In 2005, Canada implemented its first-ever domestic human trafficking legislation under sections 279.01 through 279.04 of the Criminal Code of Canada. The first conviction under this legislation came about three years after its implementation, with a total of only five convictions having been obtained as of January of 2011. This article examines the legislation and the legislative definition of human trafficking in Canada, arguing that the vagueness of this legislation, the breadth of the legislative definition, and its similarity to other provisions within the Criminal Code make it difficult to distinguish human trafficking from other criminal offences, particularly procurement, or in lay language—pimping, which is governed under section 212 of the Code. Analyzing cases identified as human trafficking by Canadian police and legal authorities, this article demonstrates the problematic effects of Canada’s human trafficking legislation. The article points out the challenges arising from identifying non-trafficking cases as human trafficking, including undermining the severity of human trafficking and impeding efforts to combat it.

Among prison scholars it is well known that access to penal institutions for the purposes of conducting research is not a given. For instance, in the Canadian context, some social researchers have been effectively barred from conducting studies inside prisons or have had to modify their research designs in order to enter the carceral. The ability to obtain unpublished records on imprisonment policies and practices in Canada has also been cited as a cumbersome process that often results in non-disclosure of the documents sought.

Beyond data collection, social researchers have also raised concerns about the challenges of communicating their findings to publics outside the academy. In criminology, in particular, scholars have been concerned with the perceived lack of influence academic work has had on public policy and public opinion. These interventions, while not novel, have resulted in calls for a public criminology, renewing a discussion on how to disseminate research to non-academic audiences.

Although much of the access to information literature is focused on the techniques used to obtain data as well as the barriers encountered during the process, and the public criminology literature is centred principally around the question of how to reach and influence those outside the halls of the university, few have examined how data collection and dissemination activities shape subsequent information flows. Here, I am not referring to the moments when and sites where the “policing of criminological knowledge” occur that mediate access to data sources and diffusion opportunities based on the epistemological orientations and political agendas of gatekeepers.

This article examines exploitation as a policy rationale for the prohibition of paid surrogacy and egg donation in Canada, focusing on claims of exploitation in parliamentary transcripts and proposed legislation. Its main focus is challenging three assumptions long used to substantiate the prohibition of commercial egg donation and surrogacy, namely: that marginalized women are being exploited; that payment and exploitation are necessarily linked; and that prohibitions on payment are the best means to prevent exploitation in assisted human reproduction. By examining these assumptions, this article assesses the legitimacy of prohibiting payment on the basis of perceived exploitation and suggests that, though much has been done to protect surrogates and donors, little is known about their real-life experiences with reproductive technologies, that the relationship between exploitation and payment is tenuous, and that it remains unclear that prohibiting payment is not doing more harm than good.

This paper tells the story of how full-service restaurant work is organized in such a way that sexualized interactions between customers and women working as servers, bartenders, and hostesses become enmeshed in the labour process. Key to this organization is how law contributes to making restaurant work precarious. With the unique gendered wage-tip relation, a relation legitimized and reinforced through lower minimum wage regulations for alcohol servers, workers rely on customers for tips. This fuels a relationship of unequal power that leaves workers vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexualized interactions with customers as the price to be paid for a tip—a form of institutionalized quid pro quo. Moreover, power relations become intensified in a work environment where employee schedules, duration of shifts, the regulation of tips, and overall income are insecure and unpredictable—all of these characteristics are attributable, in large part, to shortcomings of employment standards legislation in British Columbia.

Lesbian and gay rights are argued as rights to privacy, rights to protection from violence, rights to equality as individuals, rights to equality as family units, rights of minorities or as part of a larger framework of the recognition of sexual diversity within the society. In the last decades Canadian law has recognized equality claims, first through the reform of antidiscrimination laws and later through the interpretation of the equality provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The major current issue, important because it involves lesbian and gay visibility, is the recognition of same-sex couples for the range of rights, obligations and benefits connected with marriage or heterosexual cohabitation. Recognition is occurring through ad hoc reforms, often in response to litigation or to decisions of human rights tribunals.

This study investigates the role of an emerging legal doctrine, the precautionary principle, in the development of the plan to manage West Nile Virus in the City of Toronto during the 2003 season. Specifically, it asks whether the precautionary principle, widely expected to transform environmental and public health decision-making, operated as a map or guide to officials trying to navigate through the uncertainty associated with both the virus and the “cure.” Although the study focuses on a very particular local context, it also addresses the broader challenges that are gathering for governments hoping to lean on the precautionary principle for policy guidance in the face of controversy. In the case of West Nile Virus, public health officials seemed to confront an intractable problem: taking precaution with respect to the virus, an uncertain public health hazard, meant facing the uncertain environmental and health risks associated with chemical pesticides. The study draws on qualitative empirical data gathered from participant observation sessions in the Toronto city council chamber and comprehensive semi-structured interviews with almost a dozen key policy actors. The purpose of this detailed empirical analysis is to evaluate the potential of the precautionary principle as a policy instrument in light of a common claim of the principle's critics. Can it point the way out of controversy? Or does the precautionary principle, as is argued by legal academics such as Cass Sunstein, “point in no direction at all”?

