Lessons in Cause-and-Effect; from Walkerton to the Novel Coronavirus The interesting thing about disaster is that it generally surprises when it strikes, yet it is often revealed to have been entirely predictable and preventable in hindsight. Take the Walkerton E. coli disaster of 2000 as an example: more than two thousand sick, six people dead, and an entirely predictable and preventable...
Time for the Republic of Canada I consider myself to be a bit of a traditionalist. I grew up in a family where my grandmothers on both sides were (are) enamoured by our monarch, the Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II. Somewhat an oddity considering my late-grandmother on my Father’s side was of Polish-German descent, and my grandmother on my Mother’s side is French-Canadian – neither, of course, being...
What the courts of equity have to say about Taylor Swift’s contract dispute with Big Machine Records Welcome to Nashville Taylor Swift is one of the most powerful musicians in the world. In 2019, Forbes estimated the country starlet turned popstar boasted a net worth of approximately $360 million. On social media, Taylor holds an impressive 123 million followers on Instagram. Yet, a...
What HBO’s Watchmen can tell us about the relationship between law and justice. In the fall television season, HBO debuted their newest series Watchmen to great critical and consumer praise. The show is a continuation of the story depicted in the Alan Moore series of comics which ran in 1987 also titled “Watchmen.” The story of Watchmen — like its comic source material — takes place in an...
The CBC and US President Trump Both Learn Hard Lessons Over the Holidays in Cause-and-Effect Christmas holidays did not come and go without controversy, predictable of course, for these times we live in. Specifically, there was a notable online backlash against Canadian public broadcaster, Canadian Broadcast Corporation (“CBC”), after they aired a slightly edited version of the classic...
Conservative MP on the rural-urban divide, firearms, and the role of law students in a democracy Jamie Schmale (CPC), the newly re-elected Member of Federal Parliament for the rural Central-Ontario riding of Haliburton – Kawartha Lakes – Brock recently sat down with Obiter’s Opinion Editor, Corey LeBlanc, to speak about rural – urban issues, firearms, and the involvement of law students in the...
and One Easy Way to Do It Given the past few months in both Canadian politics and culture, one can be forgiven for thinking the wheels have started coming completely off the proverbial cart. Almost daily we turn on the six o’clock news to hear lurid stories about the Prime Minister wearing blackface, leading politicians ranting and raving about the illegitimacy of gay marriage, Canadian cultural...
Exam time is approaching, which means there has been an uptick in Osgoode’s focus on mental health. With all the calls for “self care!” and “yoga!” it can be tempting to view the school as a bastion of mental health advocacy, but we should instead cast a critical eye onto these efforts and recognize that the stress is coming from inside the house. A professor recently told a...
And the Many Different Ways We Will be Evaluated As we all know by now, exams are right around the corner. As a 1L, it was news to me that a final exam could have so many different forms. Papers, take homes, in-class closed book, and in-class open book, to name a few. Let’s take a look at these and see what’s particularly the most fair (or unfair). The final paper worth 80-100% of your mark is an...
On November 30th, the TTC will stop selling tickets, tokens and passes. “Not to worry,” their subway posters tell us, “PRESTO’s got you covered.” This cheerful reassurance hides the fact that this latest change to service is approaching the last step in a gradual process of de-anonymization: beginning with the introduction of PRESTO in 2009, accelerating with the extinction of the Metropass last...
Don Cherry finds himself off-side with the public, and his employer I already knew what was coming before the final notes of ‘Flame of Victory’ had faded into silence. In fact, wanting to hear Canada’s most controversial sports personality go off was the sole reason why I took a break from paper-writing, and tuned in to the last five minutes of the...
Representative Democracy protects us from runaway majoritarianism On the evening of election day November 7th, 2000, then-Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush won the White House by carrying 30 states and their 271 electoral college votes. His Democratic opponent, Al Gore, won only 20 states and their 266 electoral college votes – despite receiving over 500,000 more votes in the...
