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Courts & Tribunals
Courts
Supreme Court of Canada
Supreme Court Advocacy Institute
Federal Court of Canada
Ontario Courts
Ontario Court Forms
CANLII - Canadian Legal Information Institute
BOARDS AND TRIBUNALS
Conservation Review Board (CRB)
Employment Insurance Jurisprudence Library
Financial Services Commission of Ontario
Ontario Licence Appeal Tribunal
Ontario Municipal Board
Landlord and Tenant Board (formerly Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal)
Ontario Workplace Tribunals Library
Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal
Workplace Safety and Insurance Board
COURTS
Supreme Court of Canada
This site provides information about the Court and its library, judgments from 1983, and services and information for parties and counsel, as well as links to the Charter collection. The full-text judgments database is searchable by concept (key words), or with the help of a field search template. www.scc-csc.gc.ca
Supreme Court Advocacy Institute
This is another recently launched website featured on SLAW by Michel-Adrien Sheppard. The Supreme Court Advocacy Institute is a new training organization which aims to "provide pro bono, non-partisan advocacy advice to parties appearing in an appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada".
Litigants will be able to apply to appear in front of a panel of senior counsel, former Supreme Court law clerks, and professors of law who will critique their presentation and advocacy skills.
The Supreme Court Advocacy Institute officially launched its programs on 22 February 2007. As advised on the site, counsel wishing to enroll in the Institute’s advocacy program must contact the Institute at least thirty days in advance of their hearing before the Supreme Court. Counsel will be expected to provide a copy of written submissions at the time of registration in order to permit the Institute to organize a panel hearing. In cases of demonstrated hardship, the Institute will cover copying expenses. For more information click on http://www.scai-ipcs.ca/process.html
Federal Court of Canada
This site provides information on Federal Court rules, reports and decisions, which you begin to access by clicking the appropriate tab on the top tool bar. After this, simple, uncluttered bars on the left allow access to the main sections of each component. For example, clicking the Business tab displays a tool bar listing Hearing lists, Proceedings,Act, Rules, Forms, Bills, Assessment of Costs, Requests for Interpretation, and Useful links. An interesting note to Useful Links is its apparent support of 2 commercial publishers. This is odd for an official government site, but probably explainable by the fact there are also links to Federal Court Practice 2000 published by Carswell and Federal Court of Canada service Butterworths. Likewise the link to decisions is also located on the toolbar at the top, and this module is not only easy to search, but is also very up-to-date. If only all government funded ventures were this user-friendly. You can access the site at http://www.fct-cf.gc.ca/
Ontario Courts
This site provides something for everyone with useful information about the Ontario Courts system, in a logical and easy to use format. After the opening screen, the user is given some simple main choices: Court of Appeal, Superior Court of Justice, Ontario Court of Justice. Or you can jump to more specific information by clicking items such as Ontario Court Addresses, Notices and Rule Changes, or Ontario Statutes and Regulations. Best of all though, is the availability of recently released judgments and endorsements for the Ontario Court of Appeal, as well as full-text decisions back to 1998. This is a good place to check for recent decisions which may be hard to find in the usual sources. Also useful are the links to the various rules, such as the Family Court Rules and the forms are downloadable .pdf files. The site now has a link to materials relating to the Ontario Court of Justice. www.ontariocourts.on.ca
Ontario Court Forms
We received an email recently from the Executive Director of LibraryCo. about the changes to the forms under the Rules of Civil Procedure, effective July 1, 2006. This amendment to Rule 1.06 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, made by O. Reg.77/06, removes the associated forms from the Rules and incorporates them by reference to a new website instead. The forms will no longer be published on the provincial government’s e-laws website. The regulation also includes a new Table of Forms that gives the Form Number, Form Title and Date of Form.
Each form is now available on this public website as a separate document in HTML and/or Microsoft Word. The format of these forms is not in compliance with Rule 4 that governs the format of court documents. It is a party’s responsibility to ensure that any form they file complies with the Rules of Civil Procedure, e.g. Rule 4.01 (formatting).
