Author: Caron Rollins

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Return of the Spindle Whorl

Among the many pieces of  Legacy Art installed at the Law Library is Susan Point’s Good Luck (Double Salmon Spindle Whorl), 1998 . The piece was on loan to the Vancouver Art Gallery from February until June, for the show Spindle Whorl, which was devoted to Point’s prints and sculptures. The exhibit catalog is available in the Library. The piece was returned on June 8th, coincidentally during the  Faculty’s  hosting of the 2017 joint conference of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) and the Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education (ACCLE).  Good Luck was reinstalled to a prominent,  welcoming location in the Law Library.

 

Good Luck (Double Salmon Spindle Whorl) 1998 Susan Point. Photo by Kim Nayyer

 

 

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British Columbia Election 2017 – Parliamentary Conventions (updated July 1)

Much is being written and discussed in the local and national news and social media about the final results  (see Elections BC) of the 2017 BC provincial general election:   Liberals 43 seats,  NDP 41, Greens 3.  Christy Clark was Premier as her party won the most seats, 43 out of 87, but with the NDP-Green agreement inked and signed, her government could, and did, lose on a confidence vote in the Legislature.    By convention, only certain pieces of legislation, the Throne Speech and budgets, can have confidence motions and therefore votes, attached to them.

All elected MLA’ s were sworn in the week of June 5th.  Cabinet was sworn in June 12.   The Premier stated  in her May 30 press conference “we have a duty to meet the house and test its confidence.”  She acknowledged her party will likely not last long.   Pundits predict her government  will fail on either the throne  speech or a budget bill (which must be tabled and passed no later than September).  B.C.’s Lieutenant-Governor Judith Guichon will then have the option of calling an election or asking  NDP leader John Horgan  to form a minority government.

The Legislative Assembly, 1st session of the 41st Parliament, sat June 22, for the election of a speaker (Steve Thomson, Kelowna-Mission who as of June 29 is no longer speaker)  and the reading of the Speech from the Throne.  On June 26 the liberal government introduced two bills which were negatived on motion (did not pass first reading) and will not be part of the official record.  The NDP also introduced the confidence motion on the throne speech.  On June 29, the Legislative Assembly sat for the vote on the confidence motion.  The Liberal government was defeated, thus the lost confidence.  Premier Clark then tendered her resignation to the the Lieutenant Governor and asked for the house to be dissolved, which would have triggered an election.  The only other option available was to give the NDP the opportunity to govern.  The Lieutenant  Governor upon the advice of experts and in keeping with convention,  asked John Horgan if he had the confidence of the house to form government.  His reply – yes.

Sources are available that discuss conventions, confidence motions, the conduct of legislative assemblies, the duties of the Lieutenant-Governor,  or minority governments. Below is a select list of sources including legal treatises, parliamentary procedure handbooks,  news media,  and journals.  Feel free to contact lawref@uvic.ca about these and other sources.

Andrew Heard, Canadian Constitutional Conventions: the Marriage of Law and Politics (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 1991) Law Library KF4482 H43

D. Michael Jackson and Philippe Lagassé,   Canada and the Crown : Essays on Constitutional Monarchy  (Montréal : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. McPherson Library JL15 C35

Frank Cranmer & Sir William McKay, Erskine May’s treatise on the law, privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, 23rd ed.  (London: LexisNexis, 2004) Law Library KD4354 A5M39 2004

Canada. Parliament., House of Commons. Special Committee on Reform of the House of Commons.  Report of the Special Committee on Reform of the House of Commons. (Ottawa: Queens Printer, 1985). Law Library KF4483 L4C3565 1985

Alistair Fraser, William Foster Dawson, & Holtby,  John A.,  Beauchesne’s Rules and Forms of the House of Commons of Canada, with Annotations,  Comments and Precedents (Toronto: Carswell, 1989). Law Library Reference KF4483 R8C36 1989.

