Statistics Canada Article on Hate Crime in Canada, 2020

The Statistics Canada publication Juristat has publish an article on Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2020.

In 2020 police reported 2,669 hate crimes in Canada, up 37% from 2019. 

This was the largest number of police-reported hate crimes since comparable data became available in 2009. 

In 2020, police-reported hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity almost doubled (+80%) compared with a year earlier, accounting for the vast majority of the national increase in hate crimes. 

Other crimes reported to police (excluding traffic offences) decreased by 10% from 2019 to 2020.

Among the highlights:

• Much of this increase was a result of more police-reported hate crimes targeting the Black population (+318 incidents), East or Southeast Asian population (+202 incidents), the Indigenous population (+44 incidents) and the South Asian population (+38 incidents).
• Police reported fewer hate crimes targeting religion for the third consecutive year, after peaking in 2017. Police-reported hate crimes targeting religion declined 16% from 613 incidents in 2019 to 515 incidents in 2020. This decrease was primarily due to fewer hate crimes targeting the Muslim population, which declined from 182 to 82 incidents in 2020 (-55%). Hate crimes against the Jewish population rose slightly in 2020, from 306 to 321 incidents (+5%).
• Hate crimes targeting the Black and Jewish populations remained the most common types of hate crimes reported by police, representing 26% and 13% of all hate crimes, respectively. 
• In 2020, the largest increases in the number of hate crimes were reported in Ontario (+316 incidents), British Columbia (+198 incidents), Quebec (+86 incidents), and Alberta (+84 incidents). When accounting for population size among the provinces, rates of hate crimes per 100,000 population increased the most in Nova Scotia (+70%), British Columbia (+60%), Saskatchewan (+60%), Alberta (+39%) and Ontario (+35%).

Updates on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

There are a number of parliamentary research services and international organizations that have high quality research reports and updates about the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Here are a few sources to check out:

• The infoDOCKET website has a list of Situation Reports, Briefings, and Other Updates From Various International Organizations About Conflict in Ukraine (for example Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, UN High Commission for Refugees, etc.)
• United Kingdom House of Commons Library Ukraine Crisis Research Briefing
• Russia, the West, and the Ukraine Crisis: A Bibliographic Survey (Peace Palace Library, United Nations International Court of Justice, The Hague)
• European Parliamentary Research Service - documents on Russia's war on Ukraine
• US Congressional Research Service - recent documents on invasion of Ukraine
• the blog OpinioJuris (International Commission of Jurists) has been publishing a wide range of opinions about the legal dimensions of the Russian war against Ukraine

New Project to Digitize US Government Microfiche

The Internet Archive, along with library partners, will be digitizing millions of pages of US government documents on microfiche and making them available for free:

"Microfiche cards, which contain miniaturized thumbnails of the publication’s pages, are starting to be digitized and matched to catalog records by the Internet Archive. Once in a digital format and preserved on archive.org, these documents will be searchable and downloadable by anyone with an Internet connection, since U.S. government publications are in the public domain."

"Seventy million pages on over one million microfiche cards have been contributed for scanning from Claremont Colleges, Evergreen State College, Stanford University, University of Alberta, University of California San Francisco, and the University of South Carolina (...)"

"Microfiche is not a format that can be easily read without using a machine in a library building. Many members of the public are not aware of the material available on microfiche so the potential for finding and using them is heightened once these documents are digitized. And as the information is shared with other federal depository libraries, there will be a ripple effect for researchers, academics, students, and the general public in gaining access."

The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco,  provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. It has also saved historical versions of hundreds of billions of web pages in the Wayback Machine.

English Law Commission Report on Electronic Trade Documents

The Law Commission of England and Wales has published a report on Electronic Trade Documents which it presented to the British House of Commons this week:

"The process of moving goods across borders involves a range of actors including transportation, insurance, finance and logistics service providers. We have estimated that global container shipping generates billions of paper documents a year. Across so many documents, the potential positive impacts of using electronic trade documents – including financial and efficiency gains, and environmental benefits – are vast (...)"

"Despite the size and sophistication of this market, many of its processes, and the laws underlying them, are based on practices developed by merchants hundreds of years ago. In particular, under the current law of England and Wales, being the “holder” or having “possession” of a trade document has special significance. However, the law does not allow an electronic document to be possessed. As a result, nearly all documents used in international trade are still in paper form."

"Over the past decade, the development of technologies such as distributed ledger technology has made trade based on electronic documents increasingly feasible. Without reform, the law will continue to lag behind, hindering the adoption of electronic trade documents and the significant associated benefits from being achieved (...)"

"The recommendations in our report, and the Bill that would implement them, are intended to enable trade documents in electronic form to be used in the same way as their paper counterparts. To achieve this, the Bill sets out certain “gateway criteria” that a document in electronic form must satisfy in order to qualify as an “electronic trade document”. We recommend that electronic trade documents (that is, documents in electronic form which satisfy the gateway criteria) should be capable of being possessed, and that this principle should be set out explicitly in statute."

