s Lawyers Weekly I ask the question, “What’s a lawyer worth these days?,” discussing the B.C. S.C. ruling in Danicek v. Alexander Holburn Beaudin & Lang.
Michelle Danicek, a recent UBC Law graduate, was injured days before the bar at a law firm event. She had a motor vehicle collision soon after that. The judge assessed her promising career as a corporate lawyer with a particular knack for working with clients and awarded nearly $6 million dollars.
Not everyone will be a legal superstar the way Michelle Danicek was expected to be.
But that wasn’t really the point of my article. I also cite Alan Watson and Khaled Abou El Fadel, in Fox Hunting, Pheasant Shooting, and Comparative Law, 48 Am. J. Comp. L. 1 (2000), who suggest that there may have been traditionally more to being a lawyer than just making money or winning cases.
Although jurists were men of the world, aware of social, political and economic realities, they also reveled in the very practice of interpreting the law. Legal interpretation was a sport. Yes, it was actually fun to analyze the law.
The Donkey and the Carrot: Why Law May Not Be So “Cool” After All
For the class of 2013 (or 2014 in my case), the end of summer signals the beginning of law school. Buoyed by hopes of success and spurred by the prospect of good paying jobs at the end of it all (or the metaphorical carrot on a stick), many of us are getting ready to settle in and start what will no doubt be a challenging but personally fulfilling year. In the same spirit, I eagerly packed my bags and headed to Montreal propelled by the well wishes of friends and family members. “You’ll do great,” they said. “There’s a B curve at McGill.” I replied. “Don’t worry about it,” they said. For months I had been complaining about paying tuition (side note: I know McGill’s Faculty of Law has one of the lowest tuitions in Canada. Don’t stone me…), and I was saddled with my own fears and apprehensions. But my friends and family reassured me: “It’ll all be worth it in the end.” “Go out and make those big bucks,” they said. So I pranced off to law school.
Shortly upon my arrival, I was in the McGill bookstore looking for my law textbooks when I randomly ran into and finally met fellow Law is Cool contributor Siena Anstis. We lamented over the dollars that we would inevitably have to shell out in the next few weeks, but Sienna reminded me that, “It will all pay off in the end. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway…”
A few days later, I went back to the bookstore to purchase my first set of law textbooks (yes, they are so heavy that I will have to buy them in instalments). There, I bumped into another fellow 1L. Although we exchanged no words, our countenances did the talking as we exchanged depressed glances, and I made my way to the cashier to pay for my textbooks. At the cash, I let out a heavy sigh, still decrying the amount of money that these textbooks were going to cost me. The cashier replied, “Don’t worry. You’ll make it all back by the end of [law school].”
If I had a dollar for the number of times I was told that…
Most of us are going to law school with the ulterior motive of making some “good money” (admit it…) at the end of it all. No one pays upwards of $60 000 for the heck of it. After all, many of us go to law school desperately hoping that the stereotype rings true: “lawyers are stinking rich, or at least can live comfortably” and “job prospects abound for those with a law degree.” However, as if to add insult to injury, the following excerpt from a blog post puts the stereotype into question:
The Real Value of a Legal Education
By John Farmer Jr.
America’s law schools begin the 2010-2011 academic year facing one of the greatest challenges to legal education since the rise of the modern law school at the end of the 19th century.
On one hand, the job market for law school graduates has rarely been worse than the past two years, and the class of 2011 is facing an equally daunting paucity of opportunities. As The Star-Ledger reported last week, some recent law school alumni who have had a difficult time navigating the job market have become embittered, claiming that the legal academy induced them to borrow large amounts of money by dangling a career prospect that has proven illusory.
On the other hand, interest in legal education has never been higher. Record numbers of qualified college graduates are applying to law schools, which are not hesitating to enroll them. This, in turn, led some members of the bar, meeting recently at the American Bar Association convention in San Francisco, to question the motivation of the law schools. How, they wonder, can they continue to admit thousands of students when their career prospects are so uncertain?