Marc Bosc and Audrey O’Brien, House of  Commons Procedure and Practice, 2nd ed, (Ottawa: House of Commons, 2009) Online  and McPherson Library Reference, JL164 C26 2009.

Standing Orders of the House of Commons, Including the Conflict of Interest code for Members (Ottawa : Publishing and Depository Services, 2010). Online

Peter W. Hogg, Constitutional Law of Canada, 5th ed. suppl. (Scarborough, Ont. : Thomson Carswell, c2006).  Law Library Reserve KE4219 H63 2006

E. George MacMinn, Parliamentary Practice in British Columbia, 4th ed. (Victoria : Queen’s Printer, 2008). Law Library Reference KEB470 A33M33 2008.

Ronald I. Cheffins, Constitutional Process in Canada, (Toronto, McGraw Hill, 1989) Law Library KF4482 C5

 

Library catalogue subject keyword searches:

” Parliamentary Practice Canada ”  or ” Parliament Rules and Practice” and Canada or Great Britain

News Sources:  Globe and Mail, National Post, Times Colonist, Tyee.

Select Journals:

Canadian Parliamentary Review, free online

Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law (Westlaw)

Review of Constitutional Studies  (Library e-journal, print also available)

 

Post originally written June 22, updated July 1.

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National Aboriginal Day, June 21

National Aboriginal Day has been observed in Canada since 1996, when the  Proclamation Declaring June 21 of Each Year as National Aboriginal Day was declared by the Governor General  of Canada, Roméo LeBlanc.   One of the recommendations of the 1995 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was the creation of such a day.   Link to a searchable database of the fulltext of the RCAP final report, hearings, and other documents at Library and Archives Canada . 

The official version of the proclamation  (PC1996-0785) was published as a Statutory Instrument; see  the full text of  SI/96-55   on the Justice Laws Website or in the Canada Gazette Part 1.

More information about the proclamation the day  and can be found on these websites:

 

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Something new on the Supreme Court of Canada website: a web archive of cited sources

On January 26, 2017 the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) announced in a news release the creation of an archive of the “content of most online sources cited by the Court between 1998 and 2016.” The archive is located in the Judgment section of the SCC website:  Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments 1998 – 2016

The SCC has responded to ongoing issues with citation of online sources, namely “link rot” where a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) does not serve up any content, and “reference rot” where the link works but the information has changed (see Zittrain, below at  p 177) . The SCC now captures and archives online sources cited in the “Authors Cited” section of  judgments and assigns an “archived version” URL thus ensuring that future researchers will be able to read what the Court cited.

The SCC’s approach is not new, since 2008 the US Ninth Circuit has archived websites it cites (see Liebler, below at p. 301).    Readers who use the Government of Canada website may recall seeing “archived on the web” messages on web pages, indicating these webpages have been captured and archived online.  Often these archived sources are captured in the Government of Canada’s’ web archive.  It is most often that online free sources develop link rot.  Databases like Lexis Nexis and Westlaw assign their own persistent identifiers (see Lyons below at p. 685).

The assignment of an “archived version” link grows from the establishment of persistent URLs (PURLs).  Use of PURLs provides for  continuity of references to network resources that may migrate. PURLs have been in use since 1995.  Early examples of permanent URLs are found in the catalogues and databases of government information.  The United States Government Printing Office uses PURLs in US GPO FDSYS. Persistent URLs were designed to get around the problem of “link rot”, i.e. no content, which occurs when a website and it folders are moved to entirely different locations and servers (see  Liebler &  Liebert below at p. 305).

Current examples of moving to different servers? Government website reorganizations after elections.   President Obama’s White House webpages have been archived at: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ .  The Government of Canada is currently redesigning all of its websites.  Fortunately, the government publications likely to be cited in a judgment or scholarly publication will have a  PURL.  You just have to use the right PURL locator,for example, the Government of Canada Publications catalogue, the Legislative Library of British Columbia Catalogue, the United States Government Printing Office catalogue, and now the SCC Internet Sources.

