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. 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.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

2. CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC v 801 Seventh Inc, 2020 ABCA 212 (CanLII)

[17] In deciding whether there is a serious issue to be determined by the Court of Appeal, the judge hearing the stay application must make a preliminary assessment of the merits of the appeal, not simply rely on jurisprudence which holds that the bar is low on this threshold question. If the merits of an appeal are not to be assessed on a stay application, beyond frivolousness and vexatiousness, the test may become meaningless. The bar may be low on an interlocutory injunction application where the issues have yet to be tried. But here, where there has been an adjudication on the merits, the bar must be higher.

[18] What is being appealed here is an order permitting service of a claim outside Alberta. What was determined in permitting service ex juris was that there is jurisdiction simpliciter in the Alberta courts to adjudicate this dispute. The issue of forum conveniens is an entirely separate matter.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

3. Carter v Nguyen, 2020 ABPC 89 (CanLII)

[76] The factors of inequality of bargaining power and improvidence seem to have a relativistic relationship. The transactional weakness could be relatively minimal but the improvidence so significant that the Court is constrained to give relief. Likewise, if the transactional weakness were significant such that the inequality of the bargaining power was wide perhaps because the one party was in such an emotional state that he or she could not appreciate and weight the advantages and disadvantages of the contract at the time, then even though the improvidence may be minimal, the Court may provide a remedy.

[77] Accordingly, each case requires its own weighing of the conditions of unconscionability in the context of the individuals, the nature of the transactional weakness and the significance and nature of the improvidence of the transaction itself.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

The most-consulted French-language decision was Pharmaciens (Ordre professionnel des) c. Sene, 2020 QCCDPHA 24 (CanLII)

[47] Le pharmacien est celui qui gère les ordonnances et c’est à lui que revient la responsabilité de s’assurer que le médicament prescrit est sécuritaire pour le patient.

[48] Le public est en droit de s’attendre d’un pharmacien qu’il vérifie auprès du patient et dans le dossier de ce dernier qu’il n’est pas allergique à une substance contenue dans le médicament qu’il s’apprête à lui servir. Cette collecte d’information fait partie de la pratique de base de tout pharmacien. L’omettre constitue une négligence.

(Check for commentary on CanLII Connects)

* 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.