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.

2. R. v. C.A.F. 1998 CanLII 17568 (NS SC)
   

   Before I impose sentence, I want to recite some of the facts as referred to in submissions here today and in the briefs as provided to the Court. On January 2nd, 1998 C.A.F. went to the home of F.K. and they discussed the robbery of Robert LeBlanc. About five minutes before F.K. called the taxi cab he asked C.A.F. “why don’t we just kill him”? C.A.F. responded “fine”. They discussed that the killing could be done by C.A.F. choking Robert LeBlanc. They found some fence wire and C.A.F. and F.K. fashioned the wire so that there were loops on both ends through which C.A.F. could put his hands when using the wire to choke Robert LeBlanc.

3. Choc v. Hudbay Minerals Inc. et al. 2013 ONSC 998
   

   [1] The moving party, Amnesty International (“Amnesty”), brings this motion for an Order granting it leave to intervene in three related actions brought by the individual plaintiffs, Mayan Q’eqchi’ individuals from Guatemala, who claim alleged human rights abuses committed against them by the subsidiaries of Canadian mining companies. Amnesty seeks to intervene with respect to identical motions brought by the defendants in each of these cases, in which the defendants seek to dismiss the claims against them as disclosing no reasonable cause of action or, alternatively, to stay the claims on the basis of forum non conveniens. I was advised, at the hearing of the motion for leave to intervene, that the second Order sought, namely a stay of the claims on the basis of forum non conveniens is no longer being pursued by the defendants. Pursuant to the Order of Justice Archibald, the three motions are to be heard together on March 4 and 5, 2013 and, accordingly, there is urgency to this motion to intervene.

The most-consulted French-language decision was Wightman c. Widdrington (Succession de) 2013 QCCA 1187

[5] L’affaire Castor Holdings Ltd. (Castor) est connue. La faillite de cette dernière en 1992 a engendré une série de poursuites judiciaires en responsabilité professionnelle à l’encontre de la firme de comptables agréés Coopers & Lybrand (Coopers) et les associés canadiens de celle-ci.

[6] Près de 100 créanciers réclament à Coopers plus de 1 milliard de dollars. Pour l’essentiel, les créanciers allèguent que Coopers a fait preuve de négligence dans ses travaux comptables. Plus particulièrement à l’occasion de ceux relatifs à la vérification des états financiers de Castor. N’eût été cette négligence, affirment-ils, ils n’auraient pas investi ou prêté les sommes réclamées.

* As of January 2014 we take into account 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.