Baker McKenzie topped Thomson Reuters’ Global Elite Law Firm Brand Index for the 12th consecutive year, besting DLA Piper who have been runners-up for the third year in a row.
Clifford Chance, fifth last year, rose to third while Dentons fell to fourth, slipping a notch. Norton Rose Fulbright finished fifth, climbing up two places. (more…)
The move towards making psychedelics more readily legally accessible is gaining momentum.
The federal government quietly enacted long-awaited amendments that allow healthcare practitioners to request access to restricted drugs, like psychedelics, for patients with serious or life-threatening conditions in cases where other therapies have failed, are unsuitable, or are not available in Canada. (more…)
The Quebec Court of Appeal overturned parts of a lower court ruling that struck down certain provisions of the provincial Tobacco Control Act and upheld the constitutionality and right of the province to apply its tough and comprehensive tobacco legislation on e-cigarettes, including robust restrictions on vaping advertising. (more…)
The Quebec government is forging ahead with the deployment of a series of specialized sexual and domestic violence court pilot projects in spite of forceful opposition by the Chief Justice of the Court of Quebec, the tribunal that will manage and operate the new endeavour.
The Quebec government is launching five pilot projects in Quebec City, and the regions of Montérégie, Centre-du-Québec and Mauricie. The government selected districts based on a number of criteria, including “territorial and population realities”, the size of courthouses, the presence of community agencies working on sexual and domestic violence, and the presence of Aboriginal communities.
“The pilot projects will help to develop best practice and also to assess the impact of our specialised court model in different contexts,” said Quebec Minister of Justice Simon Jolin-Barrette in a press release.
Bill 92, An Act to create a court specialized in sexual violence and domestic violence and respecting training of judges in these matters, was unanimously adopted by the Quebec National Assembly in November 2022.
Bill 92, widely lauded by by family law experts and advocates against family and sexual violence, follows recommendations made by a report penned by former Court of Quebec Chief Justice Élizabeth Corte and Université Laval law professor Julie Desrosiers. The report, entitled “Rebuilding Trust,” called for a specialized tribunal that would take a different approach to deal with such cases.
Judicial institutions, such as specialized police units and specially trained teams of jurists, would work in tandem with social and community services to foster a victim-centered approach, without compromising the tenets of fundamental justice, told me Corte.
But current Chief Justice Louise Rondeau wants no part of the initiative. Instead, Justice Rondeau announced last fall the creation of a new divisional court dealing with conjugal and sexual complaints that is expected to be deployed early 2022.
“All these organizations do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Court,” said Justice Rondeau. “One must veer away from this perception that is emerging in society of a specialized tribunal that may have links with the way that police intervene, with the way that the Crown organizes the work of its prosecutors, with the way that community organizations provide psycho-social assistance. These measures have nothing to do with the courts. The Court is a different organization, independent.”
The government did not however announce when the pilot projects will be launched.
An anti-vaxxer mother who believes that the COVID-19 vaccine may contain electronic chips, heavy metals and aborted fetal cells lost her bid to prevent her two children from being vaccinated.
In the latest of a growing number of COVID-related cases dealt by the courts, Quebec Superior Court Justice Steve Reimnitz withdrew the woman’s parental authority in health matters of her nine and fourteen-year old kids. (more…)
Three police officers and the City of Montreal were jointly and severally ordered by Quebec Superior Court to pay a Montrealer $115,000 in damages following a wrongful arrest that occurred more than nine years ago. (more…)
The Quebec government, following up on a report that cast a critical eye on the province’s youth protection system, has tabled a proposed legislative reform that underlines and clarifies the notion of the best interests of the child as well as introduces new provisions to take into account the historical, social and cultural factors of Indigenous people.
The reform will also relax strict confidentiality provisions that have hampered communication between frontline workers and other healthcare professionals, reaffirms that children must be represented by an advocate, and entrusts the newly created position of National Director of Youth Protection with the responsibility of determining policy directions and practice standards, buttressed with the power to implement “corrective” measures.