The struggles of recent law school alumni, coupled with the apprehensions of the bar, should give pause to those of us who are involved in educating the next generation of lawyers. …
In the short term, students should embark upon a legal education with their eyes open; the job market is difficult, and likely to remain so. Legal education is not, as the comments of some would suggest, an entitlement program.
…In retrospect, we were spoiled by the prosperity of the large law firms, and the easy career pipeline and high salaries they offered. Tuitions could be raised without fear of compromising the students’ futures; the debt students were forced to incur would be easy to manage with the high salaries recent graduates were commanding. As a consequence, many law schools became “cash cows” supporting programs in their larger university communities. The focus shifted to revenue; economic issues came to dominate.
But the real value of legal education is not, and never has been, primarily economic. It’s not about money; it’s about freedom.
Legal education gives students what 99.9 percent of humanity yearns for but is denied: control over one’s own life….”
I can’t help but wonder, however, how much control one can exert over one’s life when one is broke and thus at the mercy of loans, the leviathan that is the state and the monster that is capitalism. We all know that job prospects for new law grads are not as great as they used to be (to say the least) – after all, there’ve been numerous posts and articles about this subject on numerous law blogs and sites. But what am I to expect as a law graduate in 2014? This year alone was one of the worst for articling students… Can we – should we – expect better in a few years? If so, there are no worries. If not, however, it would behove the class of 2013 to start law school with, not only the end, but reality in mind.
Society? It lied to me. My friends and family? Maybe they were wrong. It is quite possible that law school will not pay off in the end, or at least not without some elbow grease and elapsed time. The reality is that, in some ways, many of us law students will be like donkeys with that illusive (or, depending on how you think of it, elusive) carrot dangling in front of us – motivated to work because of and for the carrot but forever running after something we may never realistically obtain.
Canadians have a constitutional right to government-held info: SCC
According to a recent ruling of the SCC, the right to access to government records is now protected by the Charter. In a unanimous 7-0 ruling in Ontario (Public Safety and Security) v. Criminal Lawyer’s Association, [2010] S.C.J. No. 23, the SCC decided that if the information is needed to promote “meaningful public discussion on matters of public interest”, Canadians have an access right to that information, guaranteed by s. 2(b) of Charter under the heading “Fundamental Freedoms”.
The Criminal Lawyer’s Association (CLA) called this “an epic win”, that ensued after a decade-long battle for access to a 300-page review conducted by the OPP with regards to how the Hamilton and Halton police “handled the investigation of the 1983 murder of Toronto mobster Dominic Racco. Mr. Racco was shot and killed on December 1983 and his body was dumped on a Milton rail line. Two Hamilton men, Garaham Court and Dennis Monaghan were charged consequently by Hamilton Police. They had the charges stayed in 1997 after Justice Stephen Glithero of the Ontario Superior Court found evidence of “flagrant and intentional misconduct” by the Crown and Halton and Hamilton police in the process. An investigation by the OPP ensued that resulted in the review but it was not made public despite CLA’s request. The denial of the government to force the OPP to release the review was basically what fuelled the legal action taken by the CLA that was eventually granted the right to appeal by the SCC.
Although, the CLA found the ruling, an epic victory, it was not granted the right to access the information in the OPP review. The SCC, in turn, held that right to access could only be triggered when the information sought “is necessary for meaningful public discussion on matters of public interest”. In matters where the release of information may “interfere with the proper functioning of the governmental institution in question”, or where they are shielded by solicitor-client privilege, such rights are not guaranteed to the public.
For one, the SCC held that the review may contain information about the parties that are protected by the solicitor-client privilege. Furthermore, it was decided that CLA has failed to demonstrate that “meaningful public discussion of shortcomings in the investigation and prosecution could not take place without making the OPP report public”. Yet, the Supreme Court sent back the CLA’s request to the information commissioner for a fresh review. Yet, the ruling was described as “a baby step toward recognizing that access to information is a constitutional right” by Paul Schabas of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.
Many countries including UK and US have similar laws implemented in their laws. Sweden, embedded access to information laws in their legislation in 1766 via their Freedom of the Press Act. The British Freedom of Information Act (2000), implemented such rights into the country’s legal system. In Canada, the Access to Information Act grants citizens access to records held by federal bodies and Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act is the legislation that governs matters that come under the scope of the Ontario provincial government. The significance of this “baby-step” is of course in having the access to information right established as constitutional rather than statutory.
