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Wednesday: What’s Hot on CanLII

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Dr. Robert Grossman v. The Toronto-Dominion Bank, 2014 ONSC 3578

[25] The Bank submitted the one must assess the legal tenability of the plaintiffs’ negligence claims through the lens of the two-stage analysis re-affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in Cooper v. Hobart[9] for determining the existence of a duty of care in negligence. Restating the test from Anns v. Merton London Borough Council,[10] the Supreme Court of Canada in Cooper stated that the analysis must focus, first, on whether the harm that occurred was the reasonably foreseeable consequence of the defendant’s act and, second, whether, notwithstanding the proximity of the parties, residual policy considerations outside of the relationship between the parties existed that might negative the imposition of a duty of care.

[26] On the first branch of the test, reasonable foreseeability of the harm must be supplemented by proximity. The inquiry a court should make under the first branch is whether the case pleaded “falls within or is analogous to a category of cases in which a duty of care has previously been recognized”.[11]

2. Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571

[1] This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following descriptions: Detaxers; Freemen or Freemen-on-the-Land; Sovereign Men or Sovereign Citizens; Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International (CERI); Moorish Law; and other labels – there is no closed list. In the absence of a better moniker, I have collectively labelled them as Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants [“OPCA litigants”], to functionally define them collectively for what they literally are. These persons employ a collection of techniques and arguments promoted and sold by ‘gurus’ (as hereafter defined) to disrupt court operations and to attempt to frustrate the legal rights of governments, corporations, and individuals.

[2] Over a decade of reported cases have proven that the individual concepts advanced by OPCA litigants are invalid. What remains is to categorize these schemes and concepts, identify global defects to simplify future response to variations of identified and invalid OPCA themes, and develop court procedures and sanctions for persons who adopt and advance these vexatious litigation strategies.

3. Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack, 2014 BCSC 1063

[1] The plaintiffs apply for an interim injunction restraining two non-parties, Google Inc. and Google Canada Corporation, from including the defendants’ websites in search results generated by Google’s search engines. This application raises novel questions about the Court’s authority to make such an order against a global internet service provider.

[2] Although the plaintiffs seek an order against Google Inc. and Google Canada Corporation, there is no evidence that Google Canada Corporation is involved in the search services the plaintiffs seek to enjoin. It was common ground at the hearing that Google Inc. provides those internet search services. The order sought, if it is to be made, must thus be made against Google Inc. Accordingly, when I use the term “Google”, I am referring only to Google Inc. I use the term “Google Canada” to refer to Google Canada Corporation in places.

The most-consulted French-language decision was Deguise c. Montminy, 2014 QCCS 2672

[1] En janvier 2010, le soussigné fut désigné responsable de la gestion particulière des cas de pyrite et de pyrrhotite dans la région.

[2] Il ne s’agit pas d’un recours collectif.

[3] Tous ces recours (regroupés dans 70 dossiers) sont entrepris soit par des propriétaires de maisons nouvellement construites (ou par les assureurs de maisons neuves agissant en subrogation) ou soit par des propriétaires de commerces qui ont vu les fondations ou les dalles de leurs constructions récentes se dégrader suite au gonflement du béton.

[4] La somme totale des dommages réclamés s’élève à environ 200 000 000 $.

* As of January 2014 we measure the total amount of time spent on the pages rather than simply the number of hits; as well, a case once mentioned won’t appear again for three months.

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