The taboo once associated with Section 33 (the notwithstanding clause) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms seems to be fading. In recent months, Alberta has used it to end a teachers’ strike and pass bills affecting transgender youth and adults. Saskatchewan invoked it in 2023 to prevent students from changing names or pronouns without parental consent. In Quebec, where the taboo was never as strong, legislation related to secularism and the French language were respectively exempted from Charter compliance in 2019 and 2022. And the federal Conservatives have called for the clause’s use to protect tough-on-crime measures such as mandatory minimum sentences.

Is this a troubling trend that suggests a need for new safeguards, as argued by the Canadian Bar Association in a 2024 letter to the federal Justice Minister? Or a legitimate rebalancing of power toward the people’s elected representatives?

Marion Sandilands is a partner at Conway Litigation in Ottawa, teaches part-time at the University of Ottawa, and served on the Canadian Bar Association’s Working Group on the Notwithstanding Clause. Geoffrey Sigalet teaches political science at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus and leads the UBC Research Group for Constitutional Law.

This episode first aired in January 2025.

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

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Passing the bar exam has long been accepted as a natural step for new lawyers. But in Canada, that seems to be changing. The Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP) has already replaced bar exams in PEI, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Nunavut. British Columbia is set to make the switch soon, and the Law Society of Ontario is considering doing the same. What’s driving this transformation, and what does it mean for lawyers, aspiring lawyers, and their clients?

Jennifer Pink is the Interim Executive Director of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society. Jordan Furlong is an Ottawa-based legal sector analyst, author, and advisor with an online newsletter about how to build a better legal system. 

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

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NYU professor Margaret Satterthwaite has been monitoring threats to the rule of law on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council since 2022. She has seen autocrats around the world unleash assaults on their legal systems, but now she finds herself writing to the government of her own country about attacks on judges and lawyers in the United States. And she has plenty of advice for Canadians and people everywhere about how to identify and respond to early warning signs that the rule of law may be at risk.

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada. For more Canadian legal news, read CBA National, the CBA's bilingual online magazine.

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When the Government of Canada launched its AI Strategy Task Force on September 26, 2025, Dr. Gideon Christian noticed a significant omission: Black people. Three weeks later, he was among 60 signatories of an open letter warning that Canada’s Black community “bears some of the greatest harms from AI bias and automated decision-making systems,” and calling for the inclusion on the task force of Black Canadians with relevant expertise.

In this episode, Dr. Christian and another signatory, Jake Effoduh, describe how AI systems can exacerbate systemic biases, and how to mitigate the risks.

Dr. Gideon Christian is University Excellence Research Chair (AI and Law) at the University of Calgary. Jake Effoduh is an Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Lincoln Alexander School of Law.

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

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On October 23, 2025, Canadian Justice Minister Sean Fraser introduced Bill C-14, the Bail and Sentencing Reform Act. The legislation notably aims to make bail “stricter and harder to get” and impose harsher sentences on repeat offenders. While some, like the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Retail Council of Canada, have welcomed the new bill, the Canadian Bar Association has argued that our bail system needs more capacity, streamlined procedures, and better social services – not new legislation.

Melanie Webb chairs the CBA’s Criminal Law Section; she’s a Toronto-based criminal trial and appellate lawyer at Webb Barristers. Daniel Lerner is a former Crown Attorney who now practices criminal law at Lerner Law in Toronto.

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

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This episode is a panel discussion with Anita Szigeti of Anita Szigeti Advocates, a Toronto firm that focuses on mental health and the law; Hamna Anwar, a criminal lawyer at Lindsay Law in Toronto; and Kyla Lee, who specializes in impaired driving cases at Acumen Law in Vancouver. They are all members of Women in Canadian Criminal Defence (WiCCD), an organization Szigeti founded to support and advocate for female and gender-non-conforming criminal defence lawyers.

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

In this episode, Toronto lawyer and Supreme Court expert Nadia Effendi highlights some of the cases and issues the justices will be dealing with for the rest of 2025. These include matters involving:

• Disclosure of police misconduct records (Chief of the Edmonton Police Service v. John McKee, et al.)
• Medical patents (Pharmascience Inc. v. Janssen Inc., et al.)
• A disappeared man believed to be alive by his insurance company (Deborah Carol Riddle v. ivari)
• A dispute between a former Alberta MLA and the province’s Chief Electoral Officer (Glen L. Resler v. Joseph V. Anglin)
• The bilingualism of the New Brunswick Lieutenant Governor (Société de l'Acadie du Nouveau-Brunswick v. The Right Honourable Prime Minister of Canada)
• Sentencing considerations when an Indigenous perpetrator commits violence against an Indigenous woman (His Majesty the King v. Harry Arthur Cope)
• Overlapping Indigenous territorial claims (Nisga’a Nation v. Malii, aka Glen Williams, et al.; Skii km Lax Ha, aka Darlene Simpson, et al. v. Malii, aka Glen Williams, et al.)

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Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

In this episode, Hon. David Brown draws on his 18 years of experience as an Ontario Superior Court and Court of Appeal judge to explain why justice in Canada can move so slowly. He argues a big part of the problem is a lack of transparency about how long cases actually take and where the holdups are. And he proposes “some cracking of eggs and bumping of heads” – for instance, can financial incentives be used to extract more data and speed things up?

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Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

In this episode, writer and documentarian Karin Wells discusses her new book, Women Who Woke up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada. The conversation notably focuses on the cases of Jane Hurshman, who killed her abusive husband in 1982, and R v Ewanchuk, a landmark case about consent that featured a testy exchange between Justice John McClung of the Alberta Court of Appeal and Supreme Court Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé.

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Modern Law: Verdicts and Voices is a monthly podcast in which we unpack key legal stories and celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada. This special series delves into legal news, landmark cases and features expert guests who provide unique insights into Canada’s justice system.

In this episode, Canadian-American political analyst David Frum joins host Alison Crawford before a live audience in Toronto at an event jointly presented by the Canadian and American Bar Associations as part of the American Bar Association’s annual meeting. They discuss public attitudes toward democracy and the rule of law, the implications of the Safe Third Country Agreement governing migration between Canada and the U.S., and the role of lawyers in the prevention of democratic decline.

If you have any comments on this episode, or if you would like to send us any story ideas, you can write to us at [email protected]. 

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