Read this article by Dan Michaluk and Paul Broad of Hicks Morley for further analysis of how this case impacts the government institutions.
Photo: Dominic Racco
The law of street protest in Canada
The events of the G20 weekend in Toronto raised important legal issues and exposed gaps in our law. Are street protests legal and when can the police break them up? Can the police have special powers when world leaders are in town? How did we go from guaranteed freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly to a third-world style detention centre for protesters and police “kettling” of citizens at Queen and Spadina? What is the law of street protest in Canada?
The starting point for any analysis is the guaranteed freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly in sections 2(b) and (c) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We start here because these freedoms are secure from any government body, including the federal parliament and provincial legislatures.
There is no absolute freedom of assembly in Canada. First, the Charter itself limits it by guaranteeing only “peaceful” assembly. That’s why the government can restrict certain kinds of assembly that it considers not peaceful. Such restrictions do not infringe on the Charter freedom of assembly unless the courts disagree with the government’s interpretation of what’s “peaceful.”
Second, the Charter freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed only “to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” (s. 1 of the Charter). It means legislative acts or judge-made common law in Canada can limit even peaceful assembly, but they must have very good reasons. Legislative acts include federal and provincial laws and regulations as well as municipal by-laws.
Only law can limit a Charter right. A police officer cannot limit a Charter right on his or her own initiative without any authority in law. When the police break up a street protest, they can do it either because the protest is not peaceful or because law prohibits the protest for a good reason acceptable in a free and democratic society. Police officers may not break up a protest in any other circumstances. If they do, these officers will be breaking the law. But in Canada, it’s hard to tell when officers break the law for the following reason.
Laws regulating protests in Canada give the police a lot of discretion in deciding, first, what assemblies are peaceful, and second, when peaceful protests are not allowed. Police discretion contradicts the values of accessibility and precision that gave rise to the s. 1 requirement that limits on Charter rights be prescribed by law. The idea is that citizens should have a “reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited” (Peter W. Hogg, Constitutional Law of Canada, Student Ed. 2007 at p. 798)—that’s accessibility of law, and that officials must not engage in discriminatory and arbitrary breaches of rights—that’s precision of law.
But in R. v. Hufsky and R. v. Ladouceur, the Supreme Court held that as long as police discretion comes from law, it meets the s. 1 standard of “prescribed by law,” even if the discretion is unfettered. So completely random stops of cars authorized by an anti-drunk driving law are capable of s. 1 justification, but pulling over a car merely on a hunch as in the recent landmark case of R. v. Harrison cannot be justified by s. 1 because it is not prescribed by law.
There are five types of law that regulate street protests, and all of them give enormous discretion to the police. First, s. 63 of the Criminal Code prohibits “unlawful assembly,” which it defines as “three or more persons” gathered in a way that causes reasonable people in the neighbourhood to be afraid that the assembly will either disturb the peace tumultuously or provoke others to do so. This provision apparently complies with the Charter guarantee of “peaceful assembly” because words “disturbing the peace” and “tumultuous” imply that the assembly is not peaceful.
Second, s. 31 of the Criminal Code gives the police a general power to detain people for “breaching the peace.” The result is that street protests that breach the peace may be dispersed. The breach of peace arrest power seems to restrict the freedom of assembly without infringing on the Charter’s guarantee of peaceful assembly. Again, the police have discretion in deciding what is a breach of the peace.
Third, municipalities can pass by-laws prohibiting street protests that are not peaceful because they interfere with interests merely local in nature. For example, a by-law may prohibit excessively loud protests. It’s unclear if such prohibition fully respects the Charter, where the word “peaceful” may have a more dramatic sense than merely something touching on city noise by-laws.
Fourth, the police can use their ancillary common-law powers to regulate protests (in Ontario, see s. 42(3) of the Police Services Act). At common law, the police have powers that are necessary to discharge their duties. One of the duties of the police is to preserve the peace. If it is necessary to restrict a street protest to preserve the peace, the common law gives this power to the police. Again, apparently such police restriction would not infringe on the freedom of peaceful assembly, and again the police has tremendous discretion.
