The Supreme Court of Canada, as always, has had a busy year. Two of their recent decisions have attracted my attention. I'm in the process of publishing two articles covering entirely different subjects, but both focusing on decisions from the court that garnered a fair bit of public and media attention.
The first article covers the Court's recent decision on Canada's terrorism law: R v Khawaja. In that case, the Supreme Court made a number of controversial statements on the fault element of certain terrorism offences. In this commentary, to be published in the Criminal Reports, I review these statements and consider their impact on the future of mens rea in Canadian criminal law in general, and the crime of participating in a terrorist offence in particular.
The second article addresses not a judgment, but a decision denying leave to appeal a judgment of the Alberta Court of Appeal. The case in question is perhaps the most important animal law decision ever rendered in Canada: Reece v. Edmonton (City), a 2-1 decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal, which focused on the right of private parties to seek judicial intervention on behalf of animals. In this article, to be published in the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, I will examine what was lost by this decision to deny leave, explore the important questions that were at stake in the appeal, and suggest why the Supreme Court should have decided otherwise.
