2025 Competition

Upcoming 2025 CNNC

The Canadian National Negotiation Competition is pleased to announce that this upcoming year's competition will be held at Windsor Law on Friday, March 7 through Saturday, March 8, 2025. For the third year, we plan to offer both French and English streams. This year's CNNC competition will build on last year's successful partnership with Sustainability and Growth Initiative (SGI) at McGill University by focusing on another pressing public policy issue: housing. Hosted by the Faculty of Law, University of Windsor, and partnering with the Windsor Law Centre for Cities. Law students will engage once again in problem solving around a pressing public policy issue in both an English and French stream.

The housing crisis is one of the most significant challenges facing Canadians, affecting people of all ages and backgrounds. Housing also inherently requires environmental, racial, Indigenous, gender, and disability justice lenses to understand its impact at individual and community levels. Housing matters are predominantly governed at the provincial level, with municipalities devising and executing local planning policies in accordance with provincial housing policy. More recently, housing policies have involved all tiers of government. Notably, the federal government has assumed a proactive role in collaborating directly with municipalities to enact policies aimed at substantially ameliorating the housing shortage nationwide.

As the crisis continues to deepen over the next decade, there will be increasing emphasis on delineating jurisdiction and responsibility concerning housing outcomes. Navigating this intricate and inherently politicized landscape of housing policy involves many areas of law and policy including constitutional law, municipal law, land use, and hosing policy. Because the vast majority of housing issues occur not through litigation but through negotiation, adept dispute resolution and problem-solving skills are at the heart of good policy making. Policy makers - many of them lawyers - facilitate collaboration across governments, non-governmental public and private sector actors, developers, community groups and the public. Negotiation skill is and will be necessary in reaching accessible housing goals in Canada.

We look forward to another robust meeting of law students across Canada - the next generation of advocates who will shape the future of dispute resolution and access to justice in Canada and beyond.