Another example of capturing and archiving cited sources is Perma.cc, developed by the Harvard Law Library.  Like the SCC archive, Perma.cc captures what an author sees at moment of citation (Zittrain, below at p. 191). Authors provide a link to Perma; Perma then archives the full text associated with the URL.  Perma then returns a new URL, a Perma URL,  to the author for use instead of original URL, thus avoiding “link rot”.  Perma goes one step further; ensuring through LOCKSS technology permanent preservation of the captured content. Perma is being used by law reviews in Canada and the United States, include UVic’s own Appeal: Journal of Law Review and Reform.

And we mustn’t overlook  the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine.  If no one institution has take the time to create a web archive or PURL, you may luck out by using the WayBack Machine at https://archive.org/web/

For more information on Perma, link rot, and permanent URLs see:

Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, & Lawrence Lessig, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations” (2014) 127 Harv. L. Ref. F.  176, online:  <http://harvardlawreview.org/2014/03/perma-scoping-and-addressing-the-problem-of-link-and-reference-rot-in-legal-citations/>. Also published in (2014) 14 Legal information Management.

Raizel Liebler & June Liebert, “Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: the Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010)”, (2012) 15 Yale J.L. & Tech. 273, online: <http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/yjolt15&collection=journals&id=273>

Susan Lyone, “Persistent identification of electronic Documents and the Future of Footnotes”, (2005) 97 Law. Libr.J. 681, online: <http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/llj97&collection=journals&id=679>

PURL <http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/data-science/purl.html>

Permca.cc <https://perma.cc/>

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100th Anniversary of the Migratory Birds Convention Act, S.C 1994 c. 22

What do chickadees, bob-links, coots, oyster catchers, wrens, sandpipers, and auks  have in common?  These birds, backyard, shoreline, urban and wild are all protected by Canada’s Migratory Birds Convention Act, S.C. 1994 c. M-7, an act celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.  The Act protects migratory birds from killing, capturing, taking*, injuring, or molesting.

The Convention between Canada and the United States  was signed in Washington on the 16 of August 1916. It was subsequently  sanctioned, ratified and confirmed in 1917 by an Act of the Parliament of Canada.  The 1917 act was introduced as Bill 92 on June 21, 1917.  The debates at first and subsequent  readings can be read online at the Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources website.

The Migratory Birds Convention Act has been continuously in force (with revisions) since 1917.  A pdf version of the original Act can be found in HeinOnline, S.C. 1917  c. 18 (7-8 Geo. V.  c. 18).

The current Act (including text of the original convention) and regulations can be viewed at the Canada Justice Laws website , S.C. 1994 c. M-7

The Convention and amendments can also be viewed online at the Canada Treaty Series website; search the Bilateral section.

For a complete listing of protected birds and reference to provincial legislation, see  the Environment Canada website, Legal Protection for Migratory Birds in Canada.  

Planning Ahead to Reduce the Risk of Detrimental Effects to Migratory Birds, and their nest and Eggs.

Related websites:

*see Article II, section 1 and 3 of the Convention for exceptions for taking for food.

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Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) – new database

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) issued its final report in 1996.  Much of the material collected by the commissioners during the inquiry was made available to the public on a cd-rom product titled For Seven Generations (kept available at UVIc Libraries on a virtual workstation).  As required by the OIC establishing RCAP, the material gathered by the commissioners was transferred to the National Library (now Library and Archives Canada, LAC).

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Libraries and Archives Canada has created  a new database containing digitized content of the material  gathered by the RCAP commissioners and transferred to LAC.

See LAC’s blog post  https://thediscoverblog.com/ for more information on the digitization project, methodology  and scope.

According to LAC, “the  database provides access to documents, such as intervenor project submissions, publications, research reports and hearing transcripts that supported the writing of the report of the RCAP”.  

Access RCAP database here:

http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/royal-commission-aboriginal-peoples/Pages/introduction.aspx