Peer pressure

It costs about $35,000 to improve your lake view. A couple learned that the hard way after cutting down a neighbour’s trees to get a better look at Shuswap Lake.

— Dylan Gibbs

• This newsletter’s saving grace

• Heretofore: good riddance

• Legal aid double-dipping

• Alberta, meet privacy tort

• Cash bail, we hardly knew ye

MAKING HEADLINES 

✈️ Flight-delay claims in B.C. can now go to the Civil Resolution Tribunal. The Court of Appeal held that the federal compensation scheme (up to $1,000 when a big airline cancels your flight for reasons within its control) is part of the airline’s tariff, so a passenger can sue on the contract at the tribunal instead of waiting on the Canadian Transportation Agency.

🙏 Quebec’s ban on prayer in public institutions took effect this week. Colleges, universities, transit agencies and the like can no longer allow any religious practice in the buildings they control. It’s one of the final pieces of the expanded secularism laws the province introduced earlier this year.

📚 The BC Court of Appeal ditched the McGill Guide. Starting September 8, the court wants lawyers using the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide. Added bonus: the court also wants us to stop using verbose relics like “this Honourable Court,” “heretofore,” and gratuitous Latin.

🔍 The Privacy Commissioner is taking Google to court over the right to be forgotten. The Commissioner found last year that PIPEDA requires Google to de-list search results about a person when the results cause harm that outweighs the public interest in keeping them up. The Commissioner can’t force Google into action, though, so it’ll be up to the Federal Court to shape the scope of the internet’s memory.

⛺ It didn’t take long for Nova Scotia to reverse the recent court ruling that said tents are accommodation. The ruling would have given people who live in tents enhanced social assistance benefits, but three weeks later the province rewrote its regulations to require a “home”.

⛪ Careful with your pleadings in Quebec, where an unfounded allegation can get you sued for defamation. A woman who accused a cardinal of sexual misconduct in a class action now owes him $100,000, after a Superior Court judge found that she made the allegation recklessly (if not maliciously).

IN FOCUS

What brought Hearsay back from the dead?

For most of the past year, this newsletter went unwritten. Every so often, someone would ask when the next edition was coming. I’d say, “soon” — which was a wonderfully elastic deadline that lacked any semblance of accountability.

I knew I wanted to bring Hearsay back. I enjoy writing it. And I enjoy hearing from people like you who enjoy reading it. But the newsletter still kept sliding to the bottom of my priority list.

What finally stopped the slide was a peer group I joined this summer.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have even known to look for a peer group. But after facilitating peer groups for lawyers through Inn Laws, I decided I wanted something similar.

In part, I wanted to see how other facilitators run their groups, so I could steal the best parts for Inn Laws members. But I’ve also seen that peer groups are a literal cheat code for solving thorny challenges. Nothing improves decision-making more than access to peers who understand what you’re trying to accomplish.

In my group, everyone runs a community like Inn Laws. Most write newsletters. They’re solving the same issues I think about every day.

Meeting with this group of peers turned my vague intention to restart Hearsay into something I had to act on.

It’s not like they found some ingenious publishing strategy. They just understood how my business operates. They understood how often solo entrepreneurs let urgent work crowd out important work. They knew to ask the questions I wasn’t asking myself. And they gave me the accountability I was missing.

That’s why I think everyone needs a peer group.

Peers might seem less relevant in the AI era. Supercharged robotic thinking partners put the answers to complex questions at our fingertips.

But even this AI-enthusiastic only child — who typically leans in favour of brute-forcing problems himself — has found this type of group life-changing. At a minimum, getting advice from a real person, who’s already solved your exact issue, is a heck of a lot quicker than combing through ChatGPT responses.

A peer group doesn’t need to be fancy. Heck, you can start one yourself. Find 5–6 lawyers who share your ambitions, understand your practice, and will call you out if you’re holding yourself back.

Just keep in mind that there’s a difference between a casual group chat and a peer group. A peer group has rules that promote confidentiality and candour. A strong group should vet its members to ensure everyone’s bought in. And someone needs to take the reins as organizer, because a task assigned to everyone gets completed by no one.

Tick those boxes, and you’ll have a group that not only gives you helpful advice but also holds you accountable. Take it from me. I spent six months intending to bring Hearsay back, and a little peer pressure was all it took for me to actually do it.

PS: if you’d prefer to have someone else in charge of organization, check out Inn Laws’ fall cohorts. Our curated groups connect 5–6 lawyers tackling the same challenge, whether that’s getting more from AI, growing a law firm, or taking the next step in career development. Groups start later this month, so it’s a great time to join us.

FROM THE COURTS

1. Silence is golden
   Canada v. Emamifar, 2026 FCA 141

There’s nothing false about silence — at least when it comes to parental leave. A woman returned to work 12 months into her 18-month leave, and never told the Employment Insurance Commission. By the time the Commission tried to claw back the benefits, more than three years had passed — which meant the clawback could only succeed if the woman had made a false statement. According to the Federal Court of Appeal, she hadn’t:

2. The shield of the Crown
   Minotar Holdings v. Ontario, 2026 ONCA 606

Provinces have free rein to kill your lawsuit. A developer sued Ontario because its property was placed in a protected zoning area. In response, Ontario legislated away every possible claim the developer could advance, including bad faith. The developer argued that was unconstitutional, but a majority of the Court of Appeal disagreed. Stay tuned, though, because the SCC is hearing a case about a similar issue next month.

3. Alberta finally gets a privacy tort
   BD v. Germain, 2026 ABKB 590

Albertans can finally sue for intrusion upon seclusion, the privacy tort Ontario has had since 2012. One tweak to Ontario’s test, though: courts measuring the intrusiveness of a privacy invasion need to consider the victim’s perspective (not a bystander’s). The new tort meant that a woman could sue the man who secretly filmed her in a workplace bathroom.

BY THE NUMBERS

$17.1 billion: the settlement reached between Meta and nearly every US state, in response to allegations that the company designed its social media platforms to hook kids. Meta also agreed to cap teenagers’ daily social media use at 2 hours and lock them out completely from midnight to 6 a.m. Here at home, the government still plans to ban social media for kids under 16.

$20,000: the cap on pain and suffering damages at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, plus another $20,000 if the discrimination was wilful or reckless. A union of federal employees argued the caps were unconstitutional, but the Federal Court of Appeal just upheld them.

2 weeks: the lifespan of Ontario’s new cash bail rules. Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice granted an interim injunction that suspends the cash requirement until the Court decides the constitutional challenge brought by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Criminal Lawyers' Association.

THINGS NOT TO DO 😤

Don’t bill your clients for work covered by their legal aid certificate.

Or at least give it back when Legal Aid comes knocking.

An Ontario lawyer took over $45,000 from a client’s settlement proceeds, asserting that he was entitled to more than just his legal aid payment of about $2,600. After a lengthy argument with Legal Aid Ontario, the lawyer eventually undertook to repay the extra money.

He ended up returning the money nearly two months later than he said he would, and ghosted Legal Aid Ontario in the meantime, which was enough for a finding of misconduct.

The tribunal stopped short of saying that the lawyer misappropriated the settlement funds by taking them in the first place — but you probably shouldn’t attempt the same thing: