The high court will hear 11 appeals, which includes seven criminal cases, in its spring session
A day after the Supreme Court of Canada marked its 150th anniversary, the high court announced the 11 appeals it will hear during its spring session.
Among the cases is Deborah Carol Riddle v. ivari, which the court will hear on April 22.
In 2017, Riddle obtained a judgment declaring that her spouse, who had disappeared nine years earlier, was deceased. Her spouse’s life insurance company filed an application to annul the declaration of death, arguing that there was evidence he was alive in another country in 2018.
A Superior Court of Quebec judge granted the life insurance company’s request and annulled the declaration of death despite the company failing to serve the application to Riddle’s spouse. An appellate court affirmed the judge’s decision but allowed an appeal related to the costs award.
Seven of the 11 appeals the high court will consider in the coming weeks involve criminal matters.
In His Majesty the King v. Paul Sheppard, which will be heard on April 23, the SCC will consider whether certain principles established by the court retroactively apply to historic criminal offences.
The respondent in the case was a teacher at an all-male boarding school in Alberta who was found guilty of sexual misconduct with a minor student in 1993 and 1994. The respondent was sentenced to prison, but a majority on the Alberta Court of Appeal allowed his appeal to reduce his sentence.
The SCC will consider whether principles set out in its 2020 decision in R. v. Friesen, a widely-reported sexual assault case involving a four-year-old child, can be applied to Sheppard’s three-decade-old offences.
On May 20, the court will hear His Majesty the King v. Sharon Fox, which involves a criminal defence lawyer whose client was the subject of a wiretap authorization, which allowed phone calls with a lawyer to be recorded but not monitored live.
The lawyer, Fox, called her client during the surveillance operation, which was recorded and briefly monitored. The recording revealed that the lawyer had informed her client that a related party had been arrested and that the police would likely be obtaining search warrants. The lawyer was charged with trying to obstruct justice by interfering with an ongoing police investigation.
A trial judge found that Fox’s rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were not violated when her phone conversation with her client was briefly monitored. The judge also found, however, that Fox’s Charter rights were breached when she was denied access to another privileged part of the call recording and ordered the entire recording excluded from the trial. The lawyer was acquitted, and a majority of an appellate court affirmed the acquittal.
The SCC will hear His Majesty the King v. B.F on May 22. The respondent, B.F., was found guilty of attempting to murder her mother and 19-month-old daughter by injecting them with high doses of insulin. She also injected herself. While B.F. and her mother recovered, her daughter suffered serious and permanent damage to her brain and other organs.
B.F. appealed her conviction and sentence of life imprisonment. An appellate court rejected the sentence appeal, as well as her conviction appeal concerning her mother.
However, the appellate court ordered a new trial for the conviction related to B.F.’s daughter. The court noted that evidence pointed to acts that could be interpreted as B.F. aiding her mother’s suicide attempt and said the trial court should have distinguished the required mens rea for attempted murder from that needed to convict for aiding a suicide attempt.
