2025-10-15
Daniel Del Gobbo
The Canadian government has a long history of regulation, exploitation, and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S+) people. One of the most painful chapters in this history is the “LGBT Purge,” a term that refers to the expulsion of LGBTQ2S+ service members and employees from the Canadian Armed Forces, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Federal Public Service between 1955 and 1992. The LGBT Purge was the subject of a class action lawsuit filed in 2017 that resulted in a settlement agreement in 2018. On a parallel track to the settlement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology for the government’s history of state-sponsored discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people in 2017. In this article, I consider these events from a legal historical and queer theoretical perspective. I focus on the potential of the settlement to promote reconciliation with LGBTQ2S+ people, contextualizing the settlement in light of neoliberal and homonationalist pressures on the class members to settle the past and forgive legacies of homophobic violence that continue to be felt today. Praiseworthy as the settlement terms might be, I conclude by arguing that forgiving the government’s history of discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people is an historical impossibility.
2025-10-15
Patrick Garon-Sayegh
This article examines the kinds of arguments that can be made in debates regarding whether or not an expert is properly qualified to critique the work or opinions of another expert. Since these debates routinely occur in both legal and political arenas, a more fine-tuned sense of their argumentative dynamics can be fruitful for reasoning through them. This article is built around the analysis of a decision which concerned the admissibility of a physician’s testimony on the medical standard of care in a malpractice case. A detailed parsing of the arguments in that decision lays the groundwork for a theoretical discussion in which broader themes relating to experts’ qualifications are drawn out. The discussion focuses on two elements present in the decision, which can serve to buttress an expert’s claim to being properly qualified: community belonging and personal character.
2025-10-15
Editors of Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Volume 62, Number 1
2025-07-22
Simon Wallace et al.
In 2019, two Roma-Hungarian travellers were prevented from boarding their flight to Canada. Even though their documents were in order and their travel was legitimate, they were singled out for examination and extra scrutiny. This article—relying on new evidence produced in a series of legal proceedings—shows how Canada has implemented a de facto system of racial profiling in airports overseas. This program was not built overnight, but produced by a series of historical accretions, all organized around the idea that potential refugees can be detected by their race. This article shows how Canada, to deter asylum seekers, has conscripted private actors to screen out some migrants. In this study, we explain how this racial profiling regime operates and test its legality against international legal instruments. We argue that this law offends basic Canadian legal commitments and that the practice ought to end.
2025-07-22
Okanga Ogbu Okanga et al.
Taxpayers’ cross-border activities often result in two (or more) states claiming the right to tax their income. To address concerns about how those tax liabilities might aggregate and suppress international activities, states typically agree to split the tax base between them. But how can states fairly share tax revenue from cross-border activities? Tax scholars and policymakers offer different normative perspectives to address this inter-nation equity conundrum. In this article, we conceptualize these normative perspectives into two types. One centres on identifying where the economic factors that lead to the ability to produce the income are located (and uses that determination as the basis for an equitable split of taxing rights). Accordingly, a state with a greater degree of economic connection should enjoy a greater share of taxing rights. This perspective, we contend, is distinguishable from the infusion of cosmopolitan distributive justice theory into tax law. The latter approach portrays the redistribution or transfer of tax revenue, a form of tax aid from high-income countries to low-income countries, usually with the goal of funding humanitarian or developmental spending. Perhaps due to ambiguities in the overarching inter-nation equity concept (which seemingly includes cosmopolitan distributive justice) existing tax policy scholarship often fails to adequately distinguish the two perspectives when articulating the justifications for international taxing rights (re)allocation involving low-income countries. This article demonstrates the policy imperatives for distinguishing the two perspectives. For textual and conceptual clarity, we frame the first perspective as “allocative justice” and the latter as “redistributive justice.” For low-income countries to escape the trap of fiscal imperialism it is essential that they (as well as international tax policymakers in all states) establish international tax regimes that align with allocative justice and resist tax bargains that unduly cede taxing rights to which they have a justifiable claim. Redistributive justice may also play a role in supporting or explaining tax sharing arrangements between countries, but that framework should not be conflated with allocative justice.
2025-07-22
Noel Semple
LADY JUSTICE CAN OFTEN BE FOUND, in statue form, in or near courthouses. This symbol of the Western justice system is blindfolded to show neutrality. She carries a scale to weigh facts and arguments fairly. Sometimes, she also holds an olive leaf to symbolize mercy and healing. A sword is the other accessory that Lady Justice invariably carries. The sword is a ubiquitous part of this symbol because most people believe that justice in general, and criminal justice in particular, necessarily involves inflicting pain upon wrongdoers.
2025-07-22
Johnathon Cruickshank
DID YOU HEAR THE ONE about the Supreme Court of Canada justice owing the Prime Minister five thousand dollars? No, this is not the set-up of a cheesy law school joke nervously told at a pub night mixer. Rather, it was a shockingly true occurrence in the Laurier era that goes to show how drastically different (and a tad more corrupt) our legal system was over one hundred years ago. While not all the historical points of interest are juicy revelations concerning public officials, A History of Law in Canada, Volume Two: Law for the New Dominion 1867–1914 wraps an explosive period of Canada’s past into a book that should pique the interest of readers beyond those already invested in this nation’s legalities of yore.
2025-07-22
Jordana Borzellino
ON DECEMBER 19TH, 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) handed down one of the most influential cases of the decade in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov. From an FBI raid to uncovering secret Russian spies, it is not often that Canadian administrative law deals with such an exhilarating situation. However, for the respondent, Alexander Vavilov, this was the situation that jolted him into the throes of administrative legal reform in Canada.