Law Commons^™

Social Media Crime In Canada: Annotated Criminal Code, R.S.C., 1985, C. C-46, 2nd Ed., Benjamin Perrin

All Faculty Publications

Over 80% of Canadians use the Internet and approximately 20 million Canadians are active on social media networks. It is not surprising that criminal activity is taking place in these global digital communities and this is raising challenges for criminal law and the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court of Canada recently recognized in R. v. K.R.J. that “[t]he rate of technological change over the past decade has fundamentally altered the social context” in which certain crimes are occurring and social media networks have given “unprecedented access to potential victims and avenues” for offending.

This annotated Criminal Code aims to …

Nagwediẑk’An Gwaneŝ Gangu Ch’Inidẑed Ganexwilagh: The Fires Awakened Us: Tsilhqot’In Report On The 2017 Wildfires, Jocelyn Stacey, Crystal Verhaeghe, Emma Feltes

All Faculty Publications

This report documents the experiences of the Tsilhqot'in Nation during the historic 2017 wildfire season. It identifies needs and recommendations for moving forward with nation-to-nation emergency management.

Operative Subsidiary And Municipal Authority: The Case Of Toronto's Ward Boundary Review, Alexandra Flynn

All Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes what the principle of subsidiarity means for municipalities, arguing in favour of “operative subsidiarity” in the design of provincial legislation. First, I outline the meaning and origins of subsidiarity, including critiques in the potential of its application. Second, I discuss the judicial treatment of municipal authority in Canada over the last twenty years. I advance that municipal authority as interpreted by the SCC has increasingly made room for municipalities as governments deserving of deference, unless the action breaches fairness or human rights. However, despite this judicial evolution, provinces have not drafted legislation with the principle of subsidiarity …

Transnational Law As Unseen Law, Natasha Affolder

All Faculty Publications

Part of the continuing allure of Philip Jessup’s account of transnational law, published in 1956, lies in its promise of capturing something beyond the easily visible bodies of public and private international law. Attempts to name and to frame this unseen law continue to this day. This chapter, part of a collection commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the publication of Transnational Law, examines the intellectual holding pen created by Jessup for other rules and sources of law, his “larger storehouse of rules”. While this initiative was firmly aimed at expanding the view of law to see beyond the …

About A Revolution: Toward Integrated Treatment In Drug And Mental Health Courts, Sara Gordon

All Faculty Publications

and mental health courts, which proponents claim created a revolution in criminal justice. Defendants whose underlying crime is the result of a substance use disorder or a mental health disorder can choose to be diverted into a specialty court, where they receive treatment instead of punishment. Many of these individuals, however, do not just suffer from a substance use disorder or a mental health disorder; instead, many have a “cooccurring disorder.” Approximately 8.9 million American adults have co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders, and almost half of individuals who meet diagnostic criteria for one disorder will also meet criteria …

Punishment And Its Limits, Debra Parkes

All Faculty Publications

The nearly three decades in which Beverley McLachlin was a member of the Supreme Court, including as Chief Justice, witnessed a number of shifts in Canadian penal policy and in the reach and impact of criminal law. During the Harper decade (2006 to 2015) in which the federal Conservatives enjoyed a majority government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, criminal justice policy took a turn toward the punitive. The federal government tore a page out of the American legislative handbook and sought to “govern through crime”, albeit in a more restrained Canadian style.

Regulating Systemic Risk In Canada, Anita Anand, Maziar Peihani

All Faculty Publications

This chapter is a contribution to an interdisciplinary book that drew on some of the world's leading experts on financial stability and regulation to examine and critique the progress made since 2008 in addressing systemic risk. The chapter contends that Canadian regulators’ ability to address systemic risk is limited by the structure of the regime, built on a sector-by-sector model, without any one institution responsible for comprehensively regulating the financial system. We also posit the proposal to establish a macroprudential regulator to monitor the financial system as a whole, as advocated by academic literature and international forums, is unlikely …

Decentralizing Legislation In China’S Law On Legislation Amendment, Wei Cui, Jiang Wan

All Faculty Publications

We present a novel account of China’s recent move to decentralize legislation through amending the Law on Legislation (LL). Conventional wisdom pervading both Chinese political discourse and social scientific scholarship on China portrays law as incompatible with experimentation and as only suitable for codifying policies adopted after experimentation. Moreover, the value of legislatures is viewed as lying in their independence from the executive branch. We highlight rationales offered by the Chinese Communist Party for the LL amendment that repudiate these assumptions: the Party proclaimed the intention to promote lawmaking as a central instrument of policy experimentation; moreover, the Party’s intervention …

Unreasonable Steps: Trying To Make Sense Of R. V. Morrison, Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

All Faculty Publications

Children and youth routinely have easy, unsupervised access to the internet through smartphones and tablets. This connectivity increases the danger that adults will sexually exploit them. Adult chat rooms, which may require nothing more than a child checking a box indicating that they are over the age of 18, are a common site for such exploitation. In most cases, this behaviour only comes to light when either a parent becomes aware of the activity, or when an in-person sexual offence against a child is detected and the online communications are discovered in the course of the investigation.