RSS FeedSCC on Funding Orders
Funding orders must be exceptional, says the Supreme Court:
‘For the first time the Supreme Court has ruled that superior courts are empowered to order governments to fund public interest litigation before statutory courts and tribunals. [...]
Brodsky suggested that “if governments don’t want the courts to attempt to deal with the problems that have been created by cuts to access-to-justice programs, then governments need to address the gaps themselves.”
She told The Lawyers Weekly “the possibility of obtaining an interim cost award can never replace the Court Challenges Program, or civil legal aid programs, that have been decimated in places like B.C. The limitations of the case-by-case cost-seeking approach are underscored by the decision in Caron in that the court confirmed that interim cost awards must be ‘highly exceptional.’ However, in reality, the circumstances in which the absence of public funding works a serious injustice are not highly exceptional. Such circumstances have become very ordinary in Canada.”’
Amicus Curiae sits down with Justice Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada
Ahmed Farahat of UWO’s new law paper interviews Justice Ian Binnie. From the February issue of Amicus.
If I can start by asking you: when did you first decide to embark on a career in law?
I think when I was in college. I arrived at it by a process of elimination. I could see all sorts of jobs that I was congenitally incapable of doing. I did a lot of debating in my undergraduate years, and becoming a barrister seemed like fun.
I noticed in your biography on the Supreme Court’s website that you did your LL.B. in Cambridge. Why did you get your law degree from the UK?
At the time I went, Ontario accepted entry to the British bar to go straight to the Bar Admission Course. So I thought: here is an opportunity to see another part of the world and get an educational qualification that is recognized in Ontario. Unfortunately, when I was away they changed the rules and when I came back, they said well, now you have to get an LL.B. from an Ontario law school. Seemed like a good idea at the beginning.
How was the Cambridge experience different from the one you had here at the University of Toronto?
The experience in the UK is totally different from University of Toronto. In the UK, they studied medieval English, Roman law, and all kinds of topics that were absolutely of no practical importance whatsoever. Toronto, when I got there, was experiencing quite a golden age with Bora Laskin and many interesting professors. So there was eventually no duplication at all between the three years I spent at Cambridge and the two years I spent at Toronto. And there is no doubt that Toronto’s education was of a higher order. The English system has law as an undergraduate degree, so you go straight from high school to law, whereas in Canada, students already completed their undergraduate degree. In England, there was no real reason to go into law other than escaping history and literature and all the other courses you performed poorly in during high school.
