I once had a boss task me with reinventing a litigation procedure that had gone stale. Blowing up the system to find a (hopefully) better way to do something. Every legal nerd’s dream. This pandemic is the bomb that reset the legal system. There’s no going back to the administration we once occupied. How it...Read More

The pandemic has sentenced everyone to an indefinite term of house arrest. Lawyers — especially trial lawyers — fit within one lifestyle extreme or another: Team Sloth; e.g., Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, mixed with the drinking finesse of Denny Crane from Boston Legal versus Team Crazy; as in, Hollywood divorce queen Laura Dern...Read More

Generally, people don’t sign up to go to jail. Sentencing is not an optional exercise. Society has made peace with the basic punishments of prison life: deprivation of liberty, personal security, goods, privacy. COVID-19 has skipped the line. The virus has added to the list of punishments without going through the proper channels (i.e. the...Read More

One might be intoxicated if they were to drink every time a reporter asked Prime Minister Trudeau whether he will try to invoke the Emergencies Act, R.S.C., 1985, c.22 (4th Supp.). As cases grow each day and the death toll climbs, we are becomingly justifiably anxious. We grasp at what we can control when trying...Read More

At only five per cent of the population in Canada, Aboriginal people now represent 30 per cent of federally sentenced inmates. This is a five percent bump from the last available data. It doesn’t require a statistician to determine that it’s only getting worse. I woke up the day after the late-January release of a...Read More

We are at the S-O-S stage of the fentanyl and opioid crisis. Predictably, our first response was to blame the addicts, throwing them in jail for as long as possible. Shockingly, the crisis didn’t go away. A wider net was cast. Prescribing doctors in the U.S. were next. On Oct. 24, the New York Court...Read More

Collect evidence now, ask questions later. That is the approach of police and FBI in the U.S. using GEDmatch, a DNA data collection site that combines results from the popular 23andMe and Ancestry sites. The site was praised for helping solve the mystery of the Golden State serial killer. Before any courts can weigh in,...Read More

The final report of the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) national inquiry, published June 3, 2019, evokes mixed feelings. Do I believe that it is a genocide? No. Labelling it as such implies that there is a single villain. They are the forgotten people. Neglected and vulnerable to crimes of violence. I have been a...Read More

A child in imminent danger needs to be saved from their abductor. This is the goal of the amber alert system. Like any emergency response system, it needs to be updated. I’m willing to stick my neck out to suggest we take this a step further and ask: does the amber alert system cause more...Read More

Up until this past week Justin Trudeau has been regarded as soft. Dealing with Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott has forced him to begin the growth process into a role his father played well: decisive political leader. The past two months have been rough for Justin. The decision to expel Wilson-Raybould and Philpott is one...Read More