Seeking solutions

Photo credit: Pixabay

Within the walls of the Law Centre, you’ll find a dynamic network of research centres and institutes quietly reshaping the legal landscape for everyday people. The Faculty of Law is home to five units bridging the gap between legal theory and real-world impact — the Centre for Constitutional Studies, the Health Law Institute, the Alberta Law Reform Institute, the Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge and the Environmental Law Centre.

Here’s a look at how the research centres and institutes in the Faculty of Law are on the front lines of the most critical issues facing our communities.

Health Misinformation

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was saturated with harmful misinformation and disinformation. Professor Timothy Caulfield, research director of the Health Law Institute (HLI), took action to combat the COVID-19 infodemic. He co-founded ScienceUpFirst in January 2021.

The goal of the campaign was simple, yet incredibly difficult: to create an independent source of scientific information and counter misinformation in a constructive way.

ScienceUpFirst — which Caulfield began with Stan Kutcher, a Nova Scotia senator — performs empirical research on topics subject to misinformation and uses evidence-based strategies to produce content that is informed by science. Today, the project has expanded its mandate beyond debunking COVID-19 myths as it tackles all kinds of junk science, including climate change-related health issues, women’s health, mental health and others. It has also expanded beyond social media to hold public events and lectures and to partner with community groups. Fostering media literacy and critical thinking while “correcting the record” are also central to its new trajectory.

“This is a generational issue that we’re tackling,” says Caulfield.

The HLI is accustomed to being at the forefront of research and advocacy. Founded in 1977 by Justice Ellen Picard, it was the first research institute in Canada in the health law field. ScienceUpFirst is just one of many HLI projects that are helping Canadians navigate the complexities of ethical, legal and health policy issues.

Indigenous Law

The Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge is a tangible manifestation of reconciliation — and Indigenous resurgence — in action. The lodge aims to support Indigenous communities to “identify, articulate and implement their own laws,” identify promising research methods, and produce valuable and accessible legal education resources.

One way they do this is through their Community Research Methods for Revitalizing Indigenous Laws workshop. “One goal of the workshop is to “demystify the concept of law, and move away from ‘law’ as being something only states do, often violently, or in an oppressive manner toward Indigenous peoples,” says Associate Professor Hadley Friedland, the lodge’s co-founder and academic director.

The workshops also aim to share methods Indigenous communities can use, such as the Narrative Analysis Method, which involves an adapted legal analysis of various resources such as stories, historical accounts and oral histories, and refining findings through community conversations with Elders and other local holders of knowledge.

“The most recent workshop was, as always, invigorating and inspiring. We always learn more than we teach,” she adds. 

Individual Indigenous communities have invited the lodge to facilitate workshops, but the group holds at least one multi-day workshop per year inviting representatives from communities all over Canada. The interest from Indigenous communities remains high.

From 2018 to today, the lodge has now offered 18 workshops for 739 participants from more than 100 Indigenous communities. However, the impact of the workshops goes beyond numbers.

“Bringing people together from all over to learn from each other and build relationships has been very powerful,” Friedland says. “The three most common words we hear after workshops are ʽhope,ʼ ʽinspired,ʼ and ʽstrength.ʼ”

Of Landlords and Legislation

Against the backdrop of Alberta’s record-breaking population growth and growing concern about the housing crisis, the Alberta Law Reform Institute (ALRI) is investigating if Alberta’s current laws are working. The institute is currently in the early stages of a project on Alberta’s Residential Tenancies Act, the primary policy dictating rules between landlords and tenants.

As of 2021, there were 465,220 renter households in Alberta and potentially tens of thousands of landlords, says Laura Buckingham, ALRI legal counsel and lead counsel for the project. With the potential to shape legislation that directly impacts landlords and tenants alike, the forthcoming report carries significant implications for people across the province.

There are parts of Alberta’s tenancy laws that are 40 or 50 years old, and it has been around 20 years since the last major review. While there have been specific parts of the legislation that have been changed, there’s a need for a thorough review of the whole act to see if it still works well in today’s society, says Buckingham.

