Find below recently published Ottawa decisions, available for free through CanLII.org.

Family Matters

Barta v. Barta (2021 ONSC 6265)
spousal support — income — imputed — child support — temporary
Justice T. Engelking

Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa v. K.D. (2021 ONSC 6092)
child — parents — genuine issue requiring — summary — affidavits
Justice J. Audet

Civil Matters

Abboud et al. v. Bouwer et al. (2021 ONSC 6188)
oppression — directors — pleading — shares — corporation
Justice C. MacLeod

Thomson v. Benjamin (2021 ONSC 6096)
costs — motion — cross-examinations — indemnity — adjournment
Justice R. Ryan Bell

McGuire v. Dejong and Coldwell Banker (2021 ONSC 6044)
real estate — commissions — registration — transactions — trade
Associate Justice A. Kaufman

Criminal Matters

R. v. Gill (2021 ONSC 6328)
metal weightlifting bar — knives — home — murder — gloves
Justice A. London-Weinstein

Divisional Court Decisions of Local Interest

Merivale-Gilmour Manor Ltd. v. Municipal Property Assessment Corporation Region No. 3 et al (2021 ONSC 6240)
higher assessment — reason to doubt the correctness — withdraw — motion for leave — property
Justice K. Muszynski

Pinon v. City of Ottawa (2021 ONSC 6172)
class proceeding — preferable — bus — certification — class members
Justices D. Aston, K. Swinton, and J. McCarthy

Keen CanLII users may have noticed a few new features in the last month or two, and if you’re legal research nerds like us, were probably quite excited! For all the details on these upgrades and how to make use of them, check out the CanLII Blog. In short, here are two of the updates we think you’ll like:

• “Unfavorable mentions”: This is a big one! A yellow jalapeño will now appear when there is an unfavourable mention in a citing decision.  This complements the blue jalapeño of relevancy.
• “Heatmaps” in legislation: Our reference librarian Brenda absolutely loves this one. Heatmaps are a tool used to visually indicate which parts of a document have been cited more frequently. CanLII rolled out this feature for decisions earlier this year, and it’s now available on legislation.

As we always say with CanLII, the best way to learn how to use these new features is to just do it! Head on over to CanLII’s blog for all the details on how these features work, and then jump in on CanLII. Want a quick link to both of these? Check out Canada v. Vavilov and look for the yellow pepper! For the legislative heatmap, take a look at the right side of the screen on the Construction Act. Remember, the darker the blue, the more heavily cited that section is.

Family law practitioners, this is for you!

CanLII has announced that approximately 4,800 judicial decisions from the Reports of Family Law (from 1968 to the present!) have been added to their database. This was made possible from a grant from the Law Foundation of Ontario, and fills in some significant gaps in the jurisprudence that was available – for free – on their site.

For more details, check out CanLII’s blog post.

Back in March, we were thrilled to announce that CCLA conference papers were now being stored on CanLII. The team at CanLII and Lexum has been hard at work, and the great news is that all of the papers that are scheduled to be hosted are now up! You can find papers from the Family, Solicitors, Criminal, and Civil Litigation conferences from 2014 up to 2019 in CanLII’s Commentary section. Once we start hosting conferences again, new papers will be deposited with CanLII within just a few months of the event.

If you’re interested in how to find and link to your papers, check out this post we did in March.

Thanks, as always, to CanLII for hosting our papers!