Patrick Gajos

The moving defendants sought an order under Rule 6.01 to have the condominium corporation's complex breach of contract and professional negligence action tried together with ten simplified procedure tort actions brought by individual homeowners arising from the same roof leak incident.

The court dismissed the motion, finding that despite the common incident, the actions involved different causes of action, different levels of complexity, and were at vastly different stages of litigation.

The court held it would be unjust to delay the homeowners' advanced simplified proceedings to allow the corporation's more complex action to catch up.

The plaintiff brought a class action against an anesthesiologist, a pain clinic, and its nursing staff following an outbreak of bacterial meningitis and epidural abscesses among patients who received epidural injections.

The court found that the anesthesiologist breached the standard of care and his fiduciary duties by failing to use proper aseptic techniques, failing to report and investigate infections, and misinforming patients about the risks.

The court drew an inference of causation linking the anesthesiologist's substandard infection prevention and control practices to the patients' infections.

The claims against the nursing staff were dismissed as there was no evidence they breached the standard of care.

The court also found the anesthesiologist's conduct warranted punitive damages.

The plaintiff in two proposed class actions alleging a price-fixing conspiracy in the canned tuna industry brought a motion for approval of a third-party litigation funding agreement.

The plaintiff could not bear the financial burden of funding the required expert evidence.

After extensive negotiations and due diligence, the plaintiff entered into an agreement with Lake Whillans Fund.

The court applied the four-factor test for approving third-party funding agreements and found the agreement to be necessary for access to justice, fair, reasonable, and protective of the defendants' interests.

The motion to approve the funding agreement was granted.

The applicant, a former officer of a municipally-owned utility corporation, sought indemnity and advancement of legal costs for his participation in a judicial inquiry investigating the sale of the utility's shares.

The respondent corporation denied the request, arguing the inquiry was not a proceeding that triggered the indemnity bylaw and that allegations of possible misconduct precluded advancement.

The court held that the inquiry was a proceeding under the bylaw and that section 136 of the Business Corporations Act provided discretionary authority to order advancement of costs.

The court ordered the respondent to advance the applicant's legal costs for the ongoing phase of the inquiry, subject to repayment if the applicant is ultimately found not to have acted honestly and in good faith.

The plaintiff brought a motion to amend the certification order in a class action concerning a bacterial infection outbreak among patients who received epidural steroid injections from the defendant physician.

The plaintiff sought to revise and expand the common issues to include negligence, causation based on epidemiological evidence, fiduciary duty, and limitation periods, and to add two subclasses.

The defendant physician brought a cross-motion to decertify the action, arguing that causation and standard of care required individualized assessments.

The court granted the plaintiff's motion to amend the certification order and dismissed the defendant's motion to decertify, finding that the plaintiff's novel methodology of using statistical correlation to prove causation met the 'some basis in fact' standard for certification and should be tested at a common issues trial.