As any Ontario personal injury lawyer knows, the common law of damages has been modified significantly in the context of motor vehicle accidents, to the benefit of defendants and their insurers. The legislature has enacted various measures to limit the ability of plaintiffs to recover in tort. It has done so for two reasons: 1) to help limit the number ...

Over on Professor Daly’s blog Administrative Law Matters, Professor Audrey Macklin wrote what I would characterize as a confessional: an admission that the law of judicial review in Canada may be beyond repair. What Prof. Macklin proposes, in light of this realization, is a renewed focus on the principles of statutory interpretation, rather than a myopic focus on standard of ...

This week, the Supreme Court of Canada finally heard the consolidated appeals in Bell/NFL and Vavilov. ARL, expertly represented by Adam Goldenberg, put forward our submissions on the matter, which focus on a return to the basis of the law of judicial review: its statutory character. During the hearings, one particular line of questioning posed a problem for this  argument, ...

The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has ruled that there is no duty to consult Indigenous groups at any stage of the law-making process.  This is an important ruling as the recognition of a justiciable duty to consult in the legislative process would have had very significant implications for the ability of federal, provincial, and territorial governments to pass laws ...

In a decision delivered in April 2018, a Newfoundland court recognized three legal parents (two fathers and one mother), based on the throuple’s sexual relationship  The case starts with a Newfoundland throuple—two men and a woman in a sexual relationship—who had a child in 2017.[1] The identity of the mother is clear, both biologically and in law. However, the men could ...

In Groia v Law Society of Upper Canada, 2018 SCC 27, decided last week, the Supreme Court of Canada once again fractured over the approach to take to the judicial review of an administrative decision ― and, once again, the majority chose correctness review disguised as reasonableness as its methodology. The substantive issue in Groia was whether the Law Society was entitled to ...

The Supreme Court of Canada released its judgement in the Wall appeal last week. It’s a victory for clarity in what had become quite a confused case.  The Court, overturning both courts below, ruled that judges do not have authority to review the decision of an unincorporated religious body to expel one of its members. Confusion at the lower courts Randy Wall, the ...

The Supreme Court delivered a bizarre decision last week in R.v. Comeau. By way of background, Comeau concerned the interpretation of s.121 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which states: “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” The issue for the Court was ...

The Ontario Court of Appeal’s recent decision in Schnarr v. Blue Mountain is significant for two reasons. First, it provides much needed clarification to the law of occupiers’ liability, and to waivers of liability in particular. Second,  it includes a detailed discussion of some of the principles of statutory interpretation. In this brief article, I discuss the Court of Appeal’s ...

 The Supreme Court recently issued its decision in Quebec (Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail) v Caron, 2018 SCC 3, which may, or may not, be another sign that the Court’s love affair with deference to administrative decision-makers is coming to an end ― in practice if not yet in theory. I ...