Introduction The Christmas and New Year holiday season is a good time to reflect generally on work and legally enforced rest. This article is about the law of holidays, the legislated observance, and payment of holidays by employers across the country for the benefit of their workers. There is substantial overlap of holidays in Canada. […]
No Judicial Role in Religious Disputes: Jehovah’s Witnesses v Wall
Introduction A perennial criticism of the Canadian judiciary is its excessive activism. Many think that the courts have helped fashion Canada into a nanny state and the Supreme Court of Canada is the most interventionist of the nanny courts. The recent case of Highwood Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses v Wall deals with whether a court […]
Liability of Volunteers in Natural Disaster Emergencies
Introduction Alberta has recently suffered several sudden, prominent, ruinous natural calamities: the 2012 wildfires in Slave Lake, the 2013 flood in southern Alberta, and the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray. The 2013 flood affected hundreds of thousands of people and took five lives. It is the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history with damages […]
Words Matter
November 2, 2018 By Peter Bowal
Introduction Several decades ago, in my first summer job during university, I washed dishes and performed other unskilled labours in the kitchen of a large government seniors’ nursing home in rural Alberta. While the work itself was not particularly memorable, I observed in that workplace of 15 men, the manager obviously decided to discriminate against […]
One’s Trash May be Police Treasure: R v Patrick
“Location is not the litmus test for determining the expectation of privacy.” R v Patrick, 2009 SCC 17, para 6 Introduction In Canada, our home is our castle, at least in legal terms. We enjoy the greatest constitutional protection of privacy in our homes. What happens when our private personal information from our homes is […]
