Michael Andre Feder

This decision sanctions the CCAA Plans of Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited, Imperial Tobacco Company Limited, JTI-Macdonald Corp., and Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc., effecting a global settlement of all tobacco-related claims in Canada.

The court reviews the structure, allocation, and fairness of the plans, including the creation of a $1 billion Cy-près Foundation, and addresses objections from social stakeholders.

The court finds the plans fair, reasonable, and in the public interest, and grants the requested relief, including third-party releases and the appointment of plan administrators.

A not-for-profit disability rights organization sought public interest standing to challenge the constitutionality of British Columbia's mental health legislation permitting forced psychiatric treatment without patient consent.

After individual co-plaintiffs withdrew, the chambers judge dismissed the claim for lack of standing; the Court of Appeal remitted the matter for fresh consideration.

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, holding that legality and access to justice do not merit particular weight in the Downtown Eastside framework and that a directly affected individual co-plaintiff is not required for a public interest litigant to establish a sufficient factual setting.

Applying the three Downtown Eastside factors cumulatively, the Court granted the organization public interest standing and awarded special costs on a full indemnity basis throughout.

A person with disabilities and long-term tenant of a non-profit housing corporation refused to disclose the value of a Henson trust established for her care and maintenance when applying for annual rent subsidy assistance.

The housing corporation denied the application on the ground that the trust constituted an 'asset' under its Asset Ceiling Policy, making the application incomplete.

The majority of the Court held that a Henson trust — where the beneficiary cannot compel distributions and cannot unilaterally collapse the trust — does not constitute an 'asset' within the ordinary meaning of that term in the rental assistance application, as it is not property the beneficiary can use to discharge debts or liabilities.

The Court further held that the tenancy agreement imposed a contractual obligation on the housing corporation to consider a complete assistance application, which obligation was breached.

The appeal was allowed, declaratory relief was granted, and the issue of monetary remedy was remitted to the court of original jurisdiction.

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.

The Court allowed the appeal and quashed an originating application for judicial review of a religious congregation’s disfellowship decision.

It held that judicial review is generally limited to public decision makers, that there is no free-standing procedural fairness claim without an underlying legal right, and that ecclesiastical issues in this dispute were non-justiciable.

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.