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.
