Ghana photos from the 80s

The Chief's Soul sitting in front of him

Just before I left Ghana in 1986, my young friend Ben Kofi Wilson gave me a set of photos. I came across them recently and thought I'd put them up on Flickr because he might like to look at them.

Three of the photos feature Ben's friend and classmate, Obese (Oh-bee-see) Yeboah, who also happened to be the soul of the Akwapihene, the chief of the Akwapims.

I didn't know that Yeboah was the chief's soul until the day I punished him for talking in class. I don't remember the punishment. Probably I made him kneel on the concrete floor for a few minutes.

After class, Ben ran after me and told me that I should not have punished Yeboah because he was the soul of the chief.

He had to explain to me about how for protection the chief lodged his soul in the body of a young boy. This meant that if I punished Yeboah, it was like I was punishing the Awkapihene.

I acted like I was unconcerned. "If he's the soul of the chief, he shouldn't do anything to get punished for."

But I was a bit concerned, so I asked my friend Emmanuel Asante-Ankwa the senior housemaster about it. "Hmm," he said, "I had heard something about this boy being the soul of the chief. I think it is all right for him to be punished if he misbehaves, but come see me if it is anything serious. Perhaps we should avoid caning him."

Fortunately for all of us, Yeboah's talking in class was an isolated incident and Emmanuel wasn't much for caning anyway.

Notes:

• Akwapim is also often spelled Akuapem.
• There is interesting detail about Akwapim kings at page 171 of Religion and Power, Oriental Institute series, Number 4.

Back to School Lifehacks

Here is a retrospective on my how to be a better student postings following from my appearance at Professor Lee's Language and Power class. Postings from me:

• Maxing the Word Count
• Writing a Paper: Interview Someone
• My Drawing Kit
• Productivity hacks I am currently using
• Prevent procrastination -- think of your future self

The Language and Power Presentation and Brainstorm Session

• Lifehacks for Students
• Language and Power Tips #1 - Starting Points and MSN
• Language and Power Tips #2 - TV
• Language and Power Tips #3 - Hatred of Topic and Happiness in the Moment

Links I spotted elsewhere:

• How to send email to a professor [spotted on Lifehacker]
• A study guide I wish I'd read before starting first-year
• Writing Links & Links for Writers Word Stuff

Suggestions from Michelle Soles:

• Study Guide Zone
• StudyTips.Org

Language and Power Tips #3 - Hatred of Topic and Happiness in the Moment

Hatred of Topic

The most interesting suggestion from the Language and Power class for what to do when you hate the topic of a class:

Find someone in the class who is really into it and make friends. Talk to them about it. Ask them for help. Some of their enthusiasm may rub off and you'll maybe learn more.

Happiness in the moment is more important than later satisfaction...

People were gamely suggesting "think of the future..." and things like that. One guy said it was easy for him: given the deal with his parents, the consequences of doing badly overpower any "happiness in the moment". I tossed this one out:

Make the work more pleasant. Listen to your favourite music when you are writing a paper. Go somewhere nice to read. Have your favorite (non-alcoholic) beverage when you're doing schoolwork.

Language and Power Tips #2 - TV

In my session in Professor Lee's class, one of the things that showed up on several slips of paper as a block to people being productive with schoolwork was TV.

I'm afraid none of the students came up with anything for defeating the power of the device that brings us Grey's Anatomy, Battlestar Galactica, Holmes on Homes, Dr. Phil, Little People - Big World and all those other diversions. So I tossed out the only way I have found to prevent myself from turning on the TV. The class did not seem to buy it, but it sometimes works for me so here it is:

I go online and read the TV listings.

I think it works because it confirms there is really nothing on that I want to watch. When I flip through the channels with the remote, I always have to go around a few times to make sure that I didn't miss something that was on a commercial break and then I might as well see if anything good came on at the half-hour. Before long several hours have passed and I'll have watched parts of fifteen programs that I didn't enjoy.

[I thought I learned this tip on Unsorted Lifehacks page on Merlin Mann's 43 Folders wiki, but as I write this, the tip is not there. No problem, it's a wiki, so I'll just add it.]

[This is the link that gets me to my TV listings, I don't know what it'll do for you. I like this one because it is easy to set the time and day you want to see the listings for and if you play with your settings you can get all of your channels on the page.]

Language and Power Tips #1 - Starting Points and MSN

I have to admit that this was my favourite of the productivity blockers from a student in the Language and Power class I attended last week. I am a serious admirer of neat printing.

