Practising in Vancouver, practising corporate-commercial law, human rights law, criminal law.

Illustration: Matt Daley

Michael Moldaver and Andromache Karakatsanis are our new Supreme Court judges. They replace justices Ian Binnie and Louise Charron, who in May both announced their resignation. (It sure takes a long time to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.) Will this change in the court’s composition have much effect on criminal law?

With five provinces scheduled to go to the polls in 2011 and three more expected to go next year, it’s a good time for the legal community to be advancing its election wish list.

Canadian Lawyer is back with our second annual list of the Top 25 Most Influential in the justice system and legal profession in Canada. Our inaugural Top 25 was one of our most-read, and most commented-on, features in 2010. As expected, it was controversial and lawyers across the country had lots to say about it. We took heed of the comments and this year put our list together slightly differently, asking for nominations from: legal groups and associations representing a variety of memberships and locations; some winners from last year’s Top 25; our general readership; and our internal panel of writers and editors. We received more than 100 nominations, which the internal panel then whittled down to about 55 candidates. We then posted the list online and once again asked our readers to participate, with more than 1,300 people voting in the poll. The final list is based on that poll with input and the last word from the internal panel.

I don’t wish to be the criminal lawyer who cried wolf. But, I am going to, because I believe we have some good reasons to be worried about our future. I believe that we are currently drowning in the political climate of fear and loathing. I believe that we are leaning towards the old school, Old Testament, retribution agendas. I believe we are slowly going to lose some of our rights guaranteed to us in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Toronto defence lawyer Howard Morton refers to the G20 summit in Toronto last June as “my weekend in Argentina.” He compares it to the oppression of a dictatorship and to what happened here 1970, when Pierre Trudeau’s federal Liberal government enacted the War Measures Act in the midst of the October Crisis, which made way for the arrests of 465 people. Yet he considers the Toronto summit, during which an estimated 1,170 were arrested, a far more troublesome event in Canadian history. “If you went down there blindfolded, and somebody took the blindfold off of you, you would never assume you were in Toronto,” says Morton, who assisted with bail hearings at a special court set up during the summit. “It was like an armed camp, and the police action was carried out as if it was a military operation.”

For most Canadians, our awareness of Canada’s firearms legislation is limited to the controversy concerning the long-gun registry — the legislation passed by the federal government as part of a more comprehensive Firearms Act in 1995 — that requires all rifle owners to register their guns. It would seem that most police officers, Crown attorneys, and judges are also a little hazy on the technicalities of the act. “I see a large part of what I do as educating the courts and police officers about our firearms legislation,” says lawyer Edward Burlew. “I have represented hundreds and hundreds of gun owners and, in a great many cases, I have been able to show that the police officers and the Crown attorneys don’t fully understand the legislation’s technicalities.”

I am not a fan of the public inquiry. Misplaced, in my opinion, is the ever-growing enthusiasm for aggrieved or unsatisfied parties to sound the clarion call for the expenditure of public funds to eventually provide a report that often doesn’t result in either action or improvements, because it ends up ignored by politicians or the organization it is aimed at. Names are rarely named and fault even more infrequently apportioned. Reports and recommendations sit on the shelf collecting dust, generally wasting the taxpayers’ outlay and not giving much satisfaction to anyone. Although, they do provide interesting work for lawyers.

Martin Friedland

Martin Friedland, former dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, says Canada’s current Criminal Code and prosecution procedures need reform.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide should be taken out of the Criminal Code, argues law professor Jocelyn Downie.

Jocelyn Downie will be lecturing on euthanasia and assisted suicide at McGill next month.