An added identifier appears at the end of each form and comprises two elements: A form code, e.g., RCP-E 4A, and a version date, e.g. November 1, 2005. At present, the civil forms share a common version date since they were incorporated by reference at the same time. In future, the version date of a form will depend on the date it is either amended, replaced by a new form, or added. No changes were made to the substance of the forms. There are no new or amended forms. The forms can be accessed at http://www.ontariocourtforms.on.ca.
CANLII - Canadian Legal Information Institute
Law library and legal research blogs and forums have seen a lot of discussion about CanLII’s latest upgrades. As stated on its homepage, CanLII is a non-profit organization managed by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Its goal is to make Canadian law accessible for free on the Internet. The new version of CanLII came online on March 20, 2007, and was not without some initial problems. Many of these have been solved now, and reviews of this new version are generally favourable. The new CanLII interface is more intuitive and cleaner looking. It now offers an advanced search function for searching across databases, and highlights search terms within the retrieved documents. Among other improvements, all decisions are now provided in both html and pdf format and all documents are clearly identified using neutral citations. Best of all for researchers wanting to stay on top of the latest cases, CanLII now includes RSS feeds which allow the user to be notified when new decisions are added. Click on http://www.canlii.org/.
Conservation Review Board (CRB)
The Conservation Review Board page is nicely concise and practical. It briefly details the legislative authority for the establishment of the Board under the Ontario Heritage Act, and offers three quick points about the Board’s nature, composition and mandate. The site holds the collection of Conservation Review Board Reports dating back to 1990, although it would appear that you can only browse by year going back to 2003. However, there is a search box that will allow you to bring up earlier decisions. You can also browse alphabetically by municipality. http://www.crb.gov.on.ca/english/home.html
Employment Insurance Jurisprudence Library
This Government of Canada site provides a very searchable electronic library of all employment insurance jurisprudence, including CUB’s, Federal Court and Supreme Court decisions, as well as an increasing number of related Provincial Court and Human Rights Tribunal decisions. It is easy to use with both a simplified and extended search engine, searchable by Court or tribunal, keywords, decision number, or name. Far easier than trying to find CUB-27102 the old fashioned way in a three-ring binder with no indexes. http://www.ei-ae.gc.ca/en/library/search.shtml
Financial Services Commission of Ontario
This organization amalgamates the former Ontario Insurance Commission, the Pension Commission of Ontario, and the Deposit Institutions Division of the Ministry of Finance. The site provides a useful source of full-text decisions searchable by date or title. Choose Automobile Insurance, then Dispute Resolution Service - Arbitration and Appeal Decisions. Oddly, the site still requires users to request a user name and password to be able to access the decisions. However, it seems everyone who does this is given the same answer so, to save you a step, the required user name is decisions and the password is subscription.
http://www.fsco.gov.on.ca
Ontario Licence Appeal Tribunal
This tribunal is an adjudicative agency, created on April 1, 2000 under the Licence Appeal Tribunal Act, 1999, as part of the Ontario government’s mandate to provide a more streamlined, responsive and efficient justice system. The Tribunal consolidates four appeal boards - the licensing appeal responsibility of the Child and Family Services Review Board, the Commercial Registration Appeal Tribunal, the Licence Suspension Appeal Board and the Private Vocational Review Board.
The website for the Tribunal is visually appealing and well organized, providing all the usual information one would expect – the Chair’s message, contact information, members appointment details, and of course, decisions.
The decision section contains Tribunal decisions, and Rules and Orders, as well as the decisions from the Superior Court of Justice, as they relate to an appeal of a Tribunal's decision, for the current fiscal year April 1st to March 31st. They are grouped by statute and type of appeal, and are downloadable in pdf format. Unfortunately, there is no key word searching function. Decisions are accessed by drilling down from the name of the act being considered, to the year, to the month, and then to case name.
