Canadian courts, even though they are not litigants, third parties may have an interest in intervening in court proceedings because the court’s judgment may affect them or others whom they represent. They often have information that they believe may be relevant to the courts in making their decisions. In Canada, interveners usually appear in appellate […]

Various provincial and federal jurisdictions choose to protect people from discrimination on various grounds in areas such as employment, services customarily available to the public and tenancy. In some cases, the grounds protected are the same across jurisdictions. In others, court challenges have resulted in court orders that grounds are to be read into human […]

Recently, the Alberta government agreed to add protection for age discrimination in the Alberta Human Rights Act (AHRA) in two areas—tenancy and services, goods and accommodation customarily available to the public. This was the result of a Consent Order on January 13, 2017 in the case of Ruth Maria Adria v Attorney General of Alberta. […]

Whenever I teach undergrad students about gender discrimination, they are often quite shocked to discover that as recently as the 1970s, there was a Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling that found that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy was not a form of gender discrimination (See: Bliss v Canada (Attorney General), [1979] 1 SCR […]