Supreme Court of Canada

Potter (Carl B.) Ltd. v. Mercantile Bank of Canada, [1980] 2 S.C.R. 343

Date: 1980-07-18

Carl B. Potter Limited Appellant;

and

The Mercantile Bank of Canada Respondent.

1980: March 27; 1980: July 18.

Present: Laskin C.J. and Ritchie, Dickson, Beetz, Estey, McIntyre and Chouinard JJ.

ON APPEAL FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF NOVA SCOTIA, APPEAL DIVISION

Banks and banking—Bank deposits—Performance guarantee—Breach of trust by bank put upon inquiry—Whether contributory negligence by cestui que trust—Contributory Negligence Act, R.S.N.S. 1967, c. 54, s. 1.

The appellant bid for the construction of an industrial waste treatment plant. The tender was accompanied by a certified cheque made payable to the owner as evidence of good faith that if awarded the contract, the bidder would carry out the construction. It was the manner in which this certified cheque was dealt with by the respondent and by the owner which gave rise to the present litigation. An officer of the owner, notwithstanding the terms of the performance guarantee, exchanged the cheque for a certificate of deposit in the name of the owner and eventually the proceeds of appellant’s cheque found their way into the owner’s collateral account at the bank where they were available for use and were in fact used to bolster up the shaky credit position of the owner. The owner went bankrupt, the appellant could not recover from it and sued the respondent. The trial judge found the respondent to have been in breach of trust. The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Appeal Division, varied the award of the trial judge by recognizing contributory negligence on the part of the appellant and in apportioning liability equally under s. 1 of the Contributory Negligence Act of Nova Scotia.

Held: The appeal should be allowed and the cross-appeal dismissed.

A banker may be a constructive trustee of money in his customer’s account and in breach of that trust if he pays the money away, even on the customer’s mandate, in circumstances which put him upon inquiry. After having considered the findings both at trial and on appeal, the Court was satisfied that the respondent was in possession of sufficient information which required its

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vice-president and assistant manager to take steps to ascertain the character of the funds which were being deposited to the owner’s credit. Notwithstanding the fact that the exact terms of the performance guarantee may not have been known to the bankers, they must be taken to have known that their customer was contemplating the construction of a waste treatment plant and the presentation of two cheques from construction companies was enough to alert them to the nature of the transaction.

With respect to the Appeal Division’s conclusion that there was evidence indicating negligence on the appellant’s part in that a whole summer had been allowed to slip by without any affirmative steps being taken to trace the destination of the proceeds of its deposit cheque, it should be recalled that there was no plea of negligence in the present case and that the cause of action was founded exclusively on a claim for “general damages and damages for breach of trust”. Whether or not the word “fault” in s. 1 of the Contributory Negligence Act connotes more than negligence and is to be read as embracing a breach of trust, “fault” must involve a breach of duty of some kind. In the present case the relationship of the appellant to the respondent was that of cestui que trust and trustee and there is no authority for the proposition that a cestui que trust owes a duty to its trustee to ensure that the terms of the trust are observed.

APPEAL and CROSS-APPEAL from a judgment of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Appeal Division, varying the award of the trial judge. Appeal allowed and crosss-appeal dismissed.

Arthur R. Moreira, Q.C., and Robert W. Wright, for the appellant.

John M. Barker and Daniel M. Campbell, for the respondent.

The judgment of the Court was delivered by

RITCHIE J.—This is an appeal and a cross-appeal brought with leave of this Court from a judgment of the Appeal Division of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia which invoked s. 1 of the Contributory Negligence Act, R.S.N.S. 1967, c. 54, and would have divided the fault equally between the plaintiff and the Mercantile Bank of

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Canada (hereinafter referred to as the bank) in respect of the bank’s liability for having so dealt with a tender deposit cheque issued to Anil Canada Limited (hereinafter referred to as Anil) by the plaintiff as to make it ultimately available to meet other current liabilities of Anil.

When tenders for the construction of an industrial waste treatment plant were called by Anil late in February or early in March 1975, five or six companies responded, but no consideration was given to any except those of the appellant and R.A. Douglas Ltd. (hereinafter sometimes referred to as the Douglas Company.)

