Peter R. Lawless

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.

This endorsement concerns the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) proceedings for JTI-MacDonald Corp., Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited, Imperial Tobacco Company Limited, and Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc. The court granted an unopposed motion to extend the stay period until March 29, 2024.

Recognizing the complexity and the four-and-a-half-year duration of negotiations, the court directed the three court-appointed Monitors, in conjunction with the court-appointed Mediator, to collaborate and develop comprehensive Plans of Compromise or Arrangement.

The objective is to finalize plans that are fair and reasonable to all applicants and creditors, moving from observable activity to meaningful action.

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.