We didn't come up with much for #1 "Starting Point". People talked about doing your best to stick with your priorities, and thinking about long-term benefits.

But for #2, MSN^*, there was plenty to say.

"Turn it off," said somebody.

"Is that realistic?" I asked. "I don't use MSN, so I don't know. Can you turn off MSN?"

"No," said pretty much everyone, including, I believe the person who had suggested turning it off. "That would be rude!"

"I've got a real problem," said one of the young women. "My mom is IMing me all the time and I can't get her to understand that I've got work to do. She's like 'but wait, I've just found out how to change fonts and colours!"

It looked like we were going to have to throw our hands in the air. I shared my old-fashioned email technique of setting Outlook to only download emails every half hour, but that clearly was not an appropriate solution.

However, one of the students provided these tips:

1. He sets his status to busy.
2. He changes his screen name to "working on a paper".

"That way only people who really need to talk to me send messages, and if I need help with something, I can find someone."

________________

* Hi Mom, MSN Messenger is this instant messaging (IMing) software all the young folks use to communicate with the people they are not talking to on their cell phones.

Lifehacks for Students

Procrastination by Dave Walker

This past Thursday was my big appearance in Professor Lee's Language and Power class. She introduced me as an "uber-student," a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Ottawa's law school.

I told the students it was true that I went to those schools, but that when I went to MIT twenty years ago (okay twenty-five years ago), I was a terrible student. I procrastinated terribly, fell asleep in classes, almost never did my readings, came so close to not graduating it was funny, well not funny then, but funny now.

But at law school I was an uber-student. "I was the best student at the U of O law school," I told them. "I didn't get the best marks... but I was the best student."

To keep me on track and to give them something to help remember my points, I used a Powerpoint presentation. I've been reading that you shouldn't use bulleted lists in Powerpoint but instead use graphics, so I drew a bunch of pictures and began the presentation with Dave Walker's brilliant monolith cartoon.

Procrastination

That led into my first topic: Procrastination.

"I've been told that you're all really bright, but you have trouble producing," I said.

[If you click on these pictures, you'll go to Flickr pages with explanatory notes.]

Writing a Paper

Second Topic: Writing Papers

I've wrote about these ideas before in Maxing the Word Count and Writing a Paper: Interview Someone.

(Notice how I found a quote on "power" for them? I didn't ask if they recognized Pierre.)

Reading before Lectures

Third Topic: Readings

I learn almost nothing from a lecture if I don't do the readings before hand.

It's like someone giving me directions when I don't have a map to follow. After "go straight two miles and then turn right" I tune everything out.

After I gave my advice, the students wrote down other things that block their productivity and we invited everyone's input on how to deal with those.

Stay tuned.

[The Powerpoint file]

[If you like the Dave Walker cartoon, he has many more. Here are just a few: 1, 2, 3, 4]

[P.S. They got the Sound of Music reference!]

Downtown Baby

Last night, the very patient Jane taught me some of the clapping rhymes currently popular in Ottawa elementary schools. Here is my favourite. [If you mouse over the words, you should see the actions that go with them. Unless it's a phrase that just gets the basic clapping.]

Downtown Baby

Downtown Baby

Down by the roller coaster No place to go

Caught you with your boyfriend Naughty! Naughty!

Didn't do the dishes. Lazy! Lazy!

Stole a box of candies. Greedy! Greedy!

Jumped out the window Super Sonic Crazy!

Home sweet home, home sweet home, this is how it goes

Eeny meeny popsakeeny Ooo ah la wanna beanie

Education Liberation

I Love You

And here is Jane patiently teaching me... [Video by Marcie]

Finished Studying - Thanks Bridgehead

My exams are over. I'd like to thank the staff and management of the Bridgehead at Bank and Gilmour for allowing me to sit in their establishment for between five and eight hours a day while buying less than ten dollars worth of merchandise for the past few weeks.

Here's why Bridgehead worked for me, while studying at home or in a library didn't:

• I don't fall asleep at Bridgehead;
• Nor do I watch TV, surf the net or play Mumu;
• The little distractions and human mini-dramas make me feel like I'm not missing out on life; and
• People I know drop by and chat with me.

Pictured here is my little pen hack. Serious book marking people already know about this one. With the pen and highlighter attached to each other, you don't have to go searching around when you switch.

Although, I have to say, I had to look up a lot of things yesterday, and the only thing I looked up that I'd either highlighted or made a margin note was the number of days before some court process you have to serve the opposing party with the thing you're supposed to serve them with. I'd look it up so I could tell you what it is you're supposed to serve them with, but the Law Society made me leave all my reference materials with them so that I wouldn't steal any of their valuable questions.