Finally, municipalities, provincial legislatures, and the federal parliament and respective cabinets can pass laws, regulations, and by-laws restricting the freedom of peaceful assembly, but only for a good reason. For example, it may be reasonable and democratic to prohibit protests in residential areas after 11 pm, in construction zones, on highways, or inside courthouses or secret military installations. If protesters challenge such law, the government will have to justify it under s. 1 of the Charter.
In a 1978 pre-Charter case Dupond v. City of Montreal, the Supreme Court upheld a city ordinance prohibiting street protests. The court cited the following English law dictum: “A claim on the part of persons so minded to assemble in any numbers, and for so long a time as they please to remain assembled, upon a highway, to the detriment of others having equal rights, is in its nature irreconcilable with the right of free passage.” After the Charter, it is not clear if municipalities still have the power to prohibit street protests.
The word “peace” is a common thread in all the laws that regulate street protest. These laws either give the police powers to preserve the “peace” at its discretion or ignore the peaceful nature of the protest for other arguably higher goals.
When the police boxed citizens in at Queen and Spadina for hours, they could invoke any of three sources of authority to break up protests disturbing the peace: s. 63 of the Criminal Code, breach of the peace provisions of the Criminal Code, or common law ancillary powers to preserve the peace. All three would require the police to make a judgement that the protest was not peaceful. Since the statute delegates this judgement to the police or recognizes its common-law authority to make that judgement, the courts would likely defer to the police expertise to decide what is peaceful and what is not.
The police could also rely on a statute that allowed it to disperse even peaceful protests. According to witnesses, some officers cited the Public Works Protection Act (PWPA) when they detained citizens on the street. That law does limit the freedom to peaceful assembly in places designated as public works, and it would probably be justified under s. 1. After all we don’t want protests in a courthouse or maybe within the G20 fence. But justifying the mass detention at Queen and Spadina, which was hundreds of meters from the G20 fence, by the PWPA is futile. And it’s clear the police didn’t need the PWPA authority there as they had plenty of discretion under other laws.
The bottom line is our courts and legislatures have consistently failed to set out rules for police engagement of street protests. The statutes are either drawn in broad terms like “tumultuous” and “peace” or simply avoid regulating protests by deferring to broad police powers at common law. Canada is not a police state—far from it. Our ideal is the rule of law and protection of civil liberties. But just like with ideals, we shouldn’t take our eyes off frightening possibilities. In a police state, armed agents of the state are free to limit freedoms and rights as they please. Their discretion is completely unfettered, almost like the discretion our laws grant to the police in dealing with street protests.
Our police forces are professional, highly trained, and generally honest. But it is not their job to determine the content of the Charter freedom of peaceful assembly. Provincial legislatures and the federal parliament must step in and give clear guidance to the police when they can break up street protests. The police can make mistakes and may have its own institutional interests that are not necessarily the same as the public interest. The people have a right to clear notice of what is lawful, and we all have a fundamental freedom of peaceful assembly. Our legislators must set out with much greater precision what the police powers are in regulating street protests.
Pulat Yunusov is a Toronto litigation lawyer.
(Post sponsored by AdviceScene)
Copyright reform in Canada: Op-Ed
Industry Minister Tony Clement knows only one way to write copyright laws for the country: heavyhandedly … Read the entire June 11th commentary at the Vancouver Sun
Pavlov’s Law and the Criminal Justice System
From my experiences dealing with the different participants in the justice system (accused, victims, witnesses, court personnel, etc) and listening to the public’s opinion, I feel confident in saying that most people are frustrated with the length of time it takes for a case to be completed in court after an offence is actually committed.
I think that most people believe in the old adage that “justice must be swift to be maintained” and the perception is that this is not happening. Indeed, this is not merely perception, but reality. Statistics from 2009 indicate that the average number of days a court case takes in the Province of Ontario until a disposition is reached is 214, with an average of 9.2 appearances in court. In some regions in Ontario these numbers are as high as 330 days and 13.1 appearances. This is an increase of 21.6% and 42.4% respectively.