The LSO’s Statement of Principles Missed Its Mark At September’s convocation, the Law Society of Ontario (“LSO”) voted 28–20 (with two abstentions) to repeal the Statement of Principles (“SOP”), an oath that every licensee must adopt in their annual report “to promote equality, diversity and inclusion”, both generally and in one’s “behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.”...
At the height of the SNC-Lavalin scandal in March, CTV News cited an anonymous source who said the relationship between former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau soured after she proposed Mantioba Justice Glenn Joyal to replace Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin on the Supreme Court of Canada. According to the source, Trudeau was disturbed by Wilson-Raybould’s...
Hong Kong in crisis – an on-the-ground perspective From merely urging for a withdrawal of a bill to presently calling for “five demands, not one less”, Hong Kongers have been through a tumultuous three months. The ability of the pro-democracy movement to regain its composure after the government’s military response to the protests can be seen as a signal that they will not repeat the same...
Thoughts on Our Constitutional Values Jack Letts was born and raised in England. He likes pasties and Dr. Who, speaks with a British accent, and looks like someone you’d call a regular bloke. But as of this summer, Jack Letts is no longer a citizen of the United Kingdom. After travelling to Syria in 2014 to join ISIL (where he admittedly fought against the Syrian army, trained child soldiers and...
Our imperfect political leaders represent an imperfect Canada ‘May you live in interesting times’, goes the purported ancient Chinese proverb; and considering the options available to Canadians casting a ballot in the upcoming federal election, interesting times we live in, indeed. The leader of the Liberal Party, our incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has recently been found to have had...
Uncertainty and apprehension froths in the air, signaling the end of the formal articling recruit and the beginning of fresh chaos. Ashy, sunken faces of third-year law students are starting to thaw and, sometimes, they imbue with colour. For most, the journey was rigorous and eventful. Had the first two years of law school aptly prepared students for this moment? Of course. Vigorous...
Click-Bait Journalism is Damaging the Industry’s Credibility Initially, the internet was supposed to save journalism. The internet provided journalists, and the newsrooms that employed them, what seemed like an effective counter-punch to the on-the-minute breaking stories found on cable news and talk radio, which had so wounded the relevance of print media through the 1980s and 90s. Yet...
The UFO Phenomenon Breaks Into the Mainstream Widespread contemporary interest in unidentified flying objects, popularly known as ‘UFOs’, is agreed to have been sparked by the 1947 Roswell incident, in which an object described by witnesses as looking like a ‘flying disc’, or ‘saucer’, is reported to have crashed at a ranch outside of the sleepy city of Roswell, New Mexico. This incident sparked...
The people of Hong Kong have been under some form of political subjugation since at least 1842, when Qing China formally ceded Hong Kong Island to the British Empire with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. The Treaty — which came as a consequence of the Qing defeat in the First Opium War — formalized Hong Kong Island as a Crown colony “in perpetuity” and began an era of colonial control over...
Discriminatory legislation in Quebec met with a national shrug As Canadians, we are taught from a young age that we possess certain inalienable rights and freedoms, and that the governments we elect have the responsibility of upholding and protecting them. A few months ago, however, Quebec’s Premier, Francois Legault, awoke many Canadians to the harsh reality that those same governments are also...
Doug Ford’s gas pump stickers are meant to mislead There are different ways to be wrong, and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario’s plan to mandate a ‘federal carbon tax notice’ on gas pumps across the province can lay claim to at least two of them: they’re misleading, and they’re unconstitutional. The simple, easy rebuke of these problematic sticky squares lies in their failure to...
Corey Robert LeBlanc – Opinions Editor When Obiter’s Editor-in-Chief asked each of us section editors to pen a welcome message to each of you for the 2019-20 school year, I admit that I found the exercise a bit hokey. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to introduce myself, or that I am uninterested in outlining my intentions for this section, but rather that I simply believe that it is a boring...
Growing up I loved Kool-Aid. I would drink that sugar water like there was no tomorrow. I would plead with my mother to get me the juice pouches and send me off with it with my packed school lunches. Whenever the iconic “Oh yeah!” would play on a commercial or on Family Guy (back when that show was good), I would get excited. Yet, as I grew up, the drink lost its charm and man oh man, how...