The Supreme Court of Canada (“SCC”) recently granted leave to appeal in the Sherman Estate’s legal battle to keep its probate application private. The appeal will provide the court with an opportunity to revisit the stringent legal test for sealing orders, an issue that has gone largely undiscussed for nearly two decades. Sealing orders, which […]
Last week, the Ontario Court of Appeal (“ONCA”) released a contentious, split decision in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2019 ONCA 732 [Toronto] in which they adjudicated the constitutionality of the Better Local Government Act, 2018, SO 2018 C-11 ("BLGA"). The ONCA majority declared the BLGA to be constitutional, with no violations of section […]
Introduction It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. – Mark Twain, Following the Equator What does harm to the reputation of a polarizing public figure entail? What is the […]
Tensions can run high during political demonstrations, and police are often deployed to monitor the situation and prevent an escalating conflict. In doing so, police have a common law power to arrest individuals when they believe an arrest may prevent a breach of the peace without the requirement that police believe that the person being […]
The open court principle requires that the media is able to report on court proceedings, except in rare cases where doing so would infringe, for example, an accused's right to a fair trial or a witness's right to privacy. In recent years, social media has been increasingly used to communicate information from courtrooms to the […]
When should judges grant police access to a media company’s communications with a source? What if that source is suspected of engaging in terrorist activity? In R v Vice Media Canada Inc., 2018 SCC 53 [Vice] the Supreme Court of Canada (“SCC”) balanced the interests of the media and the state in creating a new […]
In December 2017, the Canadian government announced changes to its Canada Summer Jobs ("CSJ") program that sparked debate over the program's constitutionality. CSJ is a funding subsidy designed to provide students with summer work opportunities. Under the program's new changes, organizations applying for the funding—small businesses, non-profits, and other community organizations—were required to check a […]
Earlier this summer, charity and not-for-profit law hit a milestone in Canada Without Poverty v Attorney General of Canada, 2018 ONSC 4147 [Canada Without Poverty], when Justice Edward Morgan of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (“SCJ”) ruled that s 149.1(6.2) of the Income Tax Act, RSC 1985, c 1 [ITA] is an unconstitutional violation of charities’ […]
Political protest is undeniably an essential right in a free and democratic society, but constitutional protection of that right is not absolute; acts and threats of violence, which serve to stymie rather than foster political debate, are not protected under s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In its August 2017 decision, […]
On June 28, 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada released Google Inc v Equustek Solutions Inc, 2017 SCC 34 [Google] which granted a worldwide interlocutory injunction against Google Inc. (“Google”), ordering it to remove a company’s website from its global search engines. The Court’s decision in Equustek provides new tools to intellectual property owners to […]