The chairman of Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission says removing more than 100,000 aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in residential schools was an act of genocide.

Justice Murray Sinclair says the United Nations defines genocide to include the removal of children based on race, then placing them with another race to indoctrinate them. He says Canada has been careful to ensure its residential school policy was not “caught up” in the UN’s definition.

Premier Christy Clark has drawn a line in the sand, telling the key players in B.C.’s justice system they’ll need to squeeze out budget inefficiencies because her government won’t pump more cash into the courts.

The Premier unveiled an initiative to reform and “modernize” the justice system, which in recent years has made headlines because of lengthy trial delays and shows of frustration from judges. During a news conference Wednesday at her downtown Vancouver office, Ms. Clark told reporters that instead of continuing to throw money at the $1.4-billion-a-year justice system, her government will launch a review to identify long-term, fiscally responsible solutions.

Her announcement immediately sparked criticism by the NDP that the government isn’t addressing the problem that led to more than 100 cases being thrown out of the courts last year, while thousands more hang in peril – that is, chronic underfunding.

The union representing the majority of postal workers across the country has notched up another win in its battle against the Harper government’s back-to-work legislation of last summer.

A federal court in Montreal has overturned Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt’s appointment of retired judge Coulter Osbourne to arbitrate the labour dispute and ordered Raitt to appoint a bilingual arbitrator with labour relations experience. Osbourne, a unilingual judge with no previous labour experience, resigned in November; had he not done so, this decision, handed down by Judge Martineau, would have cancelled his appointment.