“Last week, the Quebec and Montreal bar associations dropped a bombshell into the Quebec political and legislative scene with a lawsuit seeking a declaration from the courts that the statutes and laws of Quebec are invalid in their entirety because the process by which they were enacted violates the Canadian Constitution.” [Matthew P. Harrington, Montreal Gazette] The bars “state the problem is the laws are drafted in French and then translated into English only after the fact instead of simultaneously,” despite an interpretation arising from the British North America Act that laws must be enacted simultaneously in both languages. The practice also hands over to the assembly’s translators a degree of discretion over what the law should be that can properly be exercised only by lawmakers themselves. [Canadian Press/Montreal Gazette] Invalidating a province’s laws because of this issue would not be unprecedented, Harrington says: in 1985 the Supreme Court of Canada “found that Manitoba’s unilingual enactment process required that a century’s worth of statutes be declared invalid and that they be re-enacted in both official languages.”
Posts Tagged ‘Canada’
Canada follows a UN lead on indigenous rights
The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has moved to support bringing Canada’s laws into line with the terms of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, something predecessor administrations had resisted. The result is likely to involve major changes to the current rights and obligations of Canadians [Matt Pollard, Opinio Juris; earlier on the Declaration here and here, and related here, here and here]
Distantly related, perhaps: a symposium on “Global Justice for Indigenous Languages” [Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights]
“Man sues 10-year-old girl after jogging into her bike”
British Columbia, Canada: “A man who sued a young girl and her grandparents after he was injured when he jogged into the back wheel of her bike has lost his case in B.C. Supreme Court.” The jogger “also included the girl’s grandparents, Wendy and Patrick Marlow, in the lawsuit on the basis that they didn’t properly teach her to ride a bike safely. The judgment also clears them of liability.” [Maryse Zeidler, CBC]
Liability roundup
- Activist high court, no-fault PPI auto insurance, assignment-of-benefits (AOB) claims helped Florida win top Judicial Hellhole ranking from American Tort Reform Foundation [Amy O’Connor, Insurance Journal]
- Maybe getting people interested in the age-old ethical dangers of champerty and maintenance would be easier if litigation finance were framed as a Chamber of Commerce vs. Peter Thiel match-up [Jacob Gershman, WSJ] “Prosecutors Investigate Firms That Offer Plaintiffs Early Cash” [Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, New York Times]
- Seventh Circuit: parents, not Starbucks, bore duty of protecting 3-year-old from harm resulting from playing on crowd-control stanchions [Roh v. Starbucks]
- British Columbia is only Canadian province without limits on soft-tissue injury claims after car crashes, and now fiscal implosion at province-owned auto insurer ICBC may force leftist NDP government to reconsider that [Mike Smyth/The Province, Jason Proctor and Karin Larsen, CBC]
- “NYS Exposed: The one law adding $10,000 to the cost of a new home” [WHEC, New York Post editorial on scaffold law and other elements of state liability scene, earlier]
- “Former South Carolina Lawmaker Sentenced for Improperly Using Office to Help Trial Lawyers” [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform; Glenn Smith, Post and Courier; John Monk, The State]
Wage and hour roundup
- “The biggest question from Friday’s disappointing Canadian employment report is how much can be traced to Ontario’s sharp minimum wage increase last month.” [Theophilos Argitis and Erik Hertzberg, Bloomberg] Decline in teen employment in US since 2000 was sharpest for those age 16–17, examining some reasons [David Neumark and Cortnie Shupe, Mercatus Working Paper via Connor Wolf, Inside Sources]
- “Will D.C. End Tipping?” [Thomas Firey, Cato] “I’m your bartender. I don’t want a raise.” [Ryan Aston, Washington Post] Hollywood campaign isn’t helping [Wendyll Caisse, Inside Sources on Restaurant Opportunities Center vs. Restaurant Workers of America]
- If freedom of contract had been respected, whole debate would look different to begin with: “A Colorado Minimum Wage Waiver?” [Ryan Bourne, Cato]
- Federal regulatory role: “Will Restaurants Steal Employees’ Tips if the Feds Let Them?” [Robert Verbruggen, NRO]
- Seyfarth Shaw survey: while employers beat more wage/hour cases at the certification stage in 2017, overall class action payouts in workplace class actions continued to soar [Glenn Minnis, Cook County Record]
- “If You Don’t Want To Tip 15%, An NYC Lawyer Will Help You Sue Applebee’s” [Angela Underwood, Legal Newsline]
Banking and finance roundup
- D.C. Circuit’s en banc decision upholding constitutionality of CFPB disappointing but not surprising. On to SCOTUS [Ilya Shapiro, Aaron Nielson, Jonathan Adler]
- Big thinking under way at the SEC could replace securities class action sector with free contract: “The SEC should authorize mandatory arbitration of shareholder class action lawsuits” [Bainbridge, Benjamin Bain/Bloomberg News (noting that broker dealers have long been free to use arbitration clauses)]
- Milberg Weiss founder Melvyn Weiss dies at 82 [ABA Journal, our coverage over the years of Weiss and his firm, @PaulHorwitz (“Give generously, and to the right people, so that your NYT obit can be a glowing apologia despite a few inconvenient facts.”)]
