Articles 2020

The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario recently released new resources to help both education professionals and children understand privacy and access law in Ontario.

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.

Following are this week’s summaries of the Court of Appeal for Ontario for the week of October 18, 2021.

Recent case law in Ontario illustrates how the Courts exercise their gatekeeping function to ensure litigants in Will challenges meet a minimum evidentiary threshold. These cases provide important guidance for counsel and parties preparing for similar threshold motions.

A quick review of Elder Law - it's a broader term than you may think.

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.