Canadian courts are increasingly faced with the challenging task of reconciling a secular, liberal polity with the Charter's guarantee of freedom of religion. Conventional approaches to liberalism and secularism have made this reconciliation particularly difficult by promoting a conceptually unsatisfying vision of an a-religious and hyper-rational public space devoid of moral commitments. At the same time, liberal theorists have failed to fully appreciate the nature and demands of religious conscience. This article considers liberalism, secularism, and religious conscience, and argues for an understanding of the relationship among the three that would consist of a mediated pluralism premised upon a language of civic values. Through a case law analysis, the author demonstrates that this form of reconciliation is already tacitly at play in Canadian jurisprudence. The most theoretically consistent manner of delineating the limits of religious conscience in Canadian society, this approach gives substance to religious freedom while maintaining due regard for the common good and the gifts of secular liberalism.

Categorization plays a key role in legal reasoning but it has been under-theorized, particularly within common law legal systems. In this article, the author uses the Canadian law governing cheques to illustrate two different theories of categorization. The law governing ordinary cheques is relatively certain and the results of its application are mostly predictable. However, when that law is applied to variations on the basic form – to post-dated, certified, and double-dated cheques – the results are wildly unpredictable. The reason for this, the author argues, is the theory of categorization embodied in the governing legislation, the Bills of Exchange Act. That act assumes cheques can be defined by a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. However, such a theory cannot account for consumer and corporate practices. A theory of categorization based upon prototypes is necessary to explain the variations. They are systematic and coherent elaborations of a central model. They are not arbitrary because they are constrained by a prototype, but neither are they predictable. The theory of categorization assumed by the law obscures the complexity and fluidity of even such a seemingly simple category as cheques. A prototype theory of categorization, on the other hand, explains both the structure of the category, accounting for the variations, and the source of the law's indeterminacy.

Surnames tend to be indicators of a particular linguistic or ethnic background. For this reason, many states have sought, directly or indirectly, to influence the language of the surnames of their nationals. In this paper, the author demonstrates how surname policies have tended to reflect certain national identity objectives: to assimilate or to segregate particular ethnic communities, or to engage in national building exercises around a shared ethnic identity. These surname policies are particularly interesting in the context of ethnically diverse countries like the United States and Canada. The author draws on examples from these countries to illustrate how attitudes towards surnames reflect the inclusion or exclusion of particular communities from articulations of a national identity.

Between 2002 and 2017, Canadian lawmakers sought to redress the pervasive levels of discrimination, harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and/or non-binary people by adding the terms “gender identity” and/or “gender expression” to federal, provincial, and territorial human rights instruments. This paper tracks the complex, iterative ways in which antidiscrimination protections are brought to life outside courts and tribunals. Using Ontario’s publicly-funded English language secular school boards as a case study, we examine how the introduction of explicit human rights protections on the basis of “gender identity” and “gender expression” in 2012 worked to produce a series of responses across the education sector. Given that “gender identity” and “gender expression” remain legally undefined terms in the Ontario Human Rights Code, and only provisionally defined by Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) policy, we argue that school boards constitute important actors engaged in constructing the meanings of these terms in policy and practice. In decentering courts and tribunals in our analysis, we aim to uncover the everyday practices of parallel norm-making taking place in the education context. These everyday practices shape how we collectively understand the meaning of “gender identity” and “gender expression.” By carefully tracking these post-legislative developments, which rarely make their way into reported decisions, we suggest that human rights law reforms might open up space for the emergence of norms that allow people to do gender in a variety of ways.

This article explores the introduction of electoral gender quotas and the unprecedented social mobilization in pursuit of gender equality in Poland. The quota law was adopted as a citizens’ initiative organized by the Congress of Women, a new women’s movement. The article analyzes the factors that account for the success of this initiative, which permanently changed the public debate on gender rights in Poland. In contrast to other countries with legislative gender quotas, the Polish law was the result of bottom-up processes, and it has a strong democratic legitimacy. The law has not significantly influenced the representation of women in the Parliament, yet it significantly mainstreamed the gender perspective in the public debate. Nonetheless, the way in which the quota law has been applied by political parties shows that Polish women in politics are a “minority” devoid of power, and that the prospects for a parity democracy are still remote.

Do we need yet more analysis of the responses to the September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11), terrorist attacks? Those tragic events occurred more than a decade ago, and their 10-year memorial focused on bringing “closure” to the event. For many, those attacks have become an increasingly distant, if still poignant, memory. For still others—such as the new cohort of undergraduate students who were only nine years old on the day of the attacks—9/11 is social history.

Our contention in putting together this volume is that there continues to be significant reason to scrutinize 9/11 in terms of its consequences for the dynamics of surveillance. The aftermath of that tragic event played a major role in policy changes and in international relations. Wars were fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, sparked by 9/11, and many thousands more people died as a result. “National security” was elevated to a top priority in the United States and elsewhere, and this approach has had wave and ripple effects throughout the world. This is the “War on Terror,” and, unlike other wars, this one has no visible end point. These developments certainly affected surveillance practices internationally and have been the cue for the United States to demand that other countries fall in line with its approach. On the other hand, for many countries, especially in the global south, 9/11 is not a top-of-mind matter, nor is “national security” a vital concern.

