Current Practices of Online Dispute Resolution － The Canadian Experience －

Canada is a large country with a smallish population for its size, it has always emphasized the importance of communications and has developed an expertise in communications technology. The Internet is only the latest version of this technology. For some years in the past decade, Canada ranked first in the world in the proportion of its residents online. Canada was the first country to implement the United Nations Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (perhaps because its existing law was so inadequate that the Model Law was needed more there than elsewhere), and it has begun to implement the Model Law on International Commercial Conciliation as well. Mediation and arbitration, together (as ‘med-arb’) or separately, are widespread in commercial and family disputes. With these backgrounds in alternative dispute resolution and communications, Canada has been fairly comfortable moving dispute resolution online.