Lt John McKee LLB

If you missed the Grad Gala on Saturday night, you also missed John McKee in his dress uniform. One of the many highlights that evening.

I drew this while the BMW dealer was holding a quiz to give out his and hers BMW watches.

If you'd like some BMW swag, go by the Ottawa dealership and tell them you graduated from the UofO law school this week. (And let me know what you get, I've got enough coffee cups but maybe they're giving out something I'd want. Like a travel alarm. Or a magnifying glass.)

Graduation

I must say, it's impressive how well organized the people are who run the UofO convocations. Makes for a well-run graduation ceremony. The university gave Dalton McGuinty (Premier of Ontario) an honorary doctorate and in return he gave us an inspirational speech.

It wasn't actually as inspiring as the speech our classmate Adam Patenaude gave us on Saturday night at the Grad Gala, but Doctor McGuinty was brief. Everyone was happy about that.

How brief was he? I didn't have time to colour in the pipe organ or the UofO Crest on the podium.

Energy Drain - Bar Admissions and MuMu

I'd like to explain why I've had no energy for blogging or doing anything else these past few weeks.

I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about the bar admission course I'm taking. Everything we do seems to have a warning attached to it that goes like this:

Please note that all information prepared for this assessment process must be kept confidential. Failure to adhere to this paragraph may be regarded as "Academic Dishonesty" under s. 43(3) of the Licensing Process Policies.

For all I know, my sharing this note with you is such a breach. So let's just talk hypothetically. Imagine you're in a room with 24 people who have just completed their second or third university degree and you have an instructor asking them questions like "How do we communicate with our clients?"

And then the instructor waits for people to raise their hands. And keeps waiting.

And finally a hand goes up and the hand-raiser says, "on the phone? by email?"

"How else?"

I'm the guy who just shouts out "politely".

When the instructor didn't like that answer, I went back to being the guy who just shouts out the obvious answer right away so we don't have the long cricket chirping silences. Until the instructor asked "do we only write contracts so that the lawyers involved can understand them."

"No," I said.

"You don't have to answer so forcefully," said the instructor, "you could say, 'not necessarily'." Now we're back to the cricket chirping silences, because I'm not into unnecessarily equivocal answers.

Alas, as much as I've admired my fellow law student colleagues, I lost some of my optimism last week. Here's a sentence I used to begin a summary in a memo last week about a letter that our "firm" received by mistake:

This letter is like a live cobra that has been tossed through our window. It may have already bitten us, but if we handle it with care, we may escape further harm, get the anti-venom in time and possibly, but not likely, turn it to our advantage.

My fellow firm members deleted the sentence.

Do you see why I feel like my energy is being drained?

Don't play this game

Then here at home, I came across that damned game MuMu because somebody asked if I could find something to occupy their mind^Note1. I had my computer game addiction down to only about 20 minutes a day before this. A MuMu game takes me about 40 minutes. And when I finish one game, I want to play another. I must have spent six or seven hours playing it yesterday. And I'd promised myself I wouldn't play at all.

This morning I played two games and got a score of 653 on my second game. That's a darned high score and I'm hoping it will satisfy me enough that I never play it again. If you're smart, you won't follow the link I've imbedded into the screen shot.

Michael Dennis Reading Friday May 26th

I've been told that the Roman Catholic Church has decided that purgatory does not exist. Catholics who had been looking forward to spending time there might want to go to law school so that they are eligible for the Law Society of Upper Canada's 5-week mandatory "Skills and Professional Responsibility Program".

Why am I telling you this when the title of this post would make you think this is about Michael Dennis?

It is because way back before I entered this energy-sapping program, I had a 1-week vacation and the high point of that vacation was an afternoon I spent at Michael Dennis' house.

He made me a sandwich. We talked. He read me a bunch of terrific new poems. We talked some more. I felt like I had won the big prize at a celebrity auction.

You may not know Michael well enough to get him to make you lunch and give you a private reading, but you can go to his public reading on Friday, May 26th, 8PM at Invisible Cinema. He will have fifty copies of his new book of poetry there. The poems will be wonderful. The books will sell out.

Michael's work will not be for you if you like flowery writing or clever phrases that don't make sense.

Michael's probably will be for you if you often don't like poetry, but sometimes do.

