Supreme Court of Canada Fall 2007 Preview

The Supreme Court of Canada is gearing up for the opening of the Fall 2007 judicial season in the 2nd week of October. There are 32 cases on the docket.

Last Friday, Kirk Makin of The Globe and Mail profiled some of the "big" cases in an article entitled Key challenge to fishing rights leads court's fall agenda:

• a constitutional test case involving differential treatment for aboriginals in the area of natural resources
• a challenge to mandatory minimum sentences
• an appeal against a statute that orders third parties to produce phone records for police investigations
• a Human Rights Commission case involving a woman refused a job by local police on the grounds of bad "moral character"
• a case in which a couple found guilty in the death of their child are seeking to obtain the results of a coroner's review into the work of a disgraced pediatric pathologist
• a New Brunswick language-rights case involving a traffic ticket given by a unilingual anglophone RCMP officer to a francophone driver
• a challenge to a provision allowing young people over 14 to be sentenced as adults in manslaughter cases unless the young people can show why they should not be treated as adults (reverse onus)