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A Crosswinds of Corporate Accountability: Corporate Climate Liability in the Canadian Legal Abyss
Get PDFThis chapter queries the absence of corporate-related climate cases in Canadian courts. It first retells the recent history of corporate accountability in Canadian courts for human rights-related harms. While initial cases faltered on jurisdictional and justiciability grounds, the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2020 decision in Araya v. Nevsun Resources Ltd. was arguably a watershed moment in Canadian corporate accountability law that, in conjunction with climate litigation commenced against government actors, should have bolstered the prospect of corporate climate litigation. On the contrary though, post-Nevsun corporate accountability claims have been minimal and, to date at least, have not pursued allegations that concern climate-related harms, which arguably fall within the scope of international law and tort law principles that were endorsed by the Court’s majority in Nevsun. The chapter then looks more broadly at one potential reason why corporate climate litigation has yet to take off in Canadian jurisdictions. Like other jurisdictions in the Western world that have some form of the Anglo-American corporation, there has been both a judicial and academic debate about a corporation’s underlying purpose. This debate is largely characterized by shareholder-centric versus stakeholder-centric divide. With climate impacts accelerating and a renewed focus around the law’s place to mitigate or reverse those impacts, Canada continues to suffer from a vacuum in robust corporate purpose law that could oblige corporations to make decisions in a way that protects rather than harms the environment. With sweeping legislative reform being unrealized in the past and potentially unlikely in the future, Canadian courts may have to incrementally advance the law of corporate purpose through ad hoc judicial decisions that have the prospect of long-term ripple effects on corporate behaviour toward the environment
Pt 4A Dialogue on Dialogue Theory - His Brilliant Legacy: A Conference in Honour of Peter W. Hogg
No full textHis Brilliant Legacy: A Conference in Honour of Peter W. Hogg was held on January 10, 2024 at Osgoode Professional Development and co-hosted by Osgoode Hall Law School and Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.
This session includes: Dialogue on Dialogue Theory
Panelists discuss and critique the highly influential concept, at home and abroad, of dialogue , the theory of review under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms proposed by Peter Hogg and Ms. Allison Thornton.
Chair: Professor Benjamin L. Berger, Osgoode Hall Law School
Speakers: Professor Allan Hutchinson, Osgoode Hall Law School, Ms. Allison Thornton, Associate Solicitor, City of Guelph, Professor Alison Young, David Williams Professor of Public Law, Cambridge University UK, Sujit Choudhry, Head of Chambers, Hāki Chambers Globa
Artificial Intelligence and the Law: New Challenges and Possibilities for Fundamental Human Rights and Security - Panel 1
No full textAllan Hutchinson Reflections on Singularity: AI and Law’s Multiplicity
Jon Penney How Safe Are AI Safety Standards?
Carys Craig The AI-Copyright Trap
Valerio De Stefano Artificial Intelligence and Work
Aida Abraha Examining AI Governance in the Workplace Context: A Comparative Analysis of Workplace Technology Regulations in Canada, the United States, and the European Union.
François Tanguay-Renaud, Contrasting Police Powers of Detention and Arrest in Canada and the United States: Is There a Place for Predictive AI and Some Thoughts about Racial Profiling and its Regulation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dramatically reshaping how people live, work, and interact, as well as the functioning of societies and legal systems’ adaptations to these changes. Machine learning technologies’ integration into various decision-making processes carries profound implications for sentencing, taxation, workplace dynamics, surveillance and policing, privacy, and financial markets. The rising automation of human activities prompts significant legal inquiries spanning constitutional, contractual, and tort issues. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Chat GPT are AI technologies with a range of legal, ethical, and societal implications. These models, trained on massive volumes of text data, can generate text resembling human language, enabling tasks like answering questions, writing essays, even crafting poetry. They implicate freedom of expression, the right to information, and the democratic process at large. They have the potential to generate misleading, harmful, or hateful content, regardless of their programmers’ and owners’ intentions. They could become tools for propaganda or disinformation campaigns. They raise intellectual property questions, particularly when their output is based on pre-existing intellectual or artistic works and could lead to mass job automation
Constitutional Cases 2024 (Pt 3B) | Punishment and Policing
No full textIn a year of surprising quiescence in the criminal/constitutional jurisprudence, there was nevertheless a series of cases that advanced the Court’s thinking on persistently challenging issues. This panel will consider the effects of Hills and Hilbach on s 12, McGregor’s impact on s 8, and what Zacharias will mean for s 24(2).
