Articles 2025

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.

Following are summaries of this week’s civil decisions of the Court of Appeal of Ontario, including Yaiguaje v Chevron Corporation, in which it appears that the Court has finally put an end to the matter; and Beatty v Wei, in which the Court set aside the application judge’s interpretation of the Illegal Substances Clause commonly used as an additional term in the Ontario Real Estate Association/Toronto Real Estate Board standard form Agreement of Purchase and Sale.

Multi-jurisdictional class actions in Canada continue to create problems for parties and the courts. Recently, the problems associated with multi-jurisdictional class actions resulted in the scuttling of a national class action settlement involving the prescription drugs OxyContin and OxyNeo. Despite three other courts approving the settlement in their respective jurisdictions, the Saskatchewan court in Perdikaris v Purdue Pharma Inc., refused to approve the same settlement.