Based on these numbers I would suggest that the public’s perception is very justified and polls show just how widely held this perception is. According to the Department of Justice’s Review of Opinion Polls of Public Perceptions of Crime and Justice in Canada, 36% of Canadians claimed to have little to no confidence in the provincial court system, with a further 48% stating that they have only “some” confidence.
Might that be (at least in part) because, like Pavlov training his dog, people understand on some level that the effect (the punishment) must be proximate to the cause (the crime) in order for the association to effectively be made? If it is not, how can the offender understand the consequence of their actions? How can their sentence properly act as a deterrent? If your five year old child draws on the wall with crayon and 7 months (214 days) later you punish them for it, are they really going to learn their lesson?
Disparity in the proximity between the time of the offence and the time of sentencing causes problems for other participants in the justice system than just offenders, including victims, witnesses, and police.
Victims of crimes I’ve investigated have often expressed to me that they feel as though they are continually being victimized while the court process drags on and that they can’t really move on until it’s complete and they have some sense that justice has been done. This is especially true in cases where the crown intends to seek restitution from an offender for some loss that a victim has suffered.
Witnesses in cases I’ve had have often become more reluctant as time goes on to testify in court. Sometimes this is because their memory of the incident gets less clear as time goes on and they don’t want to put themselves in a position where they will be asked about details that they can’t remember. Sometimes, in cases involving criminals who are witnesses against other criminals, this is because there has been time for the accused to tamper with or intimidate the witness or because they’ve had a lot of time to dwell on the possible repercussions of testifying and have convinced themselves that the worse case scenario will happen, that the accused will “get them when they get out.”
Police are subject to the same problems as other witnesses with respect to their memory of an incident degrading over time. This is why police make notes of the incident to refresh their memory in court, but when you’ve dealt with a hundred similar cases since the one in question, the details sometimes blend together and answering questions about details strictly from your recollection (that you made no notes on) becomes very difficult and can adversely affect the prosecution of a case.
This happened in my first impaired case. I stopped a young man just down the street from where he had dropped his friend and his (the friend’s) girlfriend off. They were both drunk and were fighting and rolling around on the boulevard and the in the street. I suspected, based on the driving I observed and the report of the complainant who stated that he thought that all three were drunk, that the driver might have been drinking, but I didn’t have time to confirm the grounds.
Immediately after stopping the vehicle, I took the keys from the driver to keep him there and went to deal with the other two, who were in danger of being hit on the road. I ended up having to arrest both of them for public intoxication, for their own safety, in order to get them off the road. I called for another unit to take over their arrest and dealt with them until the unit arrived. A short time later I returned to the vehicle, confirmed that I had grounds to make a roadside demand and produced the breathalyzer, which the driver blew into and failed. He was arrested for Impaired and Over 80.
When the case came to court, over a year and many impaireds later, I was asked specific questions by the defence counsel about how long the accused was detained while I dealt with the other two and what exactly I was doing with them the entire time and how long it took me to get back to the accused and form my grounds. I couldn’t remember all the details and I hadn’t made notes on what I was doing at every moment. The case was dismissed based on the fact that the judge felt that we had unjustifiably detained the accused for too long without having formed grounds and made the breath demand.
Had I been able to recall better what exactly I had been doing during this time and articulate how I couldn’t have gotten back to the accused any sooner, the case might have gone differently. That is just one personal example of the problems associated with delays in court. I have many more.
Fortunately, the provincial government has acknowledged these issues and has developed a strategy to deal with them. But this post has gone on long enough so check out my next one for the details of how the government is addressing these issues.
Restraint, Mr. Harper
While cramming a treatise for my last 1L exam, I came across a quote from the Law Reform Commission of Canada. The report titled Our Criminal Law was released in 1976, but it is just as relevant today:
But criminal law is not the only means of bolstering values. Nor is it necessarily always the best means. The fact is, criminal law is a blunt and costly instrument – blunt because it cannot have the human sensitivity of institutions like the family, the school, the church or the community, and costly since it imposes suffering, loss of liberty, and great expense.