The Tribunal decisions for the previous years are available in an Archives section, dating back to 2001. Again unfortunately, until 2003-2004, the decisions are all contained in one long PDF document for each time period (2001-2002 and 2002-2003). These are searchable only by using the “find in page” feature on the browser edit menu, or by using the Adobe navigation pane, and drilling down from the name of the statute. The site notes that the decisions of the former Commercial Registration Appeal Tribunal (CRAT) and the Licence Suspension Appeal Board (LSAB) are also available on Quicklaw, or by phoning the Tribunal at 1-800-255-2214.
One of the nicer features of this site is “Bench Briefs” which provides a brief summary of selected important cases heard by the Tribunal, the Superior Court of Justice and other jurisdictions, along with the relevant decision. Visitors to this feature are advised that parties appearing before the LAT may be interested in using those precedents when preparing for the hearing. The summaries are grouped by statute and by type of appeal. Clicking on the name of a decision accesses the full text, which is downloadable in pdf format. Bookmark this site at http://www.lat.gov.on.ca.
Ontario Municipal Board
This site has been recommended by some of our members as the preferred source for OMB decisions and materials. Currently there are over 6000 e-decisions in this database back to 2001 and references to print sources and commercial publishers for access to earlier decisions. The decisions can be searched by case name, counsel or key word, and a maximum of 20 records will be returned per search. Results are displayed as case abstracts, and can be scanned quickly for relevance before linking to the full text.
Among other content, this site also provides information on preparing for a hearing, a listing and outline of relevant statutes, and the usual links to other provincial ministries, agencies, associations and services. http://www.omb.gov.on.ca/
Landlord and Tenant Board (formerly Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal)
The site is easy to navigate and contains the relevant legislation, regulations, guidelines and rules of practice relating to the tribunal. You can also access the applications, forms and notices through the site. It is an excellent public service site for your clients as it lists the location of its various offices, provides links to its information brochures and answers frequently asked questions. To date, the site does not contain the decisions of the tribunal but there is a Comments link that allows you to send them an email, so you might want to let them know that this would be a good feature to add to their site. Access this site at http://www.ltb.gov.on.ca
Ontario Workplace Tribunals Library
This is the website of the physical library for the tribunal, but it also serves as a valuable source of links to electronic sources for Employment Standards appeals, Occupational Health and Safety appeals from 1980 to date, WSIAT documents including medical discussion papers, practice directions and the current WSIAB operational manual, Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario decisions, and Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal decisions from 1989 to date. Some of these links are to the website of the tribunal in question; others are to the OLRB database on canlii.org. Furthermore, members of the public may request items to be sent by fax (40 page limit), mail or courier for $5.00 per document + GST. Librarians are also available for research assistance, in person, by phone, fax or e-mail. http://www.owtlibrary.on.ca
Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal
This site now contains all the decisions from the print Pay Equity Reports. Click on Decisions, choose Reported or Unreported Decisions, then from the list of decisions click on the decision name. Reported decisions begin with the summary (in French and English) and you may also view the full decision. Unreported decisions are full text in English. The Unreported Decisions page includes all decisions released by the Tribunal in the last 60 days. After 60 days, they are moved into the reported decisions section of the web site. The Tribunal web site also contains the revised Rules and Forms which came into effect in November, 2002. http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/pec/peht/index.htm
Workplace Safety and Insurance Board
The WSIB Alert email updating system advises that several revised operational policy documents have recently been posted to the online Operational Policy Manual. The revised documents include, for example, five different policies regarding disclosure. Hover over the Policy tab and click on the option for "Operational Policy manual" on the drop down menu that appears. Once the OPM home page appears, enter the policy number on the Search bar, or click on the policy as listed by name and number. You may also wish to subscribe to the E-mail Notification Service to receive an email notice whenever there is an update to the OPM. The WSIB web site can be accessed at http://www.wsib.on.ca.