Workers' Compensation Schemes and the Law of Tort

There are some interesting snippets in this morning's Supreme Court of Canada decision in Marine Services International Ltd. v. Ryan Estate, 2013 SCC 44 on the nature of workers' compensation statutes and their relationship to the law of tort.

Keeping the Federal Government out of the Provincial Courts

In its 2010 decision in Telezone, the Supreme Court of Canada took a relatively relaxed approach to private law actions against the federal government in provincial court. The difficulty is that in some of these cases a court will have to adjudicate on the lawfulness -- as a public law matter -- of actions or decisions taken by federal authorities, but this is a matter reserved to the federal courts by the Federal Courts Act.