Constitutional Cases (Pt 4) | Police Powers and the Exclusion of Evidence (Panel B)

The 26th iteration of the Constitutional Cases conference was held on Friday, April 14, 2023. 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. Panel B | Police Powers and the Exclusion of Evidence This panel will turn to the next chapter in the story of the Court wrestling with police powers and the scope and enforcement of legal rights in Canada. Panelists will discuss the right to counsel (Lafrance and Dussault), search incident to arrest (Stairs), and the “fresh start doctrine” developed within s. 24(2) (Beaver). Panelists: 00:02:10 Professor Danardo Jones, UWindsor Faculty of Law 00:17:00 Professor Amar Khoday, UManitoba Faculty of Law 00:33:49 Chris Rudnicki, Defence Counsel, Rudnicki Law Chair: Jill Witkin, Crown Law Office – Criminal and Chair, Sexual Violence Advisory Grou

Navigating the Free Trade—Fair Trade Fault-Lines by Michael Trebilcock

The COVID-19 pandemic came with several revelations about our pre-pandemic lives. One of these revelations was the importance of international trade law in the lives of average individuals. Headlines about food supplies, shortages of essential medical supplies, and countries’ plans to acquire and produce vaccines dominated the media following March 2020. It was a time that spurred the public’s interest in international trade law and how it functions. Indeed, media headlines showcased the growing concern about international trade during the pandemic. This is the context in which Michael Trebilcock’s Navigating the Free Trade—Fair Trade Fault-Lines situates itself. At a time when everyday Canadians and others around the world were experiencing and reading about the effects of COVID-19, Free Trade—Fair Trade provides curious readers with a pithy, wide-ranging introduction to international trade law and its many challenges. Ultimately, Trebilcock convinces his readers that international trade law—and its impact on job availability and the price and availability of goods—can make a difference in people’s everyday lives

Jurisgenerative Tissues: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Legal Secretions of 3D Bioprinting

Three-dimensional ‘bioprinting’ is under development, which may produce living human organs and tissues to be surgically implanted in patients. Like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine generally, the process of bioprinting potentially disrupts experience of the human body by redefining understandings of, and becoming actualised in new practices and regimes in relation to, the body. The authors consider how these novel sociotechnical imaginaries may emerge, having regard to law’s contribution to, as well as its possible transformation by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors draw on Gilbert Simondon and corporeal, material feminists to account for these disruptions as ‘ontogenetic,’ in the sense that technology can produce new ontologies or beings. The authors focus namely on ontogenesis, individuation and the pre-individual forces that comprise, and yet remain inexhausted by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors argue legal phenomena are pre-individual forces that ‘in-form’ ontogenesis. These pre-individual forces are indistinguishable from those implicated in the individuation of the body’s physical form; thereby, the individuation of the bodily material through 3D bioprinting may be expressive and generative of sociolegal phenomena, at least as those relate to the body. The authors conclude that 3D bioprinting shores up conventional, liberal conceptions in law of the human body as individual, bounded and primarily contractual. Three-dimensional bioprinting may introduce ontological difference to the extent it promises and realises a new temporality of the human as a species- and legal-subject, although such a development would only seem to expand, rather than attenuate, a biopolitical regime

Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour by Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano

In March 1964, the cover page of a popular German weekly magazine entitled Der Spiegel painted a frightening picture: An anthropomorphic robot with six mechanical arms commands an assembly line while a displaced human worker floats aimlessly in the foreground. Ejected from his station, the worker throws up his hands in despair next to a headline that reads, “Automation in Germany, the arrival of robots.” Over fifty years later, a cover page from the same magazine evoked similar themes: A giant robot arm yanks an office worker away from his computer under the headline, “You’re fired! How computers and robots steal our jobs – and which jobs will be safe.” The more things change, the more they stay the same

Canadian QDMTT Challenges

Nobody believes that Canada is a tax haven. The fact remains that the effective tax rate of certain entities could be less than 15%. If nothing is done, Pillar Two could therefore apply and taxes that naturally accrue to Canada could end up in foreign hands. We must therefore find a solution and the most obvious is that of adopting a qualified domestic minimum top up tax. Other solutions are possible, but they seem less attractive. A QDMTT still presents some challenges. These challenges include sharing with the provinces, determining the priority to be given to certain foreign taxes relating to Canadian income (i.e., whether those foreign taxes take priority over the QDMTT or vice versa), estimating certain foreign taxes

Assisted Suicide in Canada: Moral, Legal, and Policy Considerations by Travis Dumsday

THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA’S (SCC) decision in Carter v Canada (“Carter”) was a landmark moment in Canadian jurisprudence. In Carter, the SCC declared two sections of the Criminal Code to be of no force and effect because the “prohibition on physician assisted dying…deprives a competent adult of such assistance where (1) the person affected clearly consents to the termination of life; and (2) the person has a grievous and irredeemable medical condition…that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual.” Not only did Carter overturn an earlier decision in Rodriguez v British Columbia (Attorney General) (“Rodriguez”), which had upheld prohibitions on medical assistance in dying (MAID), but Carter was also instrumental in two other aspects of Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (“Charter”) jurisprudence

The Future Concept of Work

This chapter offers a reappraisal of the idea of ‘personal work’ and a critical assessment of the concept of subordination, which shapes the traditional contract of employment and subordinate work. The authors suggest that the notion of personal work may be more useful in attempts to develop a newly conceptualised concept of human labour, one capable of incorporating certain dimensions of (unpaid) gendered labour, ‘heteromated’ labour (‘heteromation’ is the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labour in computer-mediated networks), and other forms of socially (and ecologically) valuable labour that hitherto have been excluded from the realm of formal, protected and paid employment

Constitutional Cases (Pt 3) | Access to Justice (Panel A)

The 26th iteration of the Constitutional Cases conference was held on Friday, April 14, 2023. 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. Panel A | Access to Justice Panelists will consider issues of public interest standing, including questions of justiciability, genuine interest, and reasonable and effective means. They will consider broader issues on the intersection between rules of civil procedure and the administration of justice, and access to the justice through a disability rights lens. Panelists: 00:03:03 Professor Gerard Kennedy, UManitoba Faculty of Law 00:18:30 Elin Sigurdson, Mandell Pinder LLP 00:36:50 Professor Tess Sheldon, UWindsor Faculty of Law, Karen R. Spector, Barrister & Solicitor, and Professor Ruby Dhand, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University Chair: Professor Faisal Bhabha, Osgoode Hall Law Schoo

The Next Revolution? Negligence Law for the 21st Century

Donoghue’s neighbour is still the defining concept of Canadian tort law. Indeed, the whole history of modern negligence law can be reasonably understood as a concerted judicial effort to adapt and accommodate that principle to changing social, commercial and legal conditions. Now, 90 years later, it is perhaps time to recommend another revolution in negligence law. The Donoghue-inspired doctrine has done sterling work, but it is now weighed down with a bewildering range of conditions, clarifications and complications. When the duty analysis is complemented by other related requirements of causation and remoteness, the law of negligence has become something of a dog’s breakfast. This is compounded by the fact that tort law has become the poster-child for a general shift in law away from traditional legal reasoning to a more openly acknowledged policy analysis. This is no bad thing. But the problem is that there exist multi-dimensional and multi-located doctrinal occasions for such policy work. This does not lend itself to a doctrinal product that is either readily accessible or easily understandable. As such, the time is ripe for transforming, if not revolutionizing negligence law. This essay seeks to engage in such a transformative analysis and prescription