Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised during the recent campaign that 2015 would be the last federal election to employ “first-past-the-post.” This is the electoral system familiar to  Canadians, in which the candidate who wins a plurality of votes in each riding is elected to Parliament. In its place we would see the introduction of a more “representative” system, most likely ...

Hate speech is back in the news. The Quebec government has recently tabled Bill 59, which, among other things, would prohibit “hate speech” – a term that is not defined. Anyone who “engages in or disseminates” hate speech is liable to be fined up to $10,000 for the first utterance and $20,000 for the second.   The Bill would also ...

Is there any real distinction between the phrases “from the Bar” and “from among the advocates”? According to two recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions, the answer to that question must be an emphatic “yes”. The first decision is well-known to the legal community and to the public as a whole. In Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and ...

The Supreme Court of Canada’s March 27, 2015 decision in Quebec (Attorney General) v. Canada (Attorney General) is an exemplary judgment in upholding the rule of law in the realm of federalism. The majority’s decision explicitly (and refreshingly) recognized that the constitution’s text is the primary source of its meaning, while also explicitly recognizing that courts are not to review ...

Last week, a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court of Canada held that the federal government is constitutionally permitted to destroy the data it obtained from the former long-gun registry. Quebec (Attorney General) v. Canada (Attorney General) is a classic federalism case that deals with Parliament’s power to regulate criminal law under section 91(27) of the Constitution Act, 1867. In ...

The recent Supreme Court decision in Bank of Montreal v. Marcotte, 2014 SCC 55, is a helpful clarification of the applicability of consumer protection legislation and, more generally, the current principles regulating the separation of federal and provincial powers in Canada. At issue in Marcotte were charges imposed on credit card customers for purchases in foreign currency. Such purchases are ...

Earlier this month this Supreme Court of Canada held that there is a blanket constitutional right to access the civil courts. The decision in Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v. British Columbia (Attorney General) did not make huge headlines when it was released on October 2, but it probably should have. The Supreme Court has done something truly unprecedented in ...

This article originally appeared in Huffington Post Canada   When the Conservatives were in opposition, they frequently chastised the governing Liberals for ruling their backbencher MPs with an iron fist. Most if not all votes were whipped, which meant that, in a majority government, the position of the Prime Minister and his inner Cabinet invariably became the law of the ...