 

March 2022 Issue of In Session E-Bulletin of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries

The March 2022 issue of In Session is available online.

It is the monthly e-newsletter of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) and contains news from CALL committees and special interest groups, member updates and events.

Mentorship Program for Visible Minority Librarians in Canada

The following announcement was distributed on the listserv of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries.

It is reproduced here with permission:

The Visible Minority Librarians of Canada (ViMLoC) Mentorship Program is now accepting applications for the 2022 session! This mentoring session will run from May 2nd to July 1st, 2022. To apply as a mentor or mentee, please fill out the mentor application form or mentee application form. 

*** Applications will close on March 31, 2022 ***

About this program

The Visible Minority Librarians of Canada (ViMLoC) recognizes the need to help visible minority librarians, especially early career and new immigrant librarians, develop their professional careers, as well as the need to encourage and guide visible minority library students with career planning. Lack of mentorship is often cited as a challenge among visible minority librarians, and through our mentorship program, we found that small acts of mentorship were able to make an impact on our mentees. Applying for this program will help create a larger network of visible minority librarians and increase our representation in the library profession. The 2022 ViMLoC mentoring program will recruit experienced visible minority librarians as potential mentors, as well as facilitate the matching of potential mentors to mentees. ViMLoC membership is NOT required to participate in this program, however, you are encouraged to sign up for ViMLoC membership. Please visit our mentorship program page for more information.  

Should I apply?

This program is open to visible minority librarians at all stages of their career, and visible minority library students. In Canada, the visible minority population consists mainly of the following groups: Chinese, South Asian, Black, Arab, West Asian, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Latin American, Japanese and Korean. Participants with the intersectionality of these backgrounds are welcome to apply. We need mentors with all kinds of experience and skills. In recognition of your contribution to the mentorship program, we would be happy to provide mentors with a reference letter. 

Expectations

Applicants to the program are expected:

• To commit to the full term of the session;
• To keep in touch with their mentorship partner a minimum of twice per month (by email, phone, Zoom or other means of communication upon mutual agreement);
• To complete an exit survey (online) at the close of the session.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at vimloc@gmail.com . 

CanLII President Sarah Sutherland Interviewed on How Data and the Law Interact

Sarah Sutherland, the President and CEO of the Canadian Legal Information Institute, was interviewed on the most recent episode of the podcast The Geek in Review.

She was asked about her new book Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law Interact:

"We have a fun and informative discussion about how the legal industry, ranging from courts, firms, law schools and start-ups are leveraging data within their organizations and how new technologies are allowing us to do amazing things with data that we could only dream about a few short years ago. While many of us in the law understand the messiness of the data we produce and collect, however Sutherland points out that there are many industries where the data is messy, and they are using that data to increase the value of the services they provide."

"That being said, there are still a number of ways in which we create and collect data that need improvement to support current and potential uses. Leveraging data in better ways helps the legal industry across the spectrum. Whether that is the large law firms assisting global corporations, or helping individuals with access to justice needs. Sutherland’s hope is that a legal industry that has better structure data results in better outcomes for everyone needing legal services."

The podcast is co-hosted by Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer.

Supreme Court of Canada Calendar of Upcoming Hearings

The Supreme Court of Canada has published its calendar of upcoming appeals that will be heard from March 14 to March 25, 2022.

To find out more about any particular case, click on the docket number in parentheses next to each case name to find docket information, case summaries as well as facta from the parties.

Canadian Library and Archives Community Expresses Solidarity With Ukraine

The Librarianship.ca website published a long list of solidarity statements by Canadian library, archives, and museum expressing support for professional colleagues and the people of Ukraine as they face a horrific and unprovoked assault by the Russian military.

It includes the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, the Ontario Library Association, and many others.

Improved Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal (GALLOP)

GALLOP, the Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal, was launched in 2013 by the Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada.

It is a portal providing access to often hard-to-find federal and provincial government publications.

The Association has launched a beta version of an improved GALLOP Portal. 

The beta Portal will have more up-to-date content, more filtering options, and for the first time, include records from Nunavut in addition to the ten other Provinces and Territories already included. 

Here is an overall overview of GALLOP's content.

The designers are looking for feedback.

Library of Parliament Document on Growing Importance of Open-Source Intelligence

The Library of Parliament in Ottawa recently published an explanation of The Growing Importance of Open-Source Intelligence to National Security:

"Until recently, open-source intelligence (OSINT) – publicly available information that has been processed into intelligence – was typically derived from foreign broadcasts and publications."

"Today, OSINT is a changed discipline. Social media platforms, smartphones and Internet of Things devices have exponentially increased the volume and variety of available information. Commercial cloud solutions have driven down the cost of data storage and created a market for 'machine learning as a service.' Finally, advancements in microchip design have augmented data processing power, with quantum computers promising more. Consequently, publicly available information is now collected in bulk, with the aim of applying big data analytics – including ML – to generate insight."

"CSE [Communications Security Establishment] is not the only government institution collecting and analyzing publicly available information. However, its legal mandate provides the only explicit definition of 'publicly available information' apart from existing privacy law."