Barely a month after a Quebec coroner recommended that people convicted of murdering their partners be compelled to wear electronic tracking devices when released from prison, the provincial government announced that some conjugal violence offenders could be ordered to wear tracking bracelets beginning next spring.
A proposed climate change class action suit by a Montreal environment group against the federal government was denied certification by the Quebec Court of Appeal after it held that it was not justiciable, the latest in a series of climate change litigation cases that have been thwarted by the justiciability doctrine, prompting questions over the successful viability of using broadly framed Charter arguments in climate justice suits in Canada.
Less than a year after delivering a stinging rebuke to the Quebec government over recurring systemic unmitigated delays in securing trial transcripts that disproportionately affect English-speaking appellants, the Quebec Court of Appeal served a timely reminder over the importance of linguistic rights after it ordered a new trial for a convicted drug trafficker whose right to be tried in English was violated.
The decision, brimming with practical guidance aimed particularly at trial judges and Crown prosecutors, reiterates that courts that hold criminal trials “must be institutionally bilingual,” restates that it strongly favours consecutive translation over simultaneous interpretation in criminal trials, and prohibits so-called whispering interpretation from being practiced as it is “inconsistent” with s. 530.1(g) of the Criminal Code and guidance issued by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Tran, [1994] 2 S.C.R. 951.
“This is a timely decision,” noted Martine Valois, a law professor at the Université de Montréal who wrote a book on judicial independence. “This is a problem, and it does no service to the accused or the justice system. This is not a political and linguistic issue, and it has nothing to do with the French fact in Quebec or the survival of French language. It’s really an issue over the rights of the accused (and ensuring that the) justice system be institutionally bilingual.”
The ruling also underscores yet again that the Quebec justice system is plagued by a systemic lack of resources, added Quebec City criminal lawyer Julien Grégoire of Gagnon & Associés, avocats.
“It’s very difficult to understand how, five years after the Jordan decision, we in Quebec can still find ourselves in this situation,” said Grégoire. “A major drug trafficker was granted, unfortunately but fittingly as far as I am concerned, a new trial to basically allow him to have access to fair justice in the language of his choice and in a process that minimally but truly respects his right to a trial in the language he understands best.”
A controversial Quebec bill that would amend the Civil Code and family law has been lauded for creating a legal framework for the use of surrogate mothers but has been slammed for scaling back trans rights and possibly opening the door to a divisive debate over the rights of a foetus.
Police officers who demand drivers to provide breath samples must have an approved screening device with them to be able to immediately conduct the test, ruled a full bench of the Quebec Court of Appeal, upending its own previous guidance that allowed delays depending on the circumstances.
The long-awaited ruling sets clear obligations for police officers, falls in line with Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence that asserts that delays cannot be justified for practical reasons given that the right to counsel is temporarily suspended, and is widely expected to have an sizeable impact on impending cases, according to criminal lawyers.
Barely two weeks after the Quebec Justice Minister and the Chief Justice of the Court of Quebec publicly clashed over competing visions on how to deal with conjugal and sexual violence, a judicial compensation committee released a report recommending sizeable salary increases for the provincial judiciary, laying the groundwork for even further friction between the executive and the judiciary.
A five-member blue-ribbon panel (pdf) of legal and financial experts recommended boosting the renumeration of Court of Quebec judges from the current $255,000 to $310,000 by July 2022, which would make them the third best paid provincially appointed judges, behind Ontario and Saskatchewan. The independent committee would have recommended a more significant increase “had it not been for the uncertainty created by the pandemic” on Quebec’ economy and public finances.
Quebec notaries can now heave a huge sigh of relief after the Court of Appeal found that their duty to inform depends on the circumstances and relationship they have with their client.
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A new corporate transparency law recently enacted by the Quebec government will compel all private corporations and partnerships, regardless of where it is registered or incorporated, who conduct business in the province to disclose the identity and some information of the beneficial owners of their shares in a publicly accessible database, a requirement that goes further than similar legislation passed by the federal government and other provinces.