Here's the PR copy:

OTTAWA - May 26, 2006. An isolated coast village on Quebec’s north shore provides the setting for the latest collection of work by Ottawa poet Michael Dennis. In the harsh and rugged environment of Magpie, Quebec, a coastal village 200 km from the end of the road, Dennis intersperses his reflections on Canada’s French/English relations, and the war in Iraq with thoughts on loneliness, middle age and lovers who keep us grounded.

Written at a friend’s cottage in the summer of 2005, the poems are a surprising blend of self deprecating humour as Dennis reflects on an urban dweller’s efforts to enjoy the outdoors and the unexpected joy of whale watching out the front window.

Dennis is a journeyman poet who has published 15 books of poetry, practicing his craft in Ottawa for the past 25 years. This collection has an economy and sparse elegance, and delivers its punches with precision and grace.

Dennis reads from the new poetry collection at 8 pm on Friday, May 26 at Invisible Cinema (Bank and Lisgar).

For further information call (613) 741-5001.

[I am 100% positive that Michael didn't write that press release. It uses way more adjectives than he would use. Plus, Michael is a master poet, not a journeyman. Michael wouldn't say he's a "master" in a press release, because of modesty or something, but he also wouldn't use the wrong term.]

• Here's an old poem of Michael's that gives a good flavour of his writing: royal canadian regiment 1956
• Here's what I said after Michael's last book launch. And a Michael Dennis Poem:

  Another Poetry Reading was at another poetry reading where the audience was mostly poetic made up of poets, poet-want-to-be’s poet tasters, poet haters it was the same old shit everyone wanting to be famous then the poetry started it was a kind of non poetry not by intention but by talent there wasn’t any afterwards there was the usual back slapping to be followed by back stabbing there was drinking of course the social lubricant that wine provides being the only saving grace poor cheap red wine from a twist top bottle its slightly subtle flavour the only subtlety of the night

Smiling because it's over

Educational Computing

In 1983, I graduated from university for the first time with a degree in cognitive science, major research focus: educational computing.

I landed my first real job managing a project for Dr. Seymour Papert. Coleco gave him half a million bucks and 50 Coleco Adams to see what would happen if we placed the computers in four elementary schools. Each classroom had a different ratio of students to computers. 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, and 10:1.

My job was to teach the teachers how to use the things, keep everything running, lead a team of student programmers developing software, supervise classroom observers and do whatever else came along.

Very cool job description for a guy fresh out of undergrad. Would have been more exciting if it hadn't been Coleco Adams. Have you heard of the Coleco Adam? It didn't work out too well. As Wikipedia says:

The problems with the Adam nearly drove Coleco to bankruptcy, and the Adam was discontinued in 1985, less than two years after its introduction.

I kept wishing I knew how to short sell stock and had some capital instead of debt. Because with the first set of Adams, I knew that Coleco at $90 a share was going to be going way, way, down.

Enough reminiscing. All I really wanted to say that I had no idea in 1983, that in 2006, I'd be in classrooms where almost everyone but me had their own portable computer and that they'd be using them to play spider solitaire, to instant message their friends in other classrooms, to watch world cup soccer games and to show me pictures of their children.

One More Exam

Here I am handing in my Equality Law paper at the Common Law secretariat. The last paper required for my LLB.

Yesterday I promised no more critters, so I thought I'd give you an excerpt from my insightful and seminal work:

Auton and Wynberg – Section 15 and Autism: No gains for substantive equality

But who would believe that the day after I promise no more critters there would be news stories about:

• Upcoming awards to four life-saving dogs, one of whom is a cancer-sniffin' doggy! [story]
• A kitty in Germany who saved a baby's life [illustrated story]; and
• A tailed frog and a two-tailed lizard in Malaysia? [story with genuine pix]

But seriously, this is no longer a blog about cute little animals. One exam between me and the completion of my studies.

Legal Illustrations 6: Police Trickery, Use of the Body, Re-enactments

These are the last illustrations I will draw in law school lectures. There were few illustrations from me this semester because:

1. I only took one lecture-format class based on case law; and
2. That class was The Law of Evidence and almost all the cases involved sex assaults and that's just not a direction I want to take with my art.

Confessions

The leading case on the admissibility of confessions is R. v. Oickle. Oickle confessed to setting a bunch of fires, so I used a clip-art picture of a lit match in my first-year Crim summary. But this year I decided to pick up on a quote about "police trickery" from Former Chief Justice Lamer that Justice Iaccobucci adopts.

In general, a voluntary confession obtained through police trickery is admissible unless the police engage in conduct "that shocks the community." What tricks would shock the community? Examples include: "a police officer pretending to be a chaplain or a legal aid lawyer, or injecting truth serum into a diabetic under the pretense that it was insulin."

