Changes to the Criminal Code’s sexual assault regime in Bill C-51 threaten to upset the ability of an accused to provide a full defence, suggests the CBA’s Criminal Justice Section.

There’s more wrong with Canada’s Anti-Spam Law than can be dealt with in a three-page submission. So it is problematic that the House of Commons Committee on Industry, Science and Technology has limited the statutory review of the law in both time and space, three CBA Sections say in their submission.

When quasi-constitutional legislation interferes with a quasi-constitutional right, things are likely to get entirely messy.

Sometimes it is better – or more feasible – to notify individuals affected by a data breach indirectly. The Sections suggest amending the draft regulations to allow this when the contact information is “likely” to be out of date (the draft regulations say “is” out of date), or when the cost of directly notifying each individual in the affected group would be prohibitive to the organization.

The Pension and Benefits Law Section called once again for a harmonized pension regulatory system in its October comment on the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institution’s revised draft derivatives guideline for federally regulated pension plans.

It’s probably never a bad thing when a government decides to modernize its laws and regulations. The Canadian Transportation Agency announced last year its intent to do just that – bring regulations that haven’t changed in 25 years or more in line with the current reality.

Canada’s new Global Skills Strategy has been receiving a lot of positive feedback from CBA immigration experts, but in the four months since its launch a number of issues have emerged that require action by the government.

When the Finance Department released draft legislation in September to limit the use of billed-basis accounting, the CBA was happy to see that the government had acted to address one of the Association’s major concerns with the changes.

On July 18 the federal government quietly dropped a bombshell whose concussive effects included debate, discussion and much division – more of each than the government might have anticipated with a consultation paper aimed at “tax fairness” issued in the middle of a rainy Canadian summer.

The post-9/11 emphasis on the need for security has exacerbated the difficulty of balancing the individual right of privacy with the state’s right to know, especially at border crossings. And more and more the fulcrum those two balance upon is the personal electronic device, be it a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone.