Welcome to the Regulation Pro Blog. SML’s blog contains brief discussions of court decisions and other developments in professional regulation, with one or two new posts per week. Explore our catalogue below or on CanLII.
Please note that the information contained in Regulation Pro is not intended to be legal advice and is not intended to be acted upon. The information contained herein is intended for general information and educational purposes only.
Who Should Go?
When there is a concerning connection between counsel to a party in a proceeding and the adjudicator, who should step aside? In Whearty v. Ontario
Relational Bias by Adjudicators
An adjudicator’s exploration of personal opportunities with a participant in a pending case before them can constitute an appearance of bias. Typically, this occurs where
Publishing Findings Pending Appeal
Balancing a regulator’s duty of transparency against a registrant’s interest in privacy can often be challenging. Perhaps none would be more daunting than the balancing
Complaining Against Complainants
Several court decisions indicate that a complainant enjoys a legal privilege when filing a formal complaint to a regulatory body and are immune from a
Screening Out Serious Complaints
Most regulators can decline to investigate complaints that are frivolous, vexatious, an abuse of process or otherwise not in the public interest to pursue. It
Four Lessons for Regulators
Those of us in the field of professional regulation tend (perhaps wrongly) to place more importance on court-level judgments than on tribunal decisions. While court-level
Accommodation and Proportionality
Two of the more challenging legal principles for regulators to apply are accommodation and proportionality. Accommodation, in the human rights sphere, refers to adjusting a
Opinion Evidence from “Employees with Expertise”
The law of expert opinion evidence has been in flux in recent years. A recent Ontario Divisional Court decision has provided some insight into an
The Effect of Offers to Settle on Discipline Hearing Costs
In civil litigation a party who achieves an outcome in court that is equal to or better than a previous offer to settle the proceedings