The Latest

In May 2025, Alberta’s Minister of Education issued Ministerial Order 030/2025, setting province-wide rules governing access to literary materials in K–12 schools. While presented as a child-protection measure, a subsequent clarification made clear that the order applies not only to school libraries, but to entire school environments—including classrooms, supplementary reading, and voluntary access spaces.

CFE Intervener Factum in the Supreme Court of Canada – This appeal concerns the scope of the obligations of meaningful consent and safeguarding according to Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). CFE submits three points in this intervener factum: (1) evidence of subjective expectations of privacy, rather than those of a reasonable person, has no role to play in determining whether meaningful consent was provided under PIPEDA; (2) users’ reasonable expectations of privacy on digital platforms will generally be high; and (3) meaningful consent to the use or disclosure of personal information on digital platforms requires that the platform clearly inform the user of the specific purposes for which the information may be used or disclosed, prior to such use or disclosure.

Occasionally, governments introduce legislation that gets things wrong. That certainly is the case for the Liberal Government’s Bill C-9: The Combatting Hate Act. Every aspect of it is flawed.This is a special concern because it is a bill that restricts free expressive rights. Expressive freedom is never without limits, but our courts have been very clear that any restrictions must minimally impair our fundamental democratic freedoms. 

CFE Intervener Factum in the Supreme Court of Canada - In this factum, CFE submits that citizens’ access — and particularly, public interest litigants’ access — to judicial review remedies is a fundamental feature of the democratic dialogue in Canada. Absent a robust remedial comparison, judicial review applicants are at risk of being rerouted to inadequate alternative processes, including political processes with which they cannot meaningfully engage.

BY DAVID HUTTON - The Liberals need to put in place a system that truly protects whistleblowers and the Canadian public. Perhaps then we can begin to restore our national image and rejoin the ranks of truly clean and well-governed democracies.