In-House Counsel
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May 30, 2025
Canada might not be for sale ... but is Ontario?
Ontario Premier Doug Ford campaigned on a tough response to Trump’s bullying, but now that he has his new mandate, it sure looks to me like he is adopting the president’s authoritarian playbook. That should be no surprise, since he frequently expressed admiration for the Donald before the latter declared a trade war.
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May 29, 2025
Carney says CIT ruling that certain Trump tariffs on Canada are illegal accords with Ottawa’s view
Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed yesterday’s now-paused U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) ruling that set aside the Trump administration’s recent imposition of certain hefty tariffs on goods from Canada and other countries.
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May 29, 2025
Appellate decision lays foundation for civil liability of regulators who trample privilege
The British Columbia Court of Appeal’s recent decision, Lamarche v. British Columbia (Securities Commission), 2025 BCCA 146 (Lamarche), confirms that a regulator may face civil liability if it does not appropriately protect privilege during an investigation. The decision focuses on the tort for intentional breach of privacy under the British Columbia Privacy Act, but it has wider implications given similar statutory privacy torts in other provinces and similarities to the common law privacy tort.
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May 28, 2025
Common pitfalls in tribunal adjudication of mental health matters, part two: Potential solutions
In part one of this series, I highlighted due process and natural justice or fairness concerns identified by reviewing courts in two mental health tribunal proceedings. In a span of less than four weeks recently, decisions of Ontario’s civil mental health adjudicator, the Consent and Capacity Board, and the Criminal Code-based forensic psychiatric administrative tribunal, the Ontario Review Board, were overturned and returned to them for re-hearing in Hastick v. Banik, 2025 ONSC 3007 and Clayton (Re), respectively.
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May 28, 2025
Federal Court rules new trademark expungement evidence admissible in appeals
The Federal Court has clarified that evidence of expungement of a trademark relied upon in opposition proceedings is admissible as new material evidence on appeal.
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May 28, 2025
Federal Court allows motion in part in case of trademark infringement of skincare devices
The Federal Court has allowed a motion in part, finding that the defendant violated trademark rights and caused confusion to consumers in relation to anti-aging facial treatments.
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May 28, 2025
Truck driving school was treated unfairly by career college authority, Ontario court rules
Ontario’s superintendent of career colleges Charlotte Smaglinski violated procedural fairness when she forfeited a truck driving school’s $97,000 security bond without notice, forcing the family-run school out of business, an Ontario court has ruled.
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May 28, 2025
Decisions made by AI: 4 ways to make legal challenges
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or BERT have the potential to alleviate overwhelming case loads and focus adjudicators on the substantive merits of the decision before them. In the upcoming decade, tribunal decision-makers will lean on generative A.I. and LLMs to ease their administrative burdens. But reliance on A.I. poses significant challenges.
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May 28, 2025
Pitfalls in tribunal adjudication of mental health matters: Issues identified by reviewing courts
This past month, two different reviewing courts have provided very similar guidance to two different mental health tribunals in Ontario. On April 24, 2025, the Court of Appeal for Ontario found that Ernest Clayton’s fitness review hearing before the Ontario Review Board constituted a miscarriage of justice and must be reconsidered afresh. Similarly, on May 21, 2025, the Superior Court of Justice returned a review of Arlene Hastick’s Community Treatment Order to the Consent and Capacity Board for re-hearing on the basis that she was denied procedural fairness.
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May 28, 2025
What ‘agreed statement of facts’ really means
The “facts” aren’t always so obvious. More than 90 per cent of criminal convictions in Canada are not the result of a trial, but of a guilty plea. People plead guilty for many reasons, only one of which is that they are actually guilty. But that’s another matter.