“Five Days of CanLII Stats”, Day 1

This post’s title is obviously a reference to the famous Christmas ear worm — “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.

Why only five though?

I should first say that I heard this song repeatedly until about September, thanks to my son who couldn’t manage to live one day of his life without listening to its interpretation by friendly dinosaurs in “Barney’s Christmas special”, a 1999 classic of children’s holiday entertainment. Amusingly, it’s been off Netflix for a couple months now, so we won’t even listen to it during the time of the year when it’s actually appropriate to do so. I guess that’s an instance of karma hitting back a poor toddler quite harshly.

In any event, I heard it enough to know that the fun (for a two year old at least) really starts when the singers reaches those “fiiiiiiiiive, golden rings”, and I will thus allow myself to provide only five days of CanLII stats (still a very generous proposition in this busy time of year, I should say), as opposed to the traditional twelve.

Therefore, on the “first day of CanLII stats”, I’m giving you, you hordes of legal stats junkies, the List of the ten most consulted cases on CanLII.org in 2015 (see here for the 2014 list as a comparison):

Meads v. Meads – 2012 ABQB 571 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/fsvjq (up from 2nd place) Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick – 2008 SCC 9 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/1vxsm (up from 3rd place) Bhasin v. Hrynew – 2014 SCC 71 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/gf84s (new entry) Szakacs v. Clarke – 2014 ONSC 7487 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/gfs1j (new entry) R. v. Armitage – 2015 ONCJ 64 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/gg987 (new entry, most popular 2015 case) Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) – 2015 SCC 5 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/gg5z4 (new entry) Hryniak v. Mauldin – 2014 SCC 7 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/g2s18 (down from 4th place) Moore v. Getahun – 2015 ONCA 55 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/gg3lt (new entry) Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) – 1999 CanLII 699 (SCC) http://canlii.ca/t/1fqlk (down from 6th place) Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford – 2013 SCC 72 (CanLII) http://canlii.ca/t/g2f56 (down from 5th place)

Interesting facts:

Morland-Jones v. Taerk, 2014 ONSC 3061 was the top case for 2014. It dropped to the 35th place in 2015. This is probably due to the fact that the case, as Colin my predecessor noted in his similar column last year, “offers more smiles than value in the form of binding precedent”. The fact that humorous cases usually ended the year on top, Colin explained, was part of a multi-year trend…

… which trend is interrupted this year with Meads being crowned this year. There is probably stuff to smile about in Meads, but the case also has undeniable precedential value, as appears from its 84 citations in our Reflex records.

This, if you are interested, is how popular Meads is.

That’s it for today. Your gift tomorrow: the top 10 most popular cases issued in 2015 (you already have a preview in the list above)!