In the United States, state-based efforts to curtail the spread of methamphetamine (“meth”) have targeted domestic producers through heightened regulation of precursor chemicals used in the clandestine meth-production process. This article examines the impact of these efforts on the exercise of police power in a rural community affected by methamphetamine. As the author shows, the targeting of local meth production has incorporated residents of rural communities into the policing process by variously encouraging and requiring them to adopt a new way of perceiving the local landscape, centred around methamphetamine. Under the new legislation, previously benign objects such as cold medicine, batteries, and drain cleaner have been re-signified as objects with criminal potential that residents of rural communities are called upon to police. This has led to the expansion of police power within and beyond the formal domains of law enforcement. Through the targeting of local production, civic volunteers, pharmacists, retail clerks, natural resource officers, and others have been drawn into the policing of the meth problem. This reveals a key dynamic in the localization of police power: as police power is localized, the local is reimagined in terms of police power.

The failure of the Supreme Court of Canada to give more than lip service to “context” when considering claims under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms arises largely from the Court's analytic framework, which resists recognizing the social relations of power inherent in complex cases of oppression. The precise nature of the flaws in the Court's analysis is demonstrated in a number of thoughtful feminist critiques that received recognition in the recent decision in R. v. Kapp. While it is too soon to tell whether the Court intends to depart completely from the past decade of s. 15 jurisprudence, equality-seeking groups now have greater opportunities to advance alternative theoretical frameworks for Charter interpretation. This article discusses one such framework, multidimensionality theory, which focuses on the interaction of systems of oppression, conceptualized as an invisible matrix—a vast network of complex, overlapping, interactive, and mutually reinforcing systems. The operation of the systems obscures their effects, and their complexity renders outcomes difficult to predict when they interconnect at sites of subordination and privilege. One can expose the operation of the systems by looking at particular sites of oppression/privilege and considering the contradictions or “inexplicability” of the circumstances based on one system alone. The author argues that the failure of the Charter claim at the heart of the Supreme Court's decision in Native Women's Association of Canada v. Canada demonstrates the need for courts to employ multidimensionality theory in cases of complex oppression. In NWAC, multidimensionality theory reveals that the “dominant” Aboriginal groups were involved in the negotiation/performance of hegemonic masculinities within a racial/colonial context that provided them with justification to suppress NWAC's independent promotion of the interests of Aboriginal women in constitutional negotiations with the government, and that the government was complicit in this performance. By framing the freedom of expression issue as whether NWAC had a “special” right to a speaking platform, and the equality issue as exclusively one of determining whether NWAC could prove the other groups were “male dominated,” the Court fragmented considerations of patriarchy from those of racism and colonization, distorting the synergistic effect of the systems of oppression and reinforcing colonial ideology.

This article tackles the integration of intersectionality into Canadian antidiscrimination law practices by arguing that treating the grounds of discrimination discretely contributes to the further marginalization of multi-discriminated individuals and groups. After tracing the origins and evolution of the intersectional approach to discrimination, it examines the critique addressed by the proponents of intersectionality to mainstream antidiscrimination law. Drawing on a jurisprudential analysis of 30 complaint cases claiming intersectional discrimination treated in Canadian and Quebec courts in the last 20 years, the authors set up a typology of the modes of conception of discrimination by the courts: monistic, compartmentalized, additive, and holistic (intersectional). Institutionalizing intersectionality within antidiscrimination law may be a promising avenue to reconfigure equality-safeguarding judicial apparatuses so as to better enable the struggle against multiple and interlocking forms of oppression and discrimination. Yet it can also become a liberal practice of “diversity management” that obscures structural inequalities and hallows a discourse based on individual vulnerabilities.

The dominant story of matrimonial property law reform in English Canada treats the farming family case of Murdoch v. Murdoch as the great catalyst for change, but there are persistent inequalities affecting farm women, even in provinces that have made progressive changes in the law of relationship breakdown. The farm is the quintessential family business and is both place of residence and source of income. Since the farm is not readily divisible, it is not surprising that all the major marital property law cases to reach the Supreme Court of Canada have involved farm property. What is surprising is that most provincial property reforms, though inspired by the Murdoch case, explicitly exclude farms from division, and those that include farms in the property to be divided still have mechanisms that tend to favour husbands. This article examines Canadian courts' gendered conceptualization of what constitutes a family business by examining the cases on farm property and the related legislative reforms. Feminists, and all women who have benefited from matrimonial property law reform, have an obligation to recognize the problems created by our persistent failure to understand the farm as simultaneously home and place of business.

The debate over the collection of justice statistics by race continues to hinge on the same key issues that were central to the debate when it arose in the early 1990s. There has been one major change, however: whereas racial minority groups were once vehemently opposed to the collection of justice statistics by race, for fear that such statistics would be used to justify discriminatory policies, many minority groups are now advocating for the collection and publication of this data as a means to redress racial discrimination in the administration of justice. Having discussed the lack of available data on racial and ethnic statistics in the Canadian justice system, the authors sought support from the Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA). At the 2009 annual general meeting of the CLSA, a motion for the association to take an official position in support of the collection of justice statistics by race was put forth by the authors and accepted by the association. At this time it was also decided that a committee would be established to conduct relevant research and to lobby for the collection of pertinent data. At present we are asking interested individuals or organizations who fall into one or more of the following categories to contact the first author:

(1) Those with arguments relating to the collection of justice statistics by race that have not been articulated in the debate that has taken place over the past two decades.

(2) Those with information pertaining to the collection of justice statistics by race that is not readily available or that has not been documented in the academic work referenced herein.

(3) Those who are interested in participating in the work of the committee outlined at the end of this paper.