Panelists:
Steve Coughlan (Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University)
Lisa Kerr (Faculty of Law, Queen’s University)
Gerald Chan (Stockwoods LLP)
Michael Perlin (Ministry of the Attorney General)
Chair: Palma Paciocco (Osgoode Hall Law School)
The 27th iteration of the Constitutional Cases conference was held on Friday, April 12, 2024. Osgoode Hall Law School’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference, recognized as the leading constitutional law conference in Canada, brings together many highly respected constitutional scholars, lawyers, students, and experts for an insightful and practical analysis of the Supreme Court’s significant constitutional judgments of the past year
Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience by Laura Bisaillon
Get PDFIN 2002, CANADA’S FEDERAL IMMIGRATION DEPARTMENT enacted a new policy regime that mandated HIV testing in the immigration medical examination.3 This moment provided the primary motivation for the research that underlies Professor Laura Bisaillon’s first book, Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience (“Screening Out”)
The Constitution and Charter in 2022: The Court, the Chief Justice, and Justice Brown
Get PDFOsgoode Hall’s 26th Annual Constitutional Cases Conference — the 2022 Year in Review — was held on April 14, 2023. This paper is drawn from the Opening Address, which provides an overview of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence and is a longstanding feature of the conference. As it explains, the Court’s 13 decisions in 2022 focused almost exclusively on the Charter’s legal rights and remedies, though R. v. Sharma considered and dismissed a claim under section 15, and the Court rendered one decision on public interest standing. The paper provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2022 jurisprudence, adding commentary on two points of particular interest. The first concerns the Court’s invalidation of significant Criminal Code provisions on consecutive life sentences for murder, statutory limits on the defence of intoxication, and lifetime registration on the federal sex offenders’ registry. Second are the dynamics of decision-making in 2022 and the rise of unanimity on the Wagner Court, including in key decisions invalidating Criminal Code provisions. Finally, the overview notes that, due to unexpected developments early in 2023, 2022 would be Justice Russell Brown’s final year on the Supreme Court, and comments briefly on the justice’s 2022 contributions and the significance of his departure from the Court
Self-Induced Extreme Intoxication: Brown and Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code
Get PDFParliament enacted section 33.1 of the Criminal Code in 1995, in direct response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1994 decision in R. v. Daviault. Through this provision, it set out to remove the reach of the extreme intoxication defence from accused persons charged with personal violence offences, where their intoxication was self-induced. Parliament justified the imposition of criminal responsibility in these cases on the moral blameworthiness of voluntary intoxication, notwithstanding the majority’s ruling in Daviault that doing so offends the Charter. It was not until 2021 — more than 25 years after the enactment of section 33.1 — that the Charter issue came before the Court for hearing. In the much-anticipated case of R. v. Brown, the Court ruled that section 33.1 violates sections 7 and 11(d) and is not saved by section 1. Remarkably, just 25 days after the Brown decision was handed down, Parliament enacted a new section 33.1 in an effort to once again to limit the availability of the extreme intoxication defence. On this occasion, however, Parliament’s efforts were guided — and its ambitions tempered — by the Court’s clear articulation in Brown of minimum Charter requirements. This paper offers a summary of the Brown ruling. It then describes the constituent parts of the new section 33.1 and attempts to construct an analytical framework for the provision’s application in future cases. It concludes with a discussion of legal, evidentiary and practical issues that counsel and courts might soon encounter in those cases where the extreme intoxication defence is advanced, not least of which is concern about the differential treatment of accused persons based on intoxication symptoms
Best Laid Birth Plans: A Relational Analysis of the Legal Rights of Birthing People in Canada
No full textWhile it is trite law in Canada that patients have the right to make their own medical decisions, news reports, regulatory complaints, and civil claims indicate that this right is failing to translate to delivery rooms. This thesis examines the gaps between the legal rights of birthing people in Canada as they exist “on the books” and the way those rights are experienced, using the critical theory of Law in Action. Building on feminist critiques of the traditional liberal conception of autonomy, this thesis conceptualizes childbirth as an experience deeply embedded in relations to others and concludes that to close the gaps between legal rights and lived experiences, we must craft law and policy in a manner that accounts for the broader relational context in which childbirth occurs