Designations of space and place are significant to the history and formation of Canada as a white-identified country. Particular places discussed in this paper are public education and post-secondary schooling, which, as regulators of public spaces, act as indicators of belonging in the production of students' identities. White students in this study need the university for its credentialing function and for its training in ideological processes of their “becoming a teacher.” Their production as legitimate citizens and teachers is authorized by requirements of the institution in which they learn to “manage” cross-cultural relations. Maintaining the status of elite sites requires surveillance of knowledge production with respect to hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Elite social relations also designate which identifications and knowledges will be considered rational and legitimate. In the research on which this paper reports, white-identified pre-service education participants depend on the racial hierarchies of elite educational spaces to secure their own respectability among the white-dominated profession of teaching. It is a respectability which their whiteness both requires and affords.

In this article I argue that an analysis of “the State” is necessary in order to understand legal developments related to “family” that are relevant to efforts to combat the oppression of heterosexual women, as well as of lesbians and gay men. Drawing on recent debates concerning postmodernism and feminist theory, I review efforts to reconceptualize the nature of the state not as a monolithic institution, but rather as a set of arenas, or the site of various discursive formations. Because laws are generated from within, but are only part of, concentrated forms of state power, feminists and progressive groups that are engaging with law must retain an explicit analysis of the state. This analysis must be more nuanced and displaced than it has been in instrumentalist and structuralist accounts, in order to explore the ways in which feminists have influenced legal change and whether this influence is positive or negative for different groups. The limits on law's ability to fundamentally transform the social relations of oppression must however be recognized. In particular, the relationship between overall state trends—for example privatization—and trends specific to certain state arenas such as courts and legislatures—for example enhanced women's rights to men's property and increased legal recognition of same sex couples—must be traced in order to determine the political impact of seemingly progressive movements in areas related to “the family”.

Exploitative working conditions in the factories of developing countries like Bangladesh have fueled scholarly arguments for linking labour governance through trade/economic cooperation agreements/arrangements. This article argues that despite rich theoretical analyses of the structural form of these trade/economic-labour linkage mechanisms, less attention has been paid to the conceptualizations of “the social,” which tend to be narrow. These conceptualizations yield a restrictive approach to labour governance, maintaining a sharp difference between fundamental and redistributive approaches to transnational labour law. This approach may focus only on workers engaged in exporting sectors; defend individualized, civil, and political rights; weaken the participation of non-state actors in factory monitoring; and accentuate voluntary forms of corporate responsibility. Referring to some of the challenges in the transnational governance mechanisms launched after the collapse of Rana Plaza, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the aggregate effects of labour deregulation and the distributional problems of labour.

Education—and particularly public education—has become a crucible for the relationship between state and religious diversity, a principal site for contemporary debates about the meaning of secularism and the management of religious difference. This is so across a variety of national traditions, and despite wide differences in the historical and “emotional inheritances” surrounding the configuration of law, politics, and religion. Through an exploration of Hannah Arendt’s thought about responsibility and freedom in education, this article works towards a better understanding of why education is such a crucial and fraught field in the modern encounter between religion and law. The article turns to the recent jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada to draw out the implications of these ideas, arriving ultimately at a claim about the nature and limits of the concept of state neutrality.

Globalization is not simply a matter of transnational trade, and of the state, non-state and supra-state legal regimes which facilitate, regulate or resist it; it also involves transnational social, cultural, intellectual and ideological forces. These forces play upon strategically located knowledge-based elites which play an important role in restructuring the legal fields by which public and public and private institutions are constituted. Canada's experience of globalization—unique because of proximity to the United States—has been both exemplified and, in part, shaped by the fate of its knowledge-based elites, including the business community (especially that part of it involved directly or indirectly with transnational corporations), academics and intellectuals, lawyers, artists and other cultural figures, and individuals involved in politics and public administration. Because of the effects of this “globalization of the mind” upon the institutions which all of these elites inhabit, state and non-state legal fields associated with them have been transformed.

Informal workers play a central role in the global value chain along which electronic waste (e-waste) is collected and recycled. The failure of governments to recognize informal e-waste workers as legitimate stakeholders in the e-waste economy means these workers assume acute health and livelihood risks. This article argues that the exclusionary dynamics of contemporary e-waste governance paradigms, in failing to acknowledge the legal identity of some stakeholders and the legal responsibilities of others, contribute to a grossly imbalanced and environmentally unjust globalization of e-waste marked by the proliferation of dangerous and exploitative forms of work. E-waste legislation must embrace and reflect the needs and interests of marginalized social groups whose livelihoods depend on their participation in the urban waste economy. Waste governance paradigms must recognize informal workers’ claims over urban space and resources, in other words, their spatial citizenship and fundamental place as workers within the global hi-tech economy.