by Shelley Bentley

There are 72 BC Branch provincial Sections. These Sections play a vital role in keeping members up-to-date on changes in the law and aware of legal and political issues affecting a given area of practice. They are the main resource utilized by the BC Branch in legislative review, law reform initiatives and in responding to matters affecting the profession. What follows is a sample of the recent activities of many Sections.

ADR- Vancouver
The Victim Offender Mediation Program is the first state-sanctioned and funded victim offender mediation program in Canada. Administered by the Canadian Justice Institute it applies the principles of restorative justice to the circumstances of violent offences, among others. It uses an innovative approach designed to meet the need for healing and closure for people involved in, or affected by, the most serious crimes in the Criminal Code. The Program:

• Is flexible and highly responsive to the needs of the individual participants for healing, safety and confidentiality;
• Empowers victim and offender to address issues and concerns surrounding the crime and its consequences;
• Provides the parties with a process which can lead to new insight, thereby reducing levels of anxiety and contributing to therapeutic gains; and
• Addresses questions and concerns regarding the offender’s eventual release into the community.

David Gustavson, Co-Director of the Fraser Region Community Justice Initiatives Association, played a video for ADR Subsection members of a victim of sexual abuse discussing his experience and the Program. The articulate victim, a male in his mid-20’s, described the painful process of recognizing his unresolved issues with anger following the criminal conviction of the offender and his need to confront the offender in order to obtain healing and closure and to restore his ability to participate fully in life. He described being left a hollow shell by his experiences as a teenager abused by a male friend of the family and went on to discuss his transition from victim to survivor. Others benefited from this restorative process: the offender confronted his own rationalizations and the victim’s family dealt with their feelings of guilt about allowing the abuse to occur.

Poverty Law
The Poverty Law Section held three recent meetings. In the first meeting, Kimberly Azyan of the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee spoke about the role of the PGT in adult guardianship under the new legislative regime. The four new BC laws dealing with adult guardianship are: the Adult Guardianship Act, the Health Care (Consent) and Care Facility (Admission) Act, the Representation Agreement Act, and the Public Guardian and Trustee Act. The impetus to guardianship law reform has been due to a number of factors including:

• An aging population;
• Increased awareness about economic abuse of the elderly;
• The release of mentally ill persons into the community from institutions; and
• Changes in medical technology and issues relating to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its application to the appointment of substitute decision makers.

The PGT’s role is to ensure that the intent of the legislation is carried out and to coordinate community consultation. The PGT has authority to investigate Representatives under the new Representation Agreement Act and to implement protective measures such as freezing bank accounts. The PGT also plays a proactive educative role for representatives, financial institutions and others who give advice on handling assets. The PGT will soon issue a handout outlining the expectations for Representatives and providing an approved template for Representation Agreements; a sample agreement is available through the Representation Agreement Resource Centre, or visit www.trustee.bc.ca.

The second Poverty Law Section meeting featured guest speaker Geoffrey Plant, MLA, Liberal Party Justice Critic, who was asked to comment on the discussion paper entitled “Poverty Law: What’s at Stake?” prepared by a subcommittee of the BC Association of Community Law Offices and on future funding in this area. Carol Rosset and Bruno Drucker commented that poverty law clients represent a broad cross-section of society; those who are mentally or physically ill or aged, new immigrants, single mothers, aboriginal persons. They have one shared trait: vulnerability due to poverty. Usually coupled with this vulnerability is a constellation of other issues. Ms. Rosset stressed the importance of funding poverty law services:

• to ensure accountability, providing a system of checks and balances where people’s rights have been denied;
• to assist those who have the least political clout and voice; and
• to ensure that we live in a society where there is no discrimination, where people are treated fairly and government agencies are held accountable.

At another recent meeting of the Poverty Law Section the following were identified as issues of concern:

• Amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act that provide that Canada Student Loans are undischargeable for 10 years after filing an assignment in bankruptcy;
• Possible challenges to the legal validity of municipal anti-panhandling bylaws;
• Identifying housing as a right;
• Amendments to the Residential Tenancy Act that have eliminated the Arbitration Review Panel, and the corresponding increase in judicial review applications of arbitrator’s decisions; and
• Eligibility for legal aid and impact on clients with poverty law issues.

Civil Litigation-Vancouver
Kenneth Shear, VP at Technology and Law of Electronic Evidence Discovery, Inc. in Seattle, is an expert on electronic evidence. He assists corporations to deal with the issues involved in electronic evidence in litigation, particularly in the discovery phase. With the advent of computer systems, complex technology interposes itself between lawyers and the information needed to make legal decisions and to conduct legal cases. Technological changes have resulted in a continual change of the concept of discovery.

Mr. Shear discussed the lifecycle of a document.

Creation
A document is typed into memory, then saved on disk. Each time the document is used, a “cached” copy is made for duplication purposes. The computer makes copies of the document as you work and keeps information about the data (called “meta data”) such as when it was created. It then saves this information in a temporary file. There are numerous ways of creating data other than word processing – fax, e-mail, voicemail – a fax creates difficulty in electronic discovery because it is not held in regular text. However, an optical character recognition system can be used to decodify the fax.

Shelley Bentley is in-house counsel at the Loewen Group Inc in Burnaby, British Columbia.

This article was published in the June 2001 issue of BarTalk. © 2001 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.