Admissibility of Unconstitutional Evidence

Under paragraph 24(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms evidence that is obtained in violation of the Charter is not admissible in court if the admission "would bring the administration of justice into disrepute." The 3-part test for this is set out in R. v. Stillman ("You know it's a good test when it has three parts", Nicholas McHaffie). The first part of the test is "would the admission of the evidence make the trial unfair?" It will be unfair if the evidence was "conscriptive" and could not have been obtained without the Charter violation. Examples of conscriptive evidence are compelled statements, compelled body samples, evidence discovered through "use of the body", or evidence discovered through the use of one of those.

"Use of the body"? What does that mean? Suppose you're investigating a murder and you come to your suspect Michael Feeney in his trailer and you say, "hey, Feeney, step into the light." Then when he does, you see his shirt is covered in blood, you arrest him, the blood matches the victim, he's convicted. Does the fact that you told Feeney to step into the light count as "use of the body"? No. R. v. Feeney But if you made Feeney put a shirt on to see if it fit him and then had him re-enact the crime, that would be pushing it.

Prejudicial Evidence

Speaking of re-enactments, suppose you're prosecuting some guys for driving into some cops in a "drug bust gone bad" and you video-tape a re-enactment in which you use bigger cars than the guys drove, you have them move at faster speeds, and you take other liberties to make your video exciting. Will you be able to show it to a jury so they can better understand what you are saying the alleged bad guys did? Probably not. The cardinal rule of admissibility of evidence is that the probative value has to outweigh the potential for prejudice, or the chance that it will help find the truth is greater than the chance it will lead away from the truth or unnecessarily complicate the trial.

In R. v. MacDonald the Ontario Court of Appeal decided a videotape like the one I just described would be more prejudicial than probative.

In balancing the prejudicial and probative value of a video re-enactment, trial judges should at least consider the video’s relevance, its accuracy, its fairness, and whether what it portrays can be verified under oath.

Ultraquistic Subterfuge: High class, first class, law class

I'm guessing that with photos of cats and birdfeeders, recipes for chicken dishes, and boot lace diatribes, some of you are wondering if I'm actually still going to school and learning things. Let me assure you that I am.

For example, this week, I learned that that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin, wrote this when she was a justice on the British Columbia Court of Appeal:

It may well be that generally discrimination cannot be justified in a free and democratic society. But it is not true that it can never be justified. Circumstances may arise where discriminatory measures can be justified. For example, in times of war, the internment of enemy aliens might be argued to be justifiable under s. 1 [of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms], notwithstanding the fact that this is discriminatory and would not be tolerated in peace time. [Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia (1986) 27 D.L.R. (4th) 600 (B.C.C.A.)]

I wonder if she ever found herself at a social function or somewhere chatting with David Suzuki. I suspect he has thoughts on wartime internment that differ from hers.

Anyway, I know academic speculation is not what you want from me. You want legal tidbits that you can apply in your daily life. Therefore this week, from my Legal Drafting class, I bring you one of the ways that ambiguity can arise in a text:

Ultraquistic subterfuge -- equivocal repetition of a word

Ultraquistic subterfuge occurs when a writer uses a word to mean one thing in a sentence and then uses the same word to mean something different. Whether this is a problem will depend on the reader and the context.

Look at "sentence" in this example: "In the final sentence of her judgment, she gave the foreign-born Canadian an internment sentence." Most readers will take the first "sentence" to mean a string of words and the second "sentence" to mean a prison term. If we turn that example around: "She gave the foreign-born Canadian an internment sentence in the final sentence of her judgment," it becomes much less clear if the "internment sentence" was the last string of words in the judgment or was the last prison term mentioned.

Exercise: find or create demonstrations of ultraquistic subterfuge. Prizes may be awarded for particularly subtle or clever examples.

Ides of February Round-up

Feeling the pressure for constant innovation here at the lab, I bring you our latest experiment:

Strawberries dipped in chocolate pudding yogourt

Analysis: A fine way to eat chocolate yogourt pudding, but straight pudding tastes better with the strawberries because the sourness of both the strawberries and of the yogourt doesn't quite work. If I liked banana more, I'd try that. Any suggestions?

On the bus: Last night I was on the rear bench of the #2 when a guy with messy hair asked me what time it was. I'd seen the time on a pay phone just before the bus came so I told him "about five to ten." He thanked me in a way that seemed a little over the top and put the unlit white end of a cigarette in his mouth.

