The invitation of the government of Ukraine for individuals from around the world to join a foreign legion created for its self-defence, and the seeming ambiguity of the Canadian government’s attitude to this has raised a number of legal questions about those who may choose to do so. This short piece provides an overview of a number of legal issues this situation raises.
Read MoreThe Anti-Terrorism Act 2001 brought Part II.1 of the Criminal Code into being and with it, Canada’s terrorism offences. In the twenty years since that time, 62 individuals have been charged with terrorism offences by our counting. This blog post is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of the field. Instead, we set out merely to remind the reader of what constitutes a terrorism offence in Canada and then review some of the trends that we can see from the prosecuting and charging numbers to date.
Read MoreThis blog post is a medium for providing a series of tables that provide information on all terrorism cases and charges to date—a public release of information collected over the past five years that, I hope, will be of interest to students, lawyers, national security practitioners and academics. The tables strive to provide further information related to each of these cases, such as the specific offences charged, whether individuals were convicted or not, their sentences, and so on.
Read MoreIn February, the political class in Canada was preoccupied by “L’Affaire SNC-Lavalin” – the controversy over whether a prominent Québec company should be prosecuted for alleged overseas bribery, or instead dealt with under a Criminal Code remediation agreement. Lost in this discussion was the way Attorney General Ron Basford described the standards of attorney general independence in a 1978-1979 national security matter. This post revisits this forgotten case.
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