So criminal law must be an instrument of last resort. It must be used as little as possible. The message must not be diluted by overkill – too many laws and offences and charges and prison sentences. Society’s ultimate weapon must stay sheathed as long as possible. The watchword is restraint – restraint applying to the scope of the criminal law, to the meaning of criminal guilt, to the use of the criminal trial and to the criminal sentence.
In a time of economic restraint, Prime Minister Harper is planning to increase Corrections Canada’s budget by 27%. While criminologists disagree about what causes crime, nearly all agree that incarceration DOES NOT REDUCE crime. And crime rates have been steadily falling for decades, so it stands to reason that whatever we’ve been doing is working.
Tom Flanagan justifies tough on crime by comparing 2010 to the 1960s, when crime rates were lower. Would that be the same 1960s when a woman could be legally raped by her husband? When the crime of sexual assault didn’t exist? Of course not, because Mr. Flanagan is looking at the world through the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia. Those days won’t exist again because they never existed. Even if they could exist, tough on crime is simply not the route there.
Canada’s prison population is composed of a disturbingly disproportionate number of Aboriginal persons, as well as the formerly unemployed, the uneducated, the addicted, the poor. They are at the receiving end of the state’s most terrible weapon against its people. While society will reap no gain, marginalized groups will bear the hugest cost from the politicization of justice reform.
Parliament must not allow Mr. Harper’s tough on crime bills to pass. The opposition Liberals have a duty to refuse this wrongful policy. Political pandering must not trump the best interests of the country. The watchword is restraint.
Bilingualism and the Supreme Court
As reported by the Globe and Mail, a bill requiring that all future Supreme Court justices be bilingual was passed last week and now awaits Senate approval. The private member’s Bill C-232, tabled by NDP language critic Yves Godin, was harshly criticized by former Supreme Court puisne judge John Major on CBC’s “The Current” radio show.
Major argued that the only way to uphold the Rule of Law in Canada is to have the most competent people in the Supreme Court, not to put the emphasis on linguistics. Since there is far more bilingualism in the East, requiring bilingual Justices from the West would lower the grade of the talent pool. Major noted that both Parliament and the UN use translators. He said that in his 13 years on the Court there was never a single case where he didn’t fully understand the case, between translators and extensive case preparation. Major argued that “fluently bilingual” is a very high threshold to achieve, and most justices only learn French after they are appointed. Interestingly, Major criticized several times former justice minister Irwin Cotler and former lawyer Bob Rae for their support of the bill.
While Godin argued that Harper broke a fully bilingual Court by appointing Rothstein (who is currently taking language lessons), Major countered that it’s actually only two or three current Justices who are truly bilingual. Godin’s primary concern was that someone arguing a case before the Court would not be fully understood, a concern that Major effortlessly debunked.
Phil Fontaine, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, called the bill is “elitist” because it does not fully reflect the diversity of Canada. I would call it elitist because it is only a small subset of Canada’s English-speaking population that has access to quality French-language instruction at a young age.
Government Ignores “Tough on Crime” Statistics
A great article just came off the Canadian Press wire. The upshot is that the Canadian government is ignoring the results of social science studies about crime and punishment. Here are some quoteable quotes:
Federal spending estimates indicate capital expenditures on prisons in Canada will increase by more than 40 per cent in 2010-11 to $329.4 million from $230.8 million this year, although the Conservative government has refused to publicly detail the costs of its criminal justice agenda.
…
“The great appeal of mandatory minimum sentences is that they give politicians the appearance of doing something, of being seen to be doing something,” Craig Jones, the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, said in a recent interview. “You must never underestimate the need for politicians to be seen to be doing something — even if, in some cases, it’s the wrong thing.”
…
In a 2008 speech, Harper flatly denounced research-based justice policies, accusing the pedlars of such policies of trying to “pacify Canadians with statistics.” “Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong, they say; crime is really not a problem. These apologists remind me of the scene from the Wizard of Oz when the wizard says, ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
…
More recently, Harper’s former chief of staff Ian Brodie told a McGill University forum last spring that informed criticism of the government’s justice agenda is a political gift: “It helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types.”
