While Canada has long criminalized aspects of sex work, the specific act of purchasing sexual services was not against the law per se. In 2014, however, the then Conservative government implemented new legislation targeting sex work clients. Given the criminalization and persistent stigmatization of their activities, assessing clients’ changing actions, perceptions, and knowledge of the new legislation is challenging. We thus turned to a major Canadian online sex work review forum to examine postings on forum threads. This paper examines the risk knowledge practices in which clients engage as they try to make sense of the modified legal regime and avoid new legal risks. Our findings illuminate clients’ varied understandings of their own criminalization.

Canada celebrated its 150th anniversary since Confederation in 2017. At the same time, Canada is also entering an era of reconciliation that emphasizes mutually respectful and just relationships between Indigenous Peoples and the Crown. British Columbia (BC) is uniquely situated socially, politically, and economically as compared to other Canadian provinces, with few historic treaties signed. As a result, provincial, federal, and Indigenous governments are attempting to define ‘new relationships’ through modern treaties. What new relationships look like under treaties remains unclear though. Drawing from a comprehensive case study, we explore Huu-ay-aht First Nations—a signatory of the Maa-nulth Treaty, implemented in 2011—BC and Canada’s new relationship by analysing 26 interviews with treaty negotiators and Indigenous leaders. A disconnect between obligations outlined in the treaty and how Indigenous signatories experience changing relations is revealed, pointing to an asymmetrical dynamic remaining in the first years of implementation despite new relationships of modern treaty.

Against the historical backdrop of the sinking of the Canadian rum-running schooner the I’m Alone by the US Coast Guard in 1929, this paper examines the re-crafting of maritime jurisdictional practices in the 2000s through the Canada-US Cross-Border Maritime Law Enforcement Program known as Shiprider. Thinking jurisdictionally and taking seriously the materiality of the water, we explore the significance of Shiprider’s patrols in the local context of Kaniatarowano’on:we (St. Lawrence River) which flows through Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, an indigenous border nation cleaved by the Canada-US international border where local communities contend with and continue to refuse imposed colonial settler boundaries.

Every year, over 25,000 people from Mexico and the Caribbean migrate to Canada through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) to work on a Canadian farm. To what extent does the SAWP, as an institution, impact the vulnerability of migrant agricultural workers? The insights and explanations provided by neo-institutional theory’s three streams help to better account for the complexity of the economic and socio-historical SAWP-generated factors that affect the situation of migrant workers. It is shown that this program has created and continues to perpetuate a context in which it is difficult for migrant workers to have control over their working conditions.

Many types of vital research require protection of communication and information provided confidentially by research participants. In Canada, apart from information collected under the Statistics Act, the only option is a common law balancing test that creates uncertainty insofar as law is made after the fact. This paper explores the option of statute-based protection from the outset. It examines two such protections that have been in place in the United States for decades—revealing their strengths and weaknesses and how they may be applied in the Canadian context.

This article examines the role of internet service providers (ISPs) as guardians of personal information and protectors of privacy, with a particular focus on how telecom companies in Canada have historically negotiated these responsibilities. Communications intermediaries have long been expected to act as privacy custodians by their users, while simultaneously being subject to pressures to collect, utilize, and disclose personal information. As service providers gain custody over increasing volumes of highly-sensitive information, their importance as privacy custodians has been brought into starker relief and explicitly recognized as a core responsibility.

Some ISPs have adopted a more positive orientation to this responsibility, actively taking steps to advance it, rather that treating privacy protection as a set of limitations on conduct. However, commitments to privacy stewardship are often neutralized through contradictory legal obligations (such as mandated surveillance access) and are recurrently threatened by commercial pressures to monetize personal information.

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, states around the world have experienced sustained growth in the emerging industry of litigation finance in light of the perceived insularity of courtrooms from the instabilities and fluctuations of financial markets. In Canada, this nascent industry has been dominated by class actions given the high costs, risk exposures, and attractive rewards associated with collective redress. Such investments have been legitimated as promoting access to justice, a fundamental human right. This paper traces the historical and contemporary development of this legal dynamic of financialization by documenting the progressive liberalization of maintenance and champerty laws from the nineteenth century to the current period through a series of case studies, before exploring the legal economics of the emerging industry in Canada. In so doing, this paper critically examines the impacts of law’s financialization on multilayer access to justice.