Just as the bus turned onto Somerset and stopped, he moved to the seat by the door. A woman got off the bus, the door closed, the green light went off and then he got up and pushed on the door. He looked angry, but didn't call out to the driver.

This is when I remembered the "sit in the middle" rule of thumb for avoiding crazy people on the bus. The theory is that friendly crazy people sit up front near the driver, unfriendly crazy people sit at the back as far from the driver as possible. The cigarette guy slumped against the panel next to the door and let the bus go two stops before he pulled the cord to signal a stop. As soon as he got off, a man who looked like he might have come from Ethiopia or Somalia moved to the back corner with a big white plastic bag.

I didn't have to wonder why he'd moved back for long because he pulled a sweater out of the bag and folded it, then he folded a couple of shirts. What an excellent use of time, I thought. This guy is using dead time on the bus to fold his laundry instead of doing it at the laundromat or when he gets home. I wondered if he felt a bit embarrassed about it (airing his laundry in public, so to speak) and considered offering to help as a way to show I thought it was a fine thing to do, but I only had three stops to go and I'd have to get off the bus before folding a single shirt. (Plus, I'm not that good at folding shirts anyway.)

Then he leaned over and began to ask me a question. "A long time ago, did you..."

Oh, oh, I thought, he's one of the people in the documentary I did ten years ago, he remembers me and I don't remember him, but then he finished "used to smoke on the bus?"

I was about to tell him he had the wrong guy, I never smoked on any bus, when I realized he was asking about the Canadian history of smoking on buses. "Oh," I said, "a long time ago, maybe twenty-five years." We had a nice little 3-stop chat about it. He was very happy that people didn't smoke on buses here, unlike the place he came from. Just before I left, I complimented him on his time management practice with the laundry.

If I tell you about how I like to use PBWiki, I can get 10MB more storage.

A wiki is a website that has two main features:

1. It is easy to create new pages and link to them from other pages; and
2. Any reader can edit the content.

I created a wiki for the Mature Students at the Law School because a lot of the upper year students have advice for classmates and I thought it would be a good way for us to keep the advice in one easy to manage place. So far though, as easy as I find it to edit the thing, I seem to be the only one who does.

My other wiki I use for school work, particularly my research notes for papers. It's an extremely handy way to have all my notes available wherever I am, and to make links between them and to information on the web that I'll be referring to.

Check out the PBwiki tour! or Get a free wiki at PBwiki.com.

One Semester Left

At 1pm when I was printing my summary for my 2pm exam and the computer said "printer is out of black ink" I really thought I was going to have a problem. But after pressing all the buttons on the printer and making it start again, I managed to print the odd pages as well as the even pages. Then at 2pm when I went to my section on Oppression and saw that the footnotes with case names and quotes weren't there, I had another bad moment. But the only quote I really missed was from the Wise Brothers.

"The fact that creditors’ interests increase in relevancy as a corporation’s finances deteriorate is apt to be relevant to, inter alia, the exercise of discretion by a court in granting standing to a party as a “complainant” under s. 238(d) of the CBCA as a “proper person” to bring a derivative action in the name of the corporation"

I got something close, like "vicinity of insolvency". But it's all over. I probably passed. "Inter alia" by the way, is Latin for "among others". Many judges and law professors prefer to say "inter alia" instead of the English equivalents. They save two letters. On the other hand, we all have to fuss around putting the Latin into italics and I think they're actually required to write in either French or English. But I'll leave it to someone else to bring that to the attention of Justices Major and Deschamps.

Legal Illustrations 5

Peoples Department Stores Inc. (Trustee of) v. Wise, [2004] 3 S.C.R. 461

• The corporations' interests are not to be confused with the interests of the creditors or those of any other stakeholder.
• s. 122(1)(a) of the CBCA requires directors and officers to act in good faith and honestly vis-à-vis the corporation.
• An honest and good faith attempt to redress a corporation’s financial problems does not, if unsuccessful, qualify as such a breach
• The fiduciary duty does not change when a corporation is in the nebulous “vicinity of insolvency”
• There is no need to read the interests of creditors into the fiduciary duty set out in s. 122(1)(a) in light of the availability under the CBCA both of the Oppression remedy and a Duty of Care action

You know, I couldn't find a real picture of the Wise Brothers, or a decent picture of a People's Department Store. So what was I supposed to do? I know the exam is tomorrow and I'm not even at 60% on my summary, but this is an important case. It deserves its own illustration.