It is important to note that the “Instructions to Bidders” in which Anil is referred to as “the owner” contained a Bid and Performance Guarantee which reads in part as follows:

IB. 3—BID & PERFORMANCE GUARANTEE

1)—Each tender shall be accompanied by a certified cheque made payable to the Owner in the amount of at least ten percent of the amount of the tender as evidence of good faith that if awarded the Contract, the Bidder will execute and enter into a formal contract to carry out and will carry out the construction in accordance with the drawings and specifications.

2)—Should the successful Bidder fail to enter into the required contractual agreement, or become in default of the Contract, the certified cheque shall be realized by the Owner.

3)—The certified cheques of unsuccessful Bidders will be returned to them immediately following the award of the Contract.

4)—The certified cheque of the successful bidder may be cashed by the Owner provided that:

(a)—the proceeds are placed on deposit in an interest bearing trust account which contains no other funds with a chartered bank or trust company in Canada in the Owners name;

(b)—the Owner forthwith gives written notice to the successful Bidder of the particulars of the deposit and;

(c)—the Owner does not make any withdrawals from the deposit account (save and except withdrawals of interest earned on the same) prior to the Owner making the payment to the successful Bidder in accordance with the following clause unless the suc-

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cessful Bidder does not complete the work of the Contract in accordance with the Contract. The Owner shall be entitled to receive all interest earned on the deposit account as earned and credited to the deposit account.

5)—The Owner shall deliver to the successful Bidder sixty days after the acceptance of the work of the Contract by the Owners a certified cheque made payable to the successful bidder in an amount equal to the amount of the certified cheque delivered to the Owner by the Successful Bidder.

All bids were accompanied by certified cheques as required by para. (1) of the above guarantee but all cheques other than those of the appellant and the Douglas Company were returned to the bidders as soon as the decision had been made that the contract would go to one or other of the latter two companies. After this decision had been reached, however, there ensued a period of 18 days during which Anil was examining the two tenders in order to determine which was the more suitable to fulfil the requirements of the waste treatment plant.

It is the manner in which these two tender cheques were dealt with by the bank and Anil which has given rise to this litigation and in my view the difficulties are in large measure centered around a meeting held between Mr. Raju, who was the vice-president in charge of finance and administration at Anil, and the vice-president and assistant manager of the Mercantile Bank at Halifax.

Mr. Raju attended this meeting armed with the two certified cheques from the appellant and Douglas, and notwithstanding the fact that he must have known that these two cheques were subject to the terms of the performance guarantee and particularly to para. 4(a) thereof, he nevertheless exchanged them for one 18-day certificate of deposit in the name of Anil and thus took the first step which eventually led to the proceeds of the Potter cheque finding their way into the Anil collateral account at the bank where they were available for use and were in fact used to bolster up the increasingly shaky credit position of Anil with the bank and with its many other creditors.

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The trial judge made the following finding as to the instructions furnished to the bankers (Fournet and Sullivan) by Raju on behalf of Anil when he delivered the two certified cheques to the bank on April 21, 1975:

I cannot accept Mr. Raju’s evidence that he told Mr. Fournet and Mr. Sullivan in clear terms that two cheques were not Anil’s, or that they were in the nature of “trust funds”. I do find, however, that Raju did inform Mr. Fournet that the cheques were from tenderers on the pollution project and that they were to be kept “separate”. I accept this to mean—separate from the company’s funds.

This finding was affirmed in the Appeal Division where the following passage from the judgment at trial was also approved:

After a careful review of all the evidence, I find as a fact that the Mercantile, on or before May 9, 1975, had sufficient notice of the unusual nature of the Potter funds to put the Bank on its inquiry to determine the exact nature of these funds before dealing further with them. The facts revealed at the meeting on April 21, coupled with the early withdrawal and remittance of the Douglas funds on May 7, were of sufficient significance so as to place a prudent banker on his inquiry.

