On February 2 the Ontario Court of Appeal rendered its decision in Leering v. College of Chiropractors of Ontario, 2010 ONCA 87, a professional ethics/discipline case concerning the stiff prohibition on sexual relations between medical professionals and their patients.
In December 2004, the appellant Vincent Leering, a chiropractor, commenced an intimate relationship with a woman. They [...]

On Friday, the Supreme Court released judgment in the malicious prosecution case Miazga v. Kvello Estate, 2009 SCC 51, long-awaited by the parties involved as final resolution to the bizarre and heartbreaking judicial saga once termed Saskatchewan’s “Scandal of the Century”. The decision is also much-anticipated by my fellow editors at TheCourt.ca, who have previously [...]

Moving Beyond the Unilateral Duty
Last week, I broadly surveyed the benefits and detriments flowing from R. v. Cuerrier, [1998] 2. S.C.R. 371, the case enabling the Crown to prosecute sero-positive individuals who fail to disclose an HIV transmission risk. While Cuerrier’s “duty to disclose” does serve the social imperative that express misrepresentations of serostatus [...]

Criminalizing Non-Disclosure, Cuerrier and Beyond
In September 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R. v. Cuerrier, [1998] 2. S.C.R. 371 that disclosure of sero-positive status is required to legally validate consent in sexual relations that pose a significant risk of transmitting HIV. What has followed is a lengthy series of HIV-related prosecutions, numbering in [...]

“It is tragic but true that people working with the vulnerable sometimes abuse their positions and commit wrongs against the very people they are engaged to help.”
In M.E. v. Sproule, 2008 CanLII 58428, Chapnik J. begins by quoting from the decision of McLachlin J. (as she was then) in Bazley v. Curry, [1999] 2 S.C.R. [...]

Last Thursday the Supreme Court decided on two companion cases, R. v. R.E.M. 2008 SCC 51 and R. v. H.S.B. 2008 SCC 52, both of which concerned sexual abuse convictions that were overturned on appeal on the basis that the trial judge’s reasons were inadequate. In both instances the Supreme Court reinstated the original [...]

Sexual assault cases are often very difficult to resolve, particularly those in which the victim is a minor and the offender is a close adult family member. The difficulty arises not only due to the nature of the offence, but also, because more often than not, the only two witnesses to the crime are [...]