Articles 2025

Please find below our summaries of the civil decisions of the Court of Appeal for the week of August 2, 2021.

In Azar v Strada Crush, Justice Morgan comments on a representative plaintiff’s potential exposure to adverse cost awards, and the importance of having an indemnity for costs in place for the representative plaintiff, whether that is addressed in the retainer agreement by class counsel agreeing to indemnify the representative plaintiff, or by securing a third party indemnity for costs from the Class Proceedings Fund or a third-party funding company.

Following are our summaries of the civil decisions of the Court of Appeal for Ontario for the week of July 26, 2021.

Overview of the Ontario Land Tribunal.

You may not think of licence plates as a feminist issue, but last year, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia made a strong pronouncement on the impermissibility of personalized license plates that promote or may be seen to promote gender-based violence.

In Florence v Benzaguen, the Court grappled with the issue of whether it is settled law in Ontario that doctors do not owe a duty of care to an unborn child pre-conception. The majority struck the Appellants’ claim of negligence, holding that no duty of care is not recognized at law. In dissent, Fairburn A.C.J.O. held that this issue was not settled law and ought to be decided at trial. I suspect this may not be the last word on the issue.

Following are this week’s summaries of the Court of Appeal for Ontario for the week of July 16, 2021. Topics covered this week included several family law decisions relating to custody and access, relocation and spousal support and labour law (duty to bargain in good faith).

A review of the submissions made during an application for judicial review in Federal Court concerning a 2019 compensation order made by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (“CHRT”) for Indigenous victims of the discriminatory underfunding of child and family services (the “Compensation Decision”) and the CHRT’s 2020 decision regarding the definition of “First Nations child” (the “First Nations child Decision”).