By playing their essential gatekeeping role, class action judges have in numerous decisions clarified the necessary elements of various causes of action and the availability of specific remedies in a particular case. What constitutes harm that is compensable, for example, has featured in numerous and the failure to show harm has put an end to many of them. For strategic and practical reasons, some class actions do not seek compensation for losses that the class members suffered. Instead, the strategy is to pursue remedies that do not correspond with personal losses such as disgorgement, nomina ..read more

provides a summary of our Cases to Watch from Q4 2023. On the Docket: Cases to Watch features a collection of cases, identified by our Research team, that move the law forward in some meaningful way. The cases in this edition are diverse in that they arise in different areas of the law: fraudulent conveyances, securities law, law, discovery, and Crown law ..read more

The philosopher Heraclitus observed that “the only constant in life is change”, a maxim as true for the business world as the natural world. Publicly traded companies operate in a dynamic environment, where commodity prices swing, new laws are passed, and scientific breakthroughs are made. So long as those companies wish to maintain their access to public markets, they must carefully consider how day-to-day happenings (and their own reactions to those events) affect their continuous disclosure obligations. These disclosure judgements are fact-specific and often fast-paced, yet they carry poten ..read more

History has shown that recalls for product defects are often followed by a proposed class action lawsuit. While many products cases in that context have been certified, we have now seen certification of proposed being denied on the basis that there is already an effective recall campaign in place. We have seen this in Maginnis and Magnaye v FCA Canada et al ..read more

It has been just under a year since the new dismissal for delay provision in s. 29.1 of the started resulting in dismissals for delay. In essentially all of the decisions rendered to date, judges have strictly construed those provisions to require the dismissal of matters where the statutory criteria for avoiding a dismissal are not present. The recent decision of the Ontario Superior Court in is now an outlier that takes a different approach ..read more

are becoming increasingly common. In those cases, the plaintiff says that employees have been misclassified by their employer in such a way as to render them ineligible for certain benefits under applicable provincial employment standards legislation which the employee claims that they should have been eligible for. The two most common categories of alleged misclassification are employees being allegedly misclassified as independent contractors, and ordinary employees being misclassified as managers. While some misclassification cases have been certified, courts have refused to certify many ot ..read more

Is an employer obligated to pay overtime if they don’t specifically direct an employee to work overtime? And can an employer’s requirement that employees obtain pre-approval for any overtime they work shield them from the obligation to pay overtime if pre-approval isn’t obtained? These are important issues for any employer ..read more

It is not uncommon in the Canadian class action landscape for competing to be commenced in multiple jurisdictions, each procedurally vying in the horse race of who will be named the nation’s choice as national class action. Competitors who lose that race are stopped in their tracks, having to sit along the side lines as the blue-ribbon action proceeds to trial ..read more

allege a reasonably uniform conspiracy. The stereotypical scenario alleged is that executives from different companies meet in a dark, smoke-filled room and agree to raise prices or restrain output in some uniform fashion. While that is an oversimplification, and reality is always much more complex, the basic core of most price-fixing allegations is that there was a uniform conspiracy that impacted all, or at least most, consumers in a broadly similar way. This is what has made so many price-fixing class actions amenable to certification ..read more

Waiver of tort has long been a contentious subject in Canadian law. Many, many courts have permitted waiver of tort claims to proceed in . Yet no court had definitively ruled as to whether waiver of tort in fact existed. It was for this reason that the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in has been so highly anticipated. Most expected that the Supreme Court would finally answer whether a waiver of tort existed as an independent cause of action under Canadian law. This in turn would have significant consequences for many types of cases, including many types of class actions ..read more