Through a critical discourse lens, a review of formal police documents detailing historical contact with the perpetrator of Canada’s worst mass casualty event aims to demonstrate that the perpetrator’s Whiteness and socio-economic status deemed him benign and thus invisible to law enforcement officials during the early stages of the mass casualty investigation. This exploration contributes to a broader racialized analysis of who is deemed suspicious or harmless within the context of policing. By contrasting the experiences of Black Nova Scotians with the police to those of the perpetrator, this case study will demonstrate how institutional procedures and processes, influenced by biases, not only produce and maintain racial disparities within the criminal justice system, but also negatively impact law enforcement officials’ ability to conduct fair and thorough criminal investigations, ultimately impeding public safety. The impact on police legitimacy is also discussed.

Secularism has long been employed by states to signal their emancipation from “religion,” itself often positioned as unmodern and undemocratic. In this paper, we examine the ways in which secularism is understood in contemporary debates in Quebec. While secularism is typically employed to regulate religion, often with a focus on Islam, we show that with An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State (2019) its usage is mobilised to articulate the distinctiveness of the “Quebec nation.” Based on our discourse analysis of the 35 public briefs in favour of the Act, submitted to the Quebec legislature prior to its enactment, we show how most of these submissions define laïcité as a necessary tool to emancipate the Quebec nation from the rest of Canada. Laïcité is thus conceptualized as central to Quebec’s identity and constructed in opposition to a Canadian liberal-multicultural-Anglophone Other.

Comme tous les grands transporteurs aériens, l’entreprise Air Canada a été très durement frappée par la Grande récession survenue à l’échelle mondiale en 2008. Ses activités et ses revenus ont chuté dramatiquement et, outre des mises à pied et des licenciements collectifs, l’entreprise a cherché à limiter ses coûts de main-d’œuvre en réduisant les avantages des régimes de retraite en vigueur. La présente étude s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une vaste recherche sur la grande entreprise au Canada et le déclin de la citoyenneté au travail. Elle s’intéresse plus particulièrement à l’impact de la crise financière de 2008 sur la dynamique des relations de travail et l’évolution de la citoyenneté au travail chez Air Canada : nous entendons vérifier en particulier si nos hypothèses d’une médiation des interactions entre économie et droit par le politique, d’une part, par les relations industrielles (autonomie collective), d’autre part, se confirment ou non.

This study examines the recent proliferation of manslaughter charges and subsequent prosecutions brought against people who have shared, sold, or provided drugs that have led to overdose death in Canada. It presents a documentary analysis of news media coverage, court decisions, and Access-to-Information and Freedom-of-Information requests of materials from criminal legal institutions. The analysis finds that the vast majority of those who face manslaughter charges are engaged in the lowest tiers of the drug trade, are themselves people who use drugs, and are often intimately known to the deceased. Messaging by police, prosecutors and the courts mobilize the overdose crisis as rationale for these charges and prosecutions, positioning them as a form of redress to impacted communities. This phenomenon illustrates how punitive criminal legal responses to the overdose crisis have deepened alongside the retreat of criminal law in other circumstances, contradicting claims of a therapeutic turn in Canadian drug policies.

The statutory authorities to remove and to review appeals of removal assigned in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) exist in a complicated, interweaving relationship with the legal power to sentence held by judges of the criminal court. Judges do not retain the legal authority to decide on removal. Judges do, however, hold the jurisdiction to consider deportation at sentencing. The practice of judicial jurisdiction in turn has potentially significant effects for subsequent practices of jurisdiction under the IRPA, including where judges use their legal power to apply sentences protecting permanent residents from removal and/or losing their right of appeal. Despite these important jurisdictional connections, how judicial authority to consider deportation is enacted has not received scholarly examination. This paper draws from an analysis of case law and interviews to address this gap, tracing how judges practice their jurisdiction when sentencing permanent residents.

Prolonged solitary confinement is inconsistent with international minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners and may constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. In a series of recent cases, appellate courts in Canada have curtailed the use of prolonged solitary confinement in prisons on the basis that such detention is “grossly disproportionate” and “cruel and unusual.” But these judgments in the penal context have not resulted in comparable regulation of seclusion in forensic psychiatric hospitals. Seclusion in these contexts is often comparable to solitary confinement in prison and carries with it the same serious risks of lasting harm. This article comparatively reviews the legislative and policy framework that regulates the use of seclusion in different provinces in Canada. The article argues that case law on prolonged solitary confinement in the penal context has application to the forensic psychiatric context and that a failure to more closely regulate the use of seclusion may render this type of mental health legislation and treatment unconstitutional.

While Canadian law has started to seriously grapple with questions that relate to reconciliation with Indigenous communities and laws, much of the focus is on specific, often resource-based, projects. As a result, there has been relatively little attention paid to other aspects of reconciliation, such as how legal aspects of employment may be re-evaluated. Employment law is a useful place to start as employment is a fundamental aspect of a person’s life, providing both financial support and a contributory role in society. This paper examines how different societal values impact employment law and in particular, how Coast Salish worldviews and law may impact, facilitate, and resist, the employment legislation in force in British Columbia.

The arrival of COVID-19 added potentially deadly consequences to incarceration. In response, jurisprudence developed allowing for some to be spared the deprivation of their liberty. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence that this avoidance of incarceration occurred in practice in Ontario. Using fieldwork methods conducted in Ontario criminal courts coupled with data from Statistics Canada, we investigate if a change in the use of incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and if friction emerged between those who may and may not espouse this new outlook. We find a notable and persistent decrease in the use of incarceration, that this was welcomed by many court actors but also that a fatigue with such leniency grew among others. We discuss what this fatigue might signify for the potential longevity of this more exceptional use of incarceration and more largely what this can signify about changes in Canada’s criminal justice system.