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Seemingly lost amidst the Olympic shuffle last week was an announcement by the Harper government on reaching an agreement with the United States that allowed for Canadian exceptions to the highly contentious “Buy American” regulations. The regulations, imposed last-year by the U.S. government, blocked Canadian manufacturers from bidding on almost $800-billion worth of contracts tied to stimulus spending by the U.S. government.

Given the high-profile nature of the spat and the political capital such an agreement should generate, it seems strange that the Harper government would downplay the announcement by burying it amidst Olympic fever. A closer look at the details of the agreement, however, indicate why this might be the case.
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Photo Credit: Canwest News Service

On January 18, the Harper government announced the appointment of a new chair to the Commission for Public Complaints about the RCMP (CPC) – the organization tasked with conducting investigations into complaints about our national police force. Ian McPhail, a lawyer specializing in wills & real estate and a long-time contributor to the Conservative Party was appointed to the position despite having no previous experience in criminal law. In an interview with Colin Freeze of the Globe & Mail, Mr. McPhail told Freeze “you probably know more about the background [of the CPC] than I do”.

Paul Kennedy, the outgoing chair of the CPC expressed concern over McPhail’s qualifications, as well as the seemingly partisan nature of the appointment. Both he and Shirley Heafey, the previous CPC chair, had extensive experience working with federal security and regulatory bodies before taking on the role as chair of the CPC. McPhail’s only experience working with a federal security agency was his week long appointment as vice-chair of the CPC just prior to the January 18th announcement.
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Photo Credit: Vancouver Coastal Health

Lost in the shuffle amid the recent tragedy in Haiti, parliamentary drama and growing Olympic fever, a recent B.C. Court of Appeal ruling stands to reshape the way the Canadian legal system deals with addiction. On January 15, 2010 the Court of Appeal for British Columbia dismissed a federal government appeal to close InSite, Canada’s only supervised safe-injection site. The federal government is widely expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, opening the door for a new approach towards Canadian policy in dealing with addiction and substance abuse.

In the 87 page ruling, Justice Huddart wrote that the court dismissed the federal government’s appeal “by reason of the application of the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity”, which prevents a law from being applied outside of its constitutional jurisdiction. With health care professionals, academics, and courts recognizing InSite as a provider of legitimate health-care services – an area of provincial jurisdiction – the Court of Appeal found that federal drug laws prohibiting the possession of controlled substances were constitutionally unable to override the application of provincial health-care programs. The Court felt that attempts by the federal government to close InSite were an “indisputable intrusion of the federal government into the provision of medical services”.
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