- Here come the shareholder derivative suits over sleazy-boss #MeToo scandals [Kevin LaCroix] “NERA: 2017 Securities Suits Filed at ‘Record Pace'” [same]
- Rogoff rebuttals: “More Evidence of the High Collateral Damage of a War on Cash” [Lawrence White, Cato, earlier] “Money as coined liberty” [David R. Henderson]
- Quotas/targets for percentages of women, disabled and indigenous persons on Canadian corporate boards? [Terence Corcoran/Financial Post, more]
Ontario lawyers resist mandatory promote-equality pledge
Lakehead University law faculty member Ryan Alford has filed a challenge to the new Ontario bar rule requiring all lawyers to prepare and submit personal “Statement of Principles” avowing their support for equality, diversity, and inclusion. The rules have drawn fire across Canada as compelled speech, but the bar association turned down a request that individual lawyers be allowed exemptions if they believe the requirement violates their conscience. I’ve got a write-up at Cato at Liberty noting the parallels with Model Rule 8.4 (g), adopted by the ABA in 2016, which makes a vaguely defined category of discriminatory conduct, including speech, the subject of discipline as “professional misconduct,” and which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton warns would be unconstitutional if adopted into state regulation. I write:
The “Test Acts” were a series of enactments of England that excluded from public office and penalized in other ways those who would not swear allegiance to the prevailing religious tenets of the day. There is no good reason to bring back their principles.
Full piece here. More: Scott Greenfield.
Wage and hour roundup
- Among this administration’s most notable accomplishments — hurrah for Labor Sec. Alex Acosta and team — is to ditch its predecessor’s horrible overtime rules [Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post on opinion letters and internships] DoL rollback of Obama rules on tip pooling is fully justified [Christian Britschgi]
- “A Seattle Game-Changer? The latest empirical research further underscores the harm of minimum wage laws” [Ryan Bourne, Regulation mag] “Report: California’s $15 Minimum Wage Will Destroy 400,000 Jobs” [Scott Shackford]
- It just couldn’t have been Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne’s fault that some donut-franchise workers saw benefits and breaks trimmed after a minimum wage hike. “Instead, she attacked the employers.” [David Henderson; Robyn Urback/CBC and May Warren/Toronto Metro on changes by owners of some Tim Horton outlets]
- Study: grocery stores hike prices when minimum wage rises, “poor households are most negatively affected” [Tyler Cowen on Renkin, Montialoux, and Siegenthaler paper] New York enacts a minimum wage law applying to restaurant chains with at least 30 outlets, and presto-change-o, some upstate pizzerias have new names and are now separate businesses [Geoff Herbert, Syracuse.com]
- “Employer Responsibilities under the Fair Labor Standards Act After a Disaster” [Annamaria Duran, SwipeClock, promotional material for software product but informative even so]
- If lawsuits succeed in forcing ridesharing into employment mold, many will find it less attractive to earn money by driving [Coyote]
Quebec lawmakers to shopkeepers: don’t greet customers with “Bonjour hi”
A bilingual greeting might make English speakers feel too welcome, so the legislators of Quebec passed a unanimous though unenforceable resolution disapproving of its use by merchants [Dan Bilefsky, New York Times]
A Canadian hair-analysis lab and its fateful findings
“Motherisk, a once-respected lab inside [Canada’s premier] Hospital for Sick Children, performed tests for more than 100 child welfare providers in five provinces, an investigation reveals.” The lab performed hair-strand drug and alcohol tests “on at least 25,000 people across Canada. The tests were discredited, but not before they were used in at least eight criminal cases and thousands of child protection cases. Now, many of those cases are under review.” While many of the cases drew on evidence other than the hair tests, false positives for drug or alcohol abuse could be a factor in temporary or permanent removal of children from parents [Toronto Star]
In British Columbia, a mother is desperate to convince the children she lost years ago that she didn’t choose drugs over them.
In Nova Scotia, a 7-year-old girl prays for her brother, who was adopted into another family.
And in Ontario, a mother whose daughters were taken shortly after they were born is waiting for a reunion that may never come.
More on questionable crime labs: Radley Balko on a new Massachusetts scandal (not the big previous one); John Oliver.