62 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 1 JANUARY 2021
WORK COMPLETED IN 2020
2020 also marked the conclusion of two important projects: BCLI’s Builders
Lien Act Reform Project and CCEL’s Health Care Decision-Making: Legal
Rights of People Living with Dementia.
Builders Lien Act Reform Project
The goal of this project was to review the Builders Lien Act, a major cornerstone
of construction and insolvency law. At the beginning of 2020, the project
was still in the consultation phase. The project committee reviewed the
numerous responses to the consultation paper and began the process of
revising the recommendations for reform of the Act with the benefit of the
feedback. The final report was released in mid-2020.
Health Care Decision Making: Legal Rights of People Living with Dementia
One of the key findings of the 2019 CCEL report Conversations About Care:
The Law and Practice of Health Care Consent for People Living with Dementia
was that public legal education about health care consent law is critical to
enhancing respect for rights. With funding from the Law Foundation of
British Columbia, the Notary Foundation and the Vancouver Foundation,
CCEL worked with the Alzheimer Society of B.C. to develop a series of plain
language educational tools. In 2020, we published a legal rights booklet in
four languages (English, French, Chinese and Punjabi) and a series of three
animated videos.
UNIFORM LAW CONFERENCE OF CANADA – NATIONAL LAW REFORM
This past year has also brought deeper engagement for BCLI members and
staff in the activities of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada
(“ULCC”). Kathleen Cunningham, outgoing executive director, acted as
chair of the ULCC Civil Section for 2019/20 and was a member of the B.C.
delegation at the virtual annual meeting of the ULCC held in August
2020. Senior staff lawyer Greg Blue, Q.C., participated in a ULCC national
working group and also took part in the annual meeting as a member of the
B.C. delegation. Emeritus members Arthur Close, Q.C., and Joost Blom,
Q.C., each presented reports to the ULCC as the heads of different ULCC
working groups. The ULCC considered uniform legislation on electronic
wills, non-consensual disclosure of intimate images and internet crowdfunding,
all timely issues that will continue to be of interest in the near
term.
We are reminded of the importance of our work by the Supreme Court of
Canada’s recent decision in Fraser v. Canada (Attorney General), 2020 SCC
28, where Abella J., writing for the majority, cited a BCLI study paper (see