Emily Margaret MacKinnon

The respondent Fund and the appellant Manager agreed that the Fund should be liquidated and dissolved but disagreed on the liquidation process.

The motion judge ordered liquidation without appointing a court-supervised liquidator, instead allowing the Fund to proceed with its proposed process using an expert.

The Manager appealed, arguing the motion judge erred in not appointing a liquidator.

The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal, holding that section 217 of the Canada Business Corporations Act grants courts broad discretion to make orders in connection with liquidation and dissolution, and does not mandate the appointment of a liquidator.

The motion judge's reasons were cogent and supported by the record.

This endorsement addresses costs following the dismissal of a medical negligence claim.

The plaintiffs, who were unsuccessful at trial, argued against a costs award due to their elderly age, poor health, and lack of assets.

The defendants, Bolton Medical Imaging Centres and Dr. K. Schneider, sought partial indemnity costs.

The court affirmed the general rule that costs follow the event, finding no exceptional circumstances to depart from this principle.

While acknowledging the plaintiffs' right to pursue the action, the court held they must bear the adverse costs consequences.

The court fixed the defendants' costs on a partial indemnity basis, reducing the amounts claimed by both defendants due to excessive hours for certain steps, particularly for Dr. Schneider's counsel.

The appellant province sought to block production of anonymized health care databases in aggregate tobacco cost-recovery litigation under provincial legislation.

The Court held that the statutory non-compellability provision turns on the nature of the records, not on relevance to the claim, and that aggregated databases remained records or documents of particular individual insured persons or documents relating to provision of health care benefits.

The Court further rejected interpreting "particular individual insured persons" as limited to identifiable persons, finding that approach inconsistent with the statute's text and scheme.

Trial-fairness concerns did not justify departing from the statutory language, especially given existing mechanisms for expert-reliance disclosure and statistically meaningful sample discovery.

The appeal was allowed and the production order was set aside.

On appeal from a Superior Court decision, the appellant challenged the application judge's interpretation of a management agreement and the restated articles of incorporation concerning Class C shares of an investment fund.

The appellant argued that a payment it made to itself should be characterized as debt rather than an unauthorized performance dividend.

The Court of Appeal upheld the lower court's decision, finding no palpable and overriding error or extricable error in law.

The court affirmed that the payment was an undeclared and unauthorized performance dividend, and that nothing in the fund's articles converted it into debt.

The appellant sought to compel disclosure of a lawyer’s accounts receivable records under statutory audit and enforcement powers in federal tax legislation.

The court held that Parliament had clearly intended the statutory definition to exclude a lawyer’s accounting records from solicitor-client privilege as a matter of interpretation.

However, in light of the companion constitutional ruling, the disclosure scheme as applied to legal professionals was invalid, and the request for disclosure could not proceed.

The appeal was allowed only to vary the lower disposition, and the compliance application was dismissed.