Wednesday: What’s Hot on CanLII

• Author: Administrator
• Date: January 28, 2015

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Bernstein v. Poon, 2015 ONSC 155

[22] This dispute arises at one of the many intersections between business and profit on the one hand, and health and wellness on the other. Both the plaintiffs and the defendant are, financially, the beneficiaries of the burgeoning needs and demands of an increasingly obese population. While the plaintiffs are openly commercial and not dependent on public health care funding, the defendant, whose clinics see patients mainly on referral from other healthcare practitioners under the auspices of publicly funded healthcare, acknowledged that he has augmented the income from his medical practice through the sales of his books.

[23] Until this lawsuit brought them together, Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Poon had never met. Nor, other than through lawyers’ letters, had they ever communicated with each other. Dr. Bernstein had never heard of Dr. Poon until the patient alerted him to the references to the Bernstein Diet in Dr. Poon’s book.

2. R. v. Spencer, 2014 SCC 43

[1] The Internet raises a host of new and challenging questions about privacy. This appeal relates to one of them.

[2] The police identified the Internet Protocol (IP) address of a computer that someone had been using to access and store child pornography through an Internet file-sharing program. They then obtained from the Internet Service Provider (ISP), without prior judicial authorization, the subscriber information associated with that IP address. This led them to the appellant, Mr. Spencer. He had downloaded child pornography into a folder that was accessible to other Internet users using the same file-sharing program. He was charged and convicted at trial of possession of child pornography and acquitted on a charge of making it available.

3. Tervita Corp. v. Canada (Commissioner of Competition), 2015 SCC 3

[1] The appellant in this case, Tervita Corp., operates two hazardous waste secure landfills in British Columbia. In February 2010, Tervita Corp. acquired a company which held a permit for another secure landfill site. This transaction attracted the attention of the Commissioner of Competition, who initiated the merger review process under the Competition Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-34 (“Act”).

[2] The purpose of the Act is in part “to maintain and encourage...