Robson Crim Legal Blog

With over 23 billion text messages sent globally each day—270,000 messages per second—and 2.52 billion people using messaging apps, digital communication has not only transformed how people connect but also how evidence is gathered in courtrooms. In R v Aslami, the Ontario Court of Appeal tackled the intricate issues surrounding text messages as evidence, highlighting the risks of relying on electronic communications to establish guilt or innocence.

Music is a form of creative and artistic expression that has existed since time immemorial. Creating music is a method that an individual may use to convey their emotions and express themselves in a manner that may not be possible through other mediums. Today, such freedom to express oneself is being challenged in an evidentiary context in our legal world.

Indigenous oral history transfers knowledge and laws throughout generations and has increasingly been used as evidence in Canadian courts. A failure to adequately consider oral history within legal disputes would be problematic in the wake of Canada’s ongoing attempts at reconciliation.

In 2022, Indigenous people accounted for 7.7% of children under 15 years old; however, they represented 53.8% of children in foster care.” Additionally, over 50% of Indigenous children in foster care lived with non-Indigenous parents. These statistics raise enormous concern, as even with the TRC Calls to Action and Bill C-92, Indigenous children continue to be taken away from their families and culture at an alarming rate.

Provincially, legislation such as The Manitoba Evidence Act sets the limit of expert witnesses to three per side. Legislators that bring in such provisions would have us believe that this is done in the name of efficiency, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness, but, in fact, it puts lawyers and their clients in a difficult bind. Expert limits increase the risks of unethical decision-making in the name of efficiency and might altogether be more costly and time-consuming for the l