The Federal Renewable Fuels Regulations Survive an Aggressive and Comprehensive Challenge from Syncrude

By: Nigel Bankes

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Case Commented On: Syncrude Canada Ltd. v Attorney General of Canada, 2014 FC 776

In the dog days of summer (August 6, 2014) Justice Russel Zinn of the Federal Court of Canada handed down his judgement in a case in which Syncrude sought to challenge the validity of the federal Renewable Fuels Regulations, SOR/2010/189 (RFR) on both constitutional and administrative law grounds. The judgment seems to have passed almost without comment in the media. The RFR require that diesel fuel produced, imported or sold in Canada must contain renewable fuel of at least 2% by volume. This requirement can be met by blending diesel with biodiesel (although this can be challenging at cold temperatures). Failure to comply with the RFR is an offence although a regulated entity can achieve compliance by purchasing compliance units from other regulated entities who have exceeded their own compliance targets. See the judgement at para 4.

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The Vicious Spiral of Self-Representation in Family Law Proceedings

Written by: John-Paul Boyd

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A lot of good research on litigants without counsel has been published in the last three years, most notably, in my view, Julie Macfarlane‘s Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-represented Litigants, a trio of papers published by the Canadian Research Institute on Law and the Family on the views of Alberta judges and family law lawyers, and a report by the Canadian Research Institute on Law and the Family with professors Nicholas Bala and Rachel Birnbaum (in press) on the results of a national survey of judges and lawyers. Although this research doesn’t necessarily label it as such, I’ve noticed that there’s a bit of a slippery slope effect to litigating without counsel, in which the decision to self-represent, whether a choice was involved or not, seems to trigger a cascade of adverse effects that ultimately result in litigants without counsel achieving worse results in every major area of family law than would have been achieved with counsel. Continue reading →

The Quiet Decline of Canada’s IPO Markets

By: Bryce Tingle

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The Toronto Stock Exchange’s parent company has been travelling the country raising the profile of its new venture, TSX Private Markets.  At the same time, Canada’s securities commissions are engaged in the most comprehensive overhaul of the private placement regime in more than a decade.  In Ontario, in particular, this would reverse the increasingly restrictive trends of previous reforms and liberalize its private capital markets.

This is a curious state of affairs. The TSX is chipping away at the incentives for a company to go public and the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) is making it easier for companies to raise money outside of its regulatory “gold standard”: the public company prospectus system.  What is going on?

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R v Navales and Reasonable Suspicion

By: Shaun Leochko

PDF Version: R v Navales and Reasonable Suspicion

Cases Commented On: R v Navales, 2014 ABCA 70; R v Canlas, 2014 ABCA 160; R v Ng, 2014 ABPC 62; R v Tosczak, 2014 ABQB 86

The engagement of section 8 and section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) in the drug sniffer dog cases has captured the interest of civil libertarians and law enforcement for what is required for a “reasonable suspicion.”  The 2013 Supreme Court decisions of R v Chehil, 2013 SCC 49, and R v MacKenzie, 2013 SCC 50 effectively lowered what would be required of police officers to form the reasonable suspicion necessary to conduct a “sniff” search. This resulted from the Supreme Court allowing an officer’s training and experience, in the totality of the circumstances, to form the objective requirement necessary to the forming of reasonable suspicion.  The Alberta Court of Appeal in R v Navales, 2014 ABCA 70, was tasked with applying this law in Alberta.  At issue was how officers would use their training and experience, and a constellation of neutral “no win” behaviours on the part of the accused to form the objective grounds needed to find reasonable suspicion. The result has been what dissenting judges have referred to as a lowering of the standard to that of a generalized suspicion. Significantly, this line of decisions has been applied outside of the drug sniffing dog context, and even outside of the reasonable suspicion context, to other areas of criminal law in R v Canlas, 2014 ABCA 160, R v Ng, 2014 ABPC 62, and R v Tosczak, 2014 ABQB 86. Continue reading →

A Smart Decision – Access to Counsel for the Poor and Disabled in a Legal Aid Crisis

By: Sarah Burton

PDF Version: A Smart Decision – Access to Counsel for the Poor and Disabled in a Legal Aid Crisis

Case commented on: R v Smart, 2014 ABPC 175

Access to justice advocates should to take a few moments to review R v Smart, 2014 ABPC 175, where the Honourable Assistant Chief Judge Anderson stayed proceedings against three accused persons who could not afford counsel, but did not qualify for Legal Aid. While such applications are not uncommon, the evidence considered in Smart extends far beyond the norm. This extensive evidence, coupled with Judge Anderson’s probing commentary on access to justice, places a welcomed spotlight on Alberta’s Legal Aid funding crisis. In Smart, Judge Anderson sought to provide concrete guidance to courts facing similar applications. While he accomplished this task, his engagement with access to justice issues may be the more lasting legacy of the judgment.

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