This article re-evaluates the place of legislative history in Canada's modern interpretive method. Itframes the debate around enduring tensions among text, purpose, and legislative intent. Tracing the shift from exclusion to cautious inclusion oflegislative history and other extrinsic materials, it exposes the methodological uncertainty shaping judicial interpretation. The article shows how errors arise when courts conflate parliamentary evidence with executive commentary or treat incomplete records as authoritative. Finally, it proposes a structured, text-centred methodology that assigns legislative history a restrained, principled, and confirmatory role. This approach promotes interpretive coherence, transparency, and fidelity to constitutional principles and the separation of powers.
This article explores the relationship between legal ethics and restorativejustice. It argues that the legal profession should be reoriented around restorative justice as the moral foundation ofa more progressive approach to legal ethics andprofessional responsibility. It translates concepts from restorative justice into ethical terms, grounding ideas about interdependence, community involvement, and public accountability into a list of restorative principles that can be readily applied in the practice oflaw, and recommending a series of practices and regulatory measures that are consistent with a restorative principles-based approach. Ultimately, the article shows that such an approach has the potential to raise the moral consciousness of lawyers, facilitate collaboration within communities and across systems, andredefine the role oflawyers in the administration of justice, transforming conditions of law and society in a more equitable direction.
This article provides a critique of Canadian courts' attempted integration of Indigenous laws into sentencing for criminal matters. First, it examines Canadian courts' approach to resolving conflicts between Indigenous and Canadian laws in the context of recent criminal contempt proceedings in British Columbia, contrasting this approach with other legal domains. Second, it argues that Canada's recognition of Indigenous laws creates an obligation to incorporate them into determinations of moral blameworthiness. Third, it analyzes the normative rationales underpinning Canada's sentencing regime. Fourth, it argues that a failure to consider conflicts of Indigenous and Canadian laws in sentencing compromises the principle of proportionality. Fifth, it proposes a relaxed standard for admitting evidence of a conflict of Indigenous and Canadian laws at sentencing.
This article discusses the de facto repeal of the "faint hope" clause of the Criminal Code. The clause was relevant to the Supreme Court of Canadas' holding that the minimum sentence for first-degree murder did not violate the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment protected under section 12 of the Charter, as it permitted offenders who demonstrated adequate personal reform to apply for parole after serving 15 years of their otherwise mandatory 25-year parole ineligibility period. In response to the de facto repeal of the clause, the British Columbia Supreme Court recently held that the minimum sentence for first-degree murder must violate section 12 of the Charter. This article argues that the temporal limitation of the clause could be declared unconstitutional on the basis that it provides an inadequate role for the rehabilitation principle within the Charter framework.
