Robson Crim Legal Blog

Since Delgamuukwi, the oral histories of Indigenous peoples have been recognized as being put on “an equal footing” with documentary evidence.ii Oral history is a means to transmit information orally to record history and preserve Indigenous knowledge.iii The Cowichaniv case was a voir dire to determine the threshold reliability of the oral history evidence of Grant, Guerin and Chief Wayne Sparrow and to allow them to testify without interruption.

Many Canadians know — or at least think they know — about the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC)’s 1999 decision in R v Gladue. Recently, for example, when I told a man at my gym that I plan to article in criminal law, he told me to make sure I knew about Gladue because, in his words, “it’s a case that says when an Indigenous person commits a crime, we take the sentence that you would give a white person for the same crime and cut it in half.”

It can be easy to underestimate the role which the law of evidence plays in the criminal justice system. One may think that evidence is a straightforward and simple matter; the facts are the facts, and the accused is guilty or not, plain and simple. However, the law of evidence is anything but. Especially when potential wrongful convictions hang in the balance, the stakes could not be higher. R v. Schneider is indicative of how complicated and significant the law of evidenc

What is privacy, anyway? The Oxford dictionary defines privacy as “the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.” You would not expect to have as much privacy when you are walking down the street as you would when you are inside your own home. When you are out in public people can see you and interact with you, but you would not want to have people come up to your house and look in your windows or to enter your home without invitation.

In McLeod agreed on the facts that Garrioch came to the house on request of McLeod’s father concerning the removal of an intoxicated minor from the premises. The MBQB found sections of each provision to bestow power to safety officers to enforce them. The MBQB answered the question by referring to two past decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada (“the Court”) while focussing on statutory interpretation, R v Myers and Rizzo & Rizzo Shoes.