Articles 2021

Section Chair, Caroline Abela, provides a message to the Trusts and Estates Law Section and reports on the activities of the Section's committees for the 2017-2018 OBA executive year.

Topics covered this week included the breach of an agreement of purchase and sale of land, whether a termination clause in an employment contract violated the Employment Standards Act, and the appeal route when seeking to review an order of a single judge of the Divisional Court (to a panel of that court, not to the Court of Appeal).

Topics covered this week include automobile insurance coverage in the leasing context, family law, limitation periods in the breach of contract context, the need for expert evidence on the standard of care on a summary judgment motion in the professional negligence context, administrative law in the software development tax credit context, and vexatious litigants.

The Supreme Court of Canada has recently granted leave to appeal from the decisions in Bell Canada v. Canada/ National Football League v. Canada, 2017 FCA 249 and Vavilov v. Canada, 2017 FCA 132 and, in so doing, advised that it will hear these three appeals together in order to reconsider the nature and scope of judicial review of administrative decision-makers addressed in Dunsmuir and subsequent cases and has specifically directed the parties to address the question of standard of review.

Following are summaries of this week’s civil decisions of the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Even in class actions, there comes a time when enough is enough and the civil justice system will no longer tolerate an inordinate and inexplicable delay. In Smith v Armstrong et al, 2018 ONSC 2435, R.S.J. Gordon granted the federal defendants’ motion to dismiss a proposed class action for delay and found the plaintiff’s delay to be inordinate where the litigation had not advanced to the certification stage after 17 years.

The recent decision in Clearway Construction Inc. v. The City of Toronto, [2018] O.J. No. 1468 (“Clearway”), suggests that Technicore must be understood on its facts rather than standing for an inflexible principle.

The #MeToo movement has condemned the criminal justice system’s handling of sexual assault allegations. How can we address these concerns without sacrificing the rights of the accused? A diversion program for less serious sex assault cases may be part of the answer.

Following are the summaries of this week’s civil decisions of the Court of Appeal for Ontario.

On April 4, 2018, the OBA Constitutional, Civil Liberties and Human Rights Section with the OBA Education Law Section hosted a panel to discuss key Charter and human rights developments in education law.