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Minister of Justice addresses delegates at the 2016 CBA Legal Conference (Video)

“How many of you sit on boards now?” asks Rick Powers, a lawyer and associate professor from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Do you finish your conversations when you’re under pressure? You might be surprised.

Judicial vacancies and the court delays that accompany them were a key theme as the 2016 CBA Legal Conference began in Ottawa.

Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould acknowledged today the need to fill outstanding federal judicial vacancies. “I am very sensitive to the pressures that courts throughout the country are currently experiencing due to judicial vacancies,” she told opening plenary delegates at the CBA Legal Conference in Ottawa.

Leveraging your law degree was the first table to fill up in the PD session Pivotal Career moments at the 2016 CBA Legal Conference in Ottawa.

CBA Council paid tribute to retiring CEO John Hoyles who is stepping down in November after 20 years in charge.

The second and third tranches of resolutions at CBA Council meeting in Ottawa on Thursday saw a great deal more discussion, largely because a major resolution, 16-01-A dealt with matters at the heart of the association itself, a proposal to change the CBA’s governance system that itself was the culmination of more than two years’ hard work by the Re-Think steering committee.

The first tranche of resolutions up for debate at the Council meeting in Ottawa on Thursday came and went smoothly as a hot knife through butter – no debate, no objections, no amendments.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, urged the federal government to address the “perpetual crisis of judicial vacancies in Canada” and to “restore funding to the Canadian Judicial Council,” a federal body mandated to improve the quality of judicial service in Canada’s superior courts.