Category: Law News

A private member’s bill that proposes changes to the Criminal Code of Canada and the Sex Offender Information Registration Act has been introduced in Parliament and has the family of two Alberta murder victims calling for lawmakers to support it.“Noah’s Law,” formally known as Bill C-336, was introduced in both the House of Commons and the Senate this week as a joint bill by Conservative MP Gerald Soroka and Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu. The bill is named after 16-month-old Noah McConnell, who was murdered in Hinton, Alta., in September 2021. The boy’s mother, 24-year-old Mchale Busch was sexually assaulted and also killed inside their apartment building.…

With wildfires affecting every community in her nation, Grand Chief and Chairperson of the Cree Nation Mandy Gull-Masty said she hopes the Quebec government takes a look at how changes to the French-Language Charter will affect communication and logistics with the 11 communities spanning around 400,000 square kilometers of the Eeyou Istchee (Cree territory). “The French language is something that can contribute to additional communication issues,” Gull-Masty told CTV News. “We are an English-speaking nation for the majority — we are Cree language speakers, our colonial language is English — [and] there has to be accommodation. There has to be a review of certain components of that bill because English is going to be something that’s very apparent in an emergency situation in our territory.”…

Prosecutors in the United States have unsealed an indictment against Donald Trump, accusing the former president of putting the country’s national security at risk by mishandling classified documents after he left the White House in 2021. The Republican leader faces 37 criminal charges, including counts of retaining classified information, obstructing justice and making false statements, among other allegations. The federal indictment released on Friday accused Trump of mishandling classified documents that included information about the secretive US nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack. The former president, who is expected to appear at a federal court in Florida on Tuesday, had said a day earlier that the indictment was forthcoming.…

NEW YORK – Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing. Attorneys Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca are facing possible punishment over a filing in a lawsuit against an airline that included references to past court cases that Schwartz thought were real, but were actually invented by the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. Schwartz explained that he used the groundbreaking program as he hunted for legal precedents supporting a client’s case against the Colombian airline Avianca for an injury incurred on a 2019 flight.…

With the help of the Ontario Provincial Police, Montreal police have arrested a 28-year-old man in connection with the fatal shooting of Montreal Mafia member Moreno Gallo’s daughter-in-law last month. Claudia Iacono, 39, was shot five times at 4:30 pm on May 16 in the parking lot of her beauty salon, Salon Deauville, in the Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough. the Service de police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) said the suspect was arrested Tuesday night in Milton, Ont., near Toronto. A spokesperson for Quebec’s prosecutor, the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et penalessaid Joel Richard Clarke is accused of committing first-degree murder in Iacono’s death.…

Twenty-three municipalities in Quebec have joined together to ask the courts to suspend parts of Quebec’s new language law, which they describe as abusive, while they contest it. All of the cities and towns taking part in the challenge, including Côte Saint-Luc, Beaconsfield, Dorval, Kirkland, Montreal West and Westmount have bilingual status. The Act respecting French, the official and common language of Quebec, amends several pieces of Quebec legislation, including the Charter of the French Language, making it more difficult to receive services in English. The mayors say they are concerned about communications, illegal searches and seizures, government grants and the obligation, set out in the law, to discipline public employees who break the rules by working in English.…

Taipei, Taiwan – For decades, Hong Kong has advertised the rule of law as the cornerstone of the city’s success as an international business hub. These days, though, the Hong Kong government often appears unwilling or unable to explain what the law actually is. In the run-up to the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, Hong Kong officials were repeatedly asked by journalists if commemorating the event would be a crime under a Beijing-decreed national security law (NSL) imposed in the wake of mass protests in 2019. On each occasion, the officials, including Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, refused to give a direct answer.…

Debate on Bill C-21 now moves over to the Senate, says Algoma – Manitoulin – Kapuskasing Member of ParliamentAlgoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing MP, Carol Hughes writes a regular column about initiatives and issues impacting our community. The government’s firearms legislation, Bill C-21, recently passed in the House of Commons. With an increase in gun deaths in Canada over the past decade, it’s an important piece of legislation that, in its current iteration, will help crack down on handguns, as well as ghost guns. However, it was also a bill saddled with an unnecessary degree of controversy, particularly from the government’s unforced errors in introducing unpopular amendments late in the process that were eventually withdrawn.…