Publications

March 3, 2021

Product advertising in the time of COVID-19: Health Canada and the Competition Bureau are on the lookout for misleading claims

It’s been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and many companies are attempting to market products intended to help consumers deal with the risks associated with COVID-19. Some of the most common examples of such products include face masks, testing devices, hand sanitizers, and (…)

November 6, 2020

International tax planning endorsed by the Court

In the recent decision in Agracity Ltd. v. The Queen1, the Tax Court of Canada (the “Court”) endorsed the Canadian tax consequences of business transactions between a Canadian corporation (“Agracity”) and its Barbados affiliate (“NewAgco-Barbados”) within a group of companies operating in the (…)

May 21, 2020

E-commerce: Protecting Your Work

As distribution channels with a global reach, websites are a powerful tool for doing business, and during the pandemic, they even play a critical role. A website consists of a set of webpages accessible from an address hosted on a server through the internet or an intranet. A website is a (…)

May 14, 2020

E-commerce: Your Obligations regarding Consumer Protection and Competition Matters

Before selling your products and services online, you will need to determine the form and content of your contract, and ensure that you comply with the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act (the “CPA”). The CPA applies to any contract between a consumer and a merchant entered into in Quebec, (…)

May 7, 2020

E-commerce: Some Laws and Rules You Should Be Aware of

Various ways of doing e-commerce E-commerce can take different forms. For the purposes of this article, we will refer to e-commerce where the contract of sale or of supply of services is concluded by electronic means, E-commerce will be said to be “direct” when the product or service is delivered (…)

April 17, 2020

How to Negotiate Temporary Agreements or Contracts in Times of Crisis?

The rapid spread of COVID-19 and the introduction of strict government measures are limiting or changing many businesses’ operations. These measures impose unusual restrictions that make it more difficult to meet certain contractual obligations. In such a situation, many companies will want to (…)

August 24, 2018

Advertising, loyalty programs and consumer credit: what’s new and what’s coming up

This publication was co-authored by Luc Thibaudeau, former partner of Lavery and now judge in the Civil Division of the Court of Québec, District of Longueuil. Following the adoption of the Act mainly to modernize rules relating to consumer credit and to regulate debt settlement service contracts, (…)

June 18, 2018

Influencers Must Disclose Who Is Influencing Them

This publication was co-authored by Luc Thibaudeau, former partner of Lavery and now judge in the Civil Division of the Court of Québec, District of Longueuil. The rise of social media and influencers has led us to consume incredible quantities of content every day, often without realizing that (…)

October 5, 2017

Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence

Although artificial intelligence has been evolving constantly in the past few years, the law sometimes has difficulty keeping pace with such developments. Intellectual property issues are especially important: businesses investing in these technologies must be sure that they can take full advantage (…)

August 2, 2017

Deceptive Online Marketing Practices: Intermediaries, what is your legal exposure?

In recent decades, online advertising has become the single most efficient and interactive way to reach consumers and assess their behaviour. While television and print audiences continue to dwindle and overall marketing strategies that focus on these mediums are less able to effectively measure and (…)

May 16, 2017

When artificial intelligence is discriminatory

Artificial intelligence has undergone significant developments in the last few years, particularly in respect of what is now known as deep learning.1 This method is the extension of the neural networks which have been used for a few years for machine learning. Deep learning, as any other form of (…)

May 1, 2017

Artificial intelligence and its legal challenges

Is there a greater challenge than to write a legal article on an emerging technology that does not exist yet in its absolute form? Artificial intelligence, through a broad spectrum of branches and applications, will impact corporate and business integrity, corporate governance, distribution of (…)

March 29, 2017

Artificial intelligence: contractual obligations beyond the buzzwords

Can computers learn and reason? If so, what are the limitations of the tasks that they can be given? These questions have been the subject of countless debate as far back as 1937, when Alan Turing published his work on computable numbers1. Many researchers have devoted themselves to developing (…)