Minutes of the June 12, 2008 Meeting

Attendees: Michael Cowle, Jennifer Jordan, Louise Hamel, Rick Leech, Michèle Lesage, Grace Mackness, Frédéric Pelletier, Alisa Posesorski, Daniel Poulin and Ruth Rintoul.

The teleconference is chaired by Frédéric Pelletier and begins at 13:00 EDT.

The goal of this meeting is to review the first draft of the consolidated standards entitled The Uniform Preparation of Decisions. Several comments were sent by committee members since May 15, 2008 and besides those related to format, typos and consistency which will be addressed in a new draft, certain points need to be discussed.

The agenda is set as follows:

• 1) The dot problem (punctuation in acronyms and abreviations)
• 2) Publication restriction notice
• 3) Correction Notice and corrigenda
• 4) Footnotes or endnotes
• 5) In force date when citing legislation
• 6) Non word-processing files
• 7) Case naming appendix

The notes for these minutes are taken by Ruth Rintoul (slightly edited by FP).

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1) The dot problem (punctuation in acronyms and abreviations)

Alisa: Speaking as a print publisher. Her company would like to modernize formats but consistency within each publication is important. If an author drops punctuation, it‘s hard for the publisher to add parallel citations if the citations copied from external sources have punctuation. Their only options are to add NO parallel citations, to keep the author’s style and remove punctuation from imported citations, or to add punctuation to the author’s citations. They prefer to keep punctuation, but this is a practical consideration, not a philosophical one.

Daniel: We only want to eliminate useless punctuation, not all punctuation. He proposes that the CCC tackle this issue, and to start the process we should:

• adopt “v” (without the dot) in the present document (“Uniform Preparation of Decisions”, hereinafter UPD)
• state in the UPD that the CCC will prepare a future position paper on removal of punctuation generally, and that for the UPD we are making a start by introducing “v”.

Rick: If we adopt “v” in the UPD, Courts will slowly start adopting it, but how will this impact on publishers?

Alisa: For commercial purposes we must have consistent formatting within a single text.

FP: When the Courts reach a certain percentage of compliance with a no-punctuation standard, would the publishers switch?

Alisa: Yes.

FP: Should we agree with Daniel to make a statement in the UPD and adopt “v”? And state that if Courts wish to adopt “v” the CCC approves of this change?

Rick: We should definitely address this issue but not in a small gradual way. We should do it as a new Standard and do it in a big way.

Jennifer: Agrees with Rick. There will be a lot of push-back from the Courts on this change. We should start discussing it with judges now in a general way, and with the publishers.

Alisa: There is no harm in saying in the UPD that we are considering the idea and that we are moving in this direction.

Rick: Is the CCC seriously considering a position paper on punctuation?

FP and Daniel: Yes.

Consensus: In the UPD will use “v.” (with the dot) but we will mention the intent to address the issue in the future work on the CCC.

2) The publication restriction notice (section 3.8)

Rick: In 3.8 (pages 14-15), the wording does not adequately reflect local court practices. Courts are at different stages in implementing better procedures for handling publication bans.

(a) Rick objects to para 30, which says “the publication restriction notice MUST include …”. It should be changed to “should”.

Consensus: “must” will be changed to “should”..

(b) Rick is concerned about “the decision released by the court to the public complies with the restriction…”. There may be liability issues as to why a Court or government agency publishing the judgments would not want to do this.

Consensus: Remove the wording in the draft document under para. 3.8 that suggests that Court indicate the judgment complies with a publication ban.

(c) Rick indicates the Alberta Courts Web Committee had requested that the decision preparation standards include a provision that recognizes where a judgment has been edited by some agency other than the judge who writes it. This happens in Alberta where editing is necessary beyond what the judge has done. Rick will transmit examples of editorial notices applied to some Alberta judgments.

Louise: In Ontario at this time no redacting is done by the Court. There used to be a limited amount of redacting done. At this time, the publication ban is attached to the decision when the decision is released to the publishers. Louise agrees in principle that the Court should be doing the redacting.

Jennifer: The CJC has already released a document on confidentiality in decisions, saying that the obligation is with the Judge drafting the decision to protect privacy. The CCC should not now issue the UPD with conflicting statements in it.

Consensus: In the UPD we will refer to the CJC Protocol on the Use of Personal Information in Judgments and state that it is best practice for courts to comply with publication restriction at the drafting stage. However the UPD will also include, as an option, the Alberta pratice of adding a different editorial notice when redacting is not done by the judge but by a Government agency before the public release of the decision.

3) Correction Notice and corrigenda (Sections 3.9 and 6.3)

FP: Since receiving comments from the CCC he now feels that a corrigendum statement should always be added to a corrected decision. Anne (N.S.) had commented that some courts will only issue a Corrigendum, not a corrected decision. What should the UPD recommend? Options: 1. Send only a Corrigendum; or 2. Send a corrected document plus a Corrigendum statement explaining what was changed.

Daniel: Recalled the situation when the SCC released a decision on Quebec. The Court released as many as 10 versions of the decision within a few hours, with no indication of what the changes were. An impossible situation for everyone.

Grace: When a correction is minor, her publisher is happy with a Corrigendum only. When a correction is major, they want to receive a complete corrected version plus a separate document explaining the changes. For the print version, their only option is to publish the Corrigendum in a subsequent issue of the law report. For the online version, they place the corrected version online, replacing the original version, with no editorial notes (I may not have heard this correctly. It seems wrong to me).

Michael: In the example of the SCC releasing several versions, should we ask the Court to indicate the complete chain of corrections?

Daniel: Yes, it is very important that they do so.

Rick: Asking Courts to issue corrected versions for only minor changes is asking too much.

Louise: For minor changes, the Court simply replaces the version on the website. For major changes they re-issue the decision with a note saying what was changed.

Michele: The UPD must request what is best for the readers of the decisions. What is best for the readers is a corrected version plus explanatory information.

Rick: The UPD must drop the option of releasing a corrected version with no explanation.

Consensus: First & best option: Corrected version plus Corrigendum. Second option: Corrigendum only. Not permitted: Corrected version with no explanation.

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A new meeting will be scheduled next week to resume our discussion on the remaining points. Date to be determined.

The meeting ended at 14:00 EDT.