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Aboriginal representation in Canadian correctional institutions has increased rapidly over the past decade. We calculated “years of life lost to incarceration” for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.
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In this article, practices of Canadian electoral management bodies at federal provincial and territorial levels are examined, especially those methods designed to assist electors with disabilities with voting. Different models of disability co-exist within and around electoral rules, procedures, practices and overall systems. Electoral arrangements in Canada incorporate three distinct models of disability: an individualistic-biomedical approach to disability, a functional model of disability, and a social model of disability. These models have distinctive implications for addressing barriers and making access and inclusion real for voters with disabilities. Electoral reforms address different broad categories of impairments: electors with permanent disabilities, serious illness or infirmity; electors with physical mobility issues; electors with hearing challenges; electors with visual impairments; and, electors with any significant disability, whether chronic or episodic in nature, visible or invisible in appearance. Changes to election processes are shifting the mix of disability models embedded in electoral systems, away from individual and medical conceptions and toward functional and contextual notions of disability.
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Proportionality: Constitutional Rights and their Limitation is the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the vast literature on proportionality and would be indispensable to anyone interested in the field. Barak evaluates several justifications for the use of proportionality and several defences of proportionality against its critics. This review article concentrates on one such defence: viewing proportionality as a structured and analytically coherent set of tests requiring the government to provide reasons and justifications for all of its actions. We identify several prominent recent writers, Barak among them, who represent a shift in the literature on proportionality towards a justification-based approach, and assess their rationales for the duty of the government to give justifications and provide reasons for its actions. However, we claim that those rationales do not necessarily support proportionality and that a more categorical approach, such as ‘exclusionary reasons,’ follows just as much from the ideas underlying justification and provides a better anchor for proportionality.
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In Canada, like the USA, exclusions to patentable subject matter are driven primarily by the courts. Two recent decisions by the Canadian Patent Appeal Board (one on patentability of business methods and the other on the patentability of methods of medical treatment) have highlighted the inherent difficulty of crafting exclusions to patentable subject matter grounded not on legislative intent but on judicial activism.Courts, patent examiners, and the patent appeal board should be slow to deny patents where their subject matter is considered ineligible; rather patent applications should be assessed by the traditional criteria of patentability (namely, novelty, inventiveness, and utility). If the subject matter can be made to fit within the definition of ‘invention’ (even if slightly uncomfortably), the courts should aim to ‘breathe life’ into the bare, sometimes dated, words of the patent statute. Since the patent statutes are drafted with a view to the unforeseen, any judicial interpretation of the word ‘invention’ must give deference to this vision. A theory of subject-matter eligibility is also proposed.
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This article examines, from the standpoint of corrective justice, three basic situations of causal uncertainty in the law of negligence. In the first situation the uncertainty is about which of the possible defendants wrongfully caused the injury. In the second situation the uncertainty is whether the injury resulted from the innocent or the wrongful aspect of the defendant’s activity. In the third situation the uncertainty is whether the defendant’s negligence failed to prevent the materialisation of an independently existing risk. In viewing the parties as the doer and the sufferer of the same injustice, corrective justice confirms the centrality of causation to negligence liability. The article shows, nonetheless, how these three situations of uncertainty can be resolved within the corrective justice framework. Moreover, what emerges from the corrective justice analysis is that causal uncertainty is not a homogeneous problem; its solution varies with the kind of situation in which the uncertainty appears.
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Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally, there is little evidence that voters lying about their vote intention (so-called ‘shy’ voters) is a substantial cause of polling error. Instead, polling errors have most commonly resulted from problems with representative samples and weighting, undecided voters breaking in one direction, and to a lesser extent late swings and turnout models. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for polling both in terms of fixing the problems identified and new approaches to understanding public opinion.