In May 2012, a former research assistant contacted the Montréal police about an interview he had conducted with Luka Magnotta for the SSHRC-funded research project Sex Work and Intimacy: Escorts and their Clients four years previously. That call ultimately resulted in the Parent and Bruckert v R and Magnotta case. Now, a decade later, we are positioned to reflect on the collective lessons learned (and lost) from the case. In this paper, we provide a lay of the Canadian confidentiality landscape before teasing out ten lessons from Parent c R. To do so, we draw on personal archives, survey results from sixty researchers, twelve key informant interviews with qualitative sociolegal and criminology researchers, and documentary analysis of university research policies. The lessons, which range from the clichéd, to the practical, to the frustrating, have implications for the individual work of Canadian researchers and for the collective work of academic institutions.

The prosecutorial independence of the Attorney General (AG) is a firmly established constitutional convention in Canada, but it is also an evolving convention, subject to ongoing contestation and debate. This article is a contribution to that debate. It defends a normative constitutional framework wherein the AG’s authority to make final decisions in matters of criminal prosecution is balanced against a corresponding duty to consult with cabinet and the prime minister on the public interest implications of prosecutorial decisions when the circumstances warrant. Within this normative framework, respectful contestation and debate amongst ministers, the prime minister, and the AG in determining the public interest merits of prosecution is welcomed, even encouraged, and if conducted with the requisite integrity, objectivity, and transparency, it is regarded not as a threat but as a valuable check and balance on AG independence and an indispensable form of quality control on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

Les crises sanitaires produisent des effets transversaux sur la santé publique et l’ordre socio‑politique. Aux yeux des citoyens, c’est le pouvoir normatif qui s’est trouvé discrédité par la crise sanitaire liée à la Covid-19. Bousculée à plusieurs reprises, la norme juridique a perdu beaucoup de sa normativité et de sa valeur dans la conscience collective. Face aux différentes formes de désarticulation subies par le pouvoir normatif, il paraît urgent d’envisager des perspectives de réforme visant à rénover la fonction et le processus de création des normes juridiques. L’application des outils de la légistique et l’adoption d’une conception plus partenariale que régalienne de la fonction normative peuvent concourir au changement souhaité de la culture normative.

This article explores normative arguments for mandatory judicial bilingualism. It disentangles the links between the normative reasons advanced for mandatory bilingualism and the correlative level of French that should be expected of judges. To provide empirical anchoring, we construct a bilingualism score of Canadian Supreme Court justices composed of four indicators. The score shows that non-systematic assessments used so far like self-assessments, parliamentary hearings and media coverage are not reliable instruments to predict the level of use of French on the Supreme Court. Also, the score suggests that institutional dynamics have an impact worth studying in more depth. Ultimately, the measurement of functional bilingualism depends first on which linguistic capacity is being measured. This, in turn, depends on the normative reasons supporting the requirement of functional bilingualism. Instead of asking whether French should be mandatory upon appointment, it might be more productive to ask how much French should be required.

Canada’s National Housing Strategy (NHS) commits the government to eliminating chronic homelessness and promises that realizing the right to housing is a key objective. In this article, we explore how the Canadian government could realize the right to housing in the context of eliminating chronic homelessness. We argue that it is helpful to look at how other jurisdictions have successfully reduced homelessness. In this article we examine Finland and Scotland’s approaches because they offer certain similarities in how homelessness is addressed, yet they also differ, most crucially in how they understand the right to housing. We argue that both of these jurisdictions offer important lessons for Canada to draw on as it seeks to reduce long-term homelessness.

Mandatory meat inspection requirements have long been a source of frustration for advocates of ethical meat. Seen as overly restrictive and ill-adapted to the realities on the ground, some argue that farm-to-consumer sales should be subject to less stringent inspection requirements than conventional meat supply chains. Recently, a series of legislative reforms authorizing on-farm slaughter suggests that policy makers are listening. But do on-farm slaughter exemptions really facilitate ethical meat sales? To answer this question, this paper explores meat inspection systems in Quebec, Ontario, and Vermont. Drawing on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with producers, processors, and policy advisors, it argues that inspection requirements may not be the barriers they are presumed to be. Instead, producers and processors face other more significant financial and structural challenges. These need to be addressed if ethical meat is to be a viable alternative to the dominant model of animal agriculture.

This article offers a transnational perspective on Canada’s legislative response to globally expanded national security intelligence activities in the War on Terror since 2001. I situate Canada’s new legislation against the backdrop of US and Japanese legislative responses and analyze the transition, including Bill C-13 (2014), Bill C-44 (2015), Bill C-51 (2015), and Bill C-59 (2019). I argue that the thrust of this legislative trend has been the active legalization of previously illegal surveillance activities by security intelligence agencies, rather than passive ineffectiveness in restricting state mass surveillance enabled by information and communication technologies. The transition is in synch with a global legislative trend that lowers the legal standards of privacy and personal data protection and weakens checks and balances in democratic governance. As a result, mass surveillance has increasingly undermined and regulated the rule of law, not vice versa.