“At this point, we can say that we’ve heard about a lot of issues that people are encountering on the ground,” she says. “We’ve heard about a lot of issues that deserve a closer look.”

Buckingham and her colleagues began research for the project last year to understand the issues associated with the act. This includes studying relevant case law, research, media op-eds and other sources of information. They have also engaged with stakeholders, consulting with renters, landlords and legal experts in the field. “We start consultation very early to find out more about the issues, because the legal research doesn’t always provide the full picture of how things are actually working on the ground,” she says.

The organization expects to publish our findings in the next few years, Buckingham says. It will include a series of recommendations for the Government of Alberta. With a history of more than 50 years of advocacy, around 65 per cent of ALRI’s reports have resulted in some kind of change to legislation.

Constitutional Contentions

It may be an understatement to say Canada’s notwithstanding clause has been a hot topic in recent years. Section 33, which allows provinces to override certain portions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, has seen a “dramatic uptick” in its usage, says Richard Mailey, director of the Centre for Constitutional Studies (CCS).

According to Mailey, the notwithstanding clause was underused outside of Quebec until relatively recently. Now, Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan have invoked it to pass “some pretty contentious and impactful laws and policies,” Mailey says. The notwithstanding clause is the topic of a recent special issue in CCS’s journal Constitutional Forum, featuring a foreword by the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, ʼ68 LLB, ʼ91 LLD (Honorary).

“With all of these developments abound, it feels like the right time to also develop and further scholarly conversations about what the notwithstanding clause does, about how it fits within our constitutional order, and about whether or not it fixes the balance of constitutional power in the right spot in our current political climate,” Mailey says.

The special issue is the latest in a series of collaborations between the CCS and professors at UBC’s Allard School of Law. It is the result of a workshop held at the UBC early in 2023. The roundtable involved McLachlin, the former chief justice on the Supreme Court of Canada, six constitutional law professors and Mailey himself.

One of the centre’s core goals is to provide a platform for U of A faculty members. Mailey says he was impressed by contributions, including Professor Eric Adams’ article on the early history of litigation and scholarship surrounding the notwithstanding clause.

“We thought it would be worth having a conversation about how legal and political actors might respond to this rapidly evolving landscape,” he says.

Environmental Protections

When an industrial site is abandoned, who is responsible for clean up and the associated costs? Surprisingly, the legislation in Alberta doesn’t always give a straightforward answer, says Kyra Leuschen, staff lawyer with the Environmental Law Centre (ELC).

Leuschen and the ELC have recently published a new report on contaminated sites in Alberta, which includes recommendations for how to address gaps in legislation. 

With an estimated 8,000 contaminated sites across the province — excluding oil and gas facilities — the problem is not small. Sites contaminated by things like gas stations and wood treatment plants have become a notable issue in Alberta and have led to various legal battles, says Leuschen.

For the report, the ELC team looked into the laws that govern contaminated sites in the province along with the legal issues and policies surrounding them. They also dug into the policies of parts of Europe, the United States and even other provinces to see what Alberta could learn from them.

“There’s a lot of precedent elsewhere. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel,” Leuschen says. “Some jurisdictions were better than others in a lot of ways — while others might just have a single regulation that’s a slightly better approach.”

From this work, the team drafted a series of recommendations for the Government of Alberta to update and improve the laws and regulations surrounding contaminated sites. According to Leuschen, the ELC also seeks to increase public education about current and important environmental topics.

“I think these concepts go together in a lot of ways,” she says. “If you want to advocate for law reform, then you need to engage the public to increase pressure on lawmakers.” 

The ELC has been in operation since 1982 — though it only moved to the Law Centre recently — and it has a long-standing working relationship with the Government of Alberta. She says that over the years, its work has tried to apply “reasonable pressure on the government to enact law reform with the goal of environmental protection.”.