In a decision issued this week, Trinity Western University v. The Law Society of British Columbia, 2016 BCCA 423, the British Columbia Court of Appeal held that the Law Society acted unreasonably when its benchers, following its members, voted “not to approve” the University’s proposed law school, preventing its graduates from practicing in the province and causing it to lose the ...

The New Brunswick Court of Appeal will hear the Crown’s appeal in R. v. Comeau this coming month. The issue for appeal is whether Justice LeBlanc of the New Brunswick Provincial Court got it right in finding that s.121 of the Constitution Act, 1867 prohibits both tariff and non-tariff barriers between the provinces, overturning the Supreme Court of Canada’s precedent ...

The Supreme Court of Canada’s freshly released Ledcor Construction Ltd. v. Northbridge Indemnity Insurance Co. provides welcome clarification to contract law generally and insurance law specifically. By holding that appellate courts are to review interpretation of “standard form” contracts on a correctness standard, the court protects the rule of law. The decision should also promote access to civil justice. Background ...

This article appears in the current (Fall 2016) edition of the Christian Legal Journal, a publication of Christian Legal Fellowship, an intervener in Trinity Western University’s litigation in all three provinces.   Any state-imposed limit on a constitutional right or freedom must be “prescribed by law”, according to section 1 of the Charter. This requirement stems from the principle of ...

This summer saw a sharply divided Supreme Court of Canada on many points. The case of Wilson v. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., 2016 SCC 29 illustrated this perhaps better than any other, with the Court issuing four separate opinions. Many issues are raised in the case, from whether certain non-unionized federally regulated employees can be dismissed without cause to the number ...

On July 8, 2016, in R. v. Jordan, 2016 SCC 27, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned its decision in R. v. Morin, [1992] 1 SCR 771. The Court is supposed to be the gatekeeper of the Constitution. However, in R. v. Jordan, it ignored the separation of powers and legislated “ceilings” in establishing whether an accused’s s. 11(b) “right ...

In my last article, “Reaffirming the Case for Constraint“, I replied to Leonid Sirota’s article “How to do Constitutional Adjudication,” which was itself a response to my paper, “The Case for a Constrained Approach to Section 7.” Mr. Sirota also wrote a piece entitled “Seven’s Sins” in response to my original paper. I had intended to reply to “Seven’s Sins” ...

Constitutional law and alcohol are forever linked. Many famous distribution of powers cases giving rise to new federalism doctrine were about alcohol. It should not be a surprise that we can now add another case to the list. R. v. Comeau, coming out of the New Brunswick Provincial Court, is a novel judicial meditation on Canadian federalism, specifically regarding the ...

The Alberta Court of Appeal ruled in May in Canada (AG) v. E.F. that a woman suffering from “severe conversion disorder” — a non-terminal, psychiatric condition that causes physical symptoms — was eligible to receive “aid in dying” under the “criteria” stated in the Supreme Court of Canada’s February 2015 decision on physician-assisted dying, known as Carter I. The Attorney ...

In Batalla v. St. Michael’s Hospital,  the plaintiffs alleged that the physician and nurses who delivered the minor plaintiff did so negligently and caused the minor plaintiff to suffer severe brain damage. He was born with very limited cognitive functioning, impaired motor skills and visual impairments. The parties settled the matter following a mediation in April 2014 for the all-inclusive sum of $6,625,000. Pursuant to Rule 7 ...