Articles 2024

In Owsianik v. Equifax, the Divisional Court held that organizations that collect and store private information cannot be liable for the tort of intrusion upon seclusion when third parties steal or access that information. While it will not be the final word on the subject, this decision significantly curtails the scope of privacy breach class actions in Ontario that arise out of third-party hacking and cyberattacks.

In Kirsh, the Divisional Court recently considered the principles applicable to the analysis of preferability and abuse of process in the context of parallel national class actions. It confirmed what the class actions bar has known for a long time: there is no panacea for the phenomenon of parallel and duplicative national class actions commenced in different Canadian jurisdictions, particularly when the overlapping proceedings are commenced by different plaintiffs and different class counsel.

The UK Supreme Court just released its long-awaited judgment in Lloyd v Google, deciding whether England’s representative action rule can be used for the purposes of a class action. The UK Supreme Court’s interpretation of the representative rule is more revolutionary than appearances would suggest.

The recent decision of Justice Morgan in Levac v. James, 2021 ONSC 5971 confirms that common elements of causation can be resolved in a class proceeding, even while the ultimate proof of causation remains an individual issue. The decision is also noteworthy for the proposition that causal inferences can be established on the basis of circumstantial evidence supported by statistical and epidemiologic inference alone.

The Ragoonanan rule has been a fixture of Ontario class action law for approximately 20 years, yet it remains controversial. Does the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Marcotte mean that the Ragoonanan rule is no longer good law in Ontario? That is an issue that had been afforded judicial notice, but never addressed head-on until the recent decision of Justice Perell in Aphria.

The recent trend of increasing resistance to honorarium awards is unfortunate because it may result in another barrier in terms of promoting access to justice. While there is no guarantee of honorarium awards in the current regime, making honorariums more rare may mean that potential plaintiffs will be less willing to assume the role of representative plaintiff if they will not be compensated for their time and effort and could have an impact on future class-action litigation.

Plaintiffs generally have great flexibility in how they choose to frame their causes of action without court interference. If a plaintiff chooses to structure their litigation in an unconventional manner, they alone bear the risk of an unfavourable outcome. However, as recently confirmed by the Divisional Court in Pinon v Ottawa, in the context of a class action it is appropriate for the court to consider how pleadings are framed when deciding the preferable procedure criterion under the CPA.

Justice Belobaba released the first decision to interpret and apply s. 4.1 of the CPA in Dufault v TD Bank, making clear that defendants now have a presumptive right to have a potentially dispositive motion, or a motion that may narrow the issues or evidence in a proposed class proceeding, heard before certification.

Copyright owners have difficulty enforcing their rights against users of pirating software because the maximum recovery from each pirate is often too small to cover the copyright holder’s legal expenses. Meanwhile, there are often thousands, sometimes millions of acts of infringement. If the pirates had the cause of action, this might appear to be ideal for a class action. But can a class be the defendants? In Salna v Voltage Pictures, LLC, the Federal Court of Appeal appears to have said yes.

In Nasogaluak v. Canada and BigEagle v. Canada, the Federal Court reached differing outcomes on Certification, a puzzling result given the similarities between the two cases. How and why did the Court reach different decisions on two similar cases? The devil is in the details. While Plaintiffs' counsel may be tempted to frame class actions broadly to increase class size, the two decisions offer a reminder that less can sometimes be best, particularly where the claims involve novel elements.