The position of a banker who has been placed “on inquiry” in the manner aforesaid is summarized in the following brief paragraph from Halsbury’s Laws of England (4th ed.) vol. III, para. 60:

A banker may be a constructive trustee of money in his customer’s account and in breach of that trust if he pays the money away, even on the customer’s mandate, in circumstances which put him upon inquiry.

Many cases illustrating this proposition have been cited at trial and on appeal and I do not propose to refer to all of them again. It appears to me to be desirable, however, to reproduce the following passage from the judgment of the learned trial judge where he said:

In White v. Dominion Bank, [1935] 1 D.L.R. 42, Prendergast, C.J.M., cited with approval the case of Cartwright v. Lyster & Bank of Nova Scotia, [1934] 2 D.L.R. 166, O.R. 161, as follows:

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In Cartwright v. Lyster & Bank of Nova Scotia, [1934] 2 D.L.R. 166, O.R. 161, the Court of Appeal gave judgment against the bank, allowing the appeal. Cartwright, who was an executor of his father’s estate, was personally indebted to the bank and gave as security a stock certificate endorsed in blank by himself and his brother as executors. The (O.R.) headnote says:—

“Although the stock certificate would pass to any bona fide holder for value, here the Bank had knowledge of facts and circumstances that placed it upon inquiry, and having failed to inquire, it became liable to the estate and to the beneficiaries for being a party to a transaction whereby one executor used the property of the estate to pay his private debt. The manager of the defendant Bank, in the circumstances, was bound to make inquiry. Even the slightest inquiry would probably have elicited the truth, that the certificate belonged to the estate and that C. had no right to pledge it. The Bank, through its manager, having taken the certificate without the necessary inquiry, the shares must be returned to the estate”. [The underscoring is that of the trial judge.]

After having considered the findings both at trial and on appeal, I am satisfied that on April 21, 1975, and from that day forward, the bank was in possession of sufficient information which required its vice-president and assistant manager to take steps to ascertain the character of the funds which were being deposited to Anil’s credit although those funds were not in fact the property of the bank’s customer but rather constituted the proceeds of two cheques which were stamped with the trust imposed by the terms of the performance guarantee to which they had been subject since they were initially created. Notwithstanding the fact that the exact terms of the performance guarantee may not have been known to the bankers, they must be taken to have known that their customer was contemplating the construction of a waste treatment plant and the presentation of the two cheques from construction companies was enough in my view to alert them to the nature of the transaction.

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What actually occurred was that some two or three days before the expiration of the 18-day certificate of deposit, personnel at the Douglas Company were made aware by the cashing of the company’s cheque that their deposit was no longer being held in its original form and accordingly they at once demanded that it be returned to them. Anil was thus required to sever the certificate of deposit at the bank and thereupon caused the bank to deposit the amount of the Douglas cheque in its collateral account and proceeded to draw a cheque in favour of Douglas in the amount of that company’s original deposit. The proceeds of the Potter cheque however remained on deposit until the certificate matured two days later at which time they were transferred to the collateral account of Anil together with interest earned on the said certificate.

The proceeds of the Potter cheque remained in the collateral account of Anil where it was used by the bank to be drawn upon for the purpose of meeting Anil’s obligations to the bank created by an advance made to the company and secured by a series of its promissory notes.

It was not until October that any action was taken by Anil to regularize this extraordinary situation the effect of which was to reduce the company’s liability to the bank by use of the proceeds of the cheque origianlly furnished to it in trust by Potter.

On October 15, Raju caused five cheques to be created on Anil’s account payable to Potter and totalling $114,374 being the amount of its tender cheque. By this time, however, the cupboard was bare and there was no money available in any of Anil’s accounts to cover the cheques as that company was then on the verge of the receivership into which it soon dissolved.

The present action was commenced against Anil by originating notice dated October 27, 1975, but it soon became apparent that there was no chance of effecting recovery from that company and the bank was added as a party defendant at the instance of the plaintiff by order of the Chief Justice of Nova Scotia on March 26, 1976.

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As I have indicated, both the trial judge and the Appeal Division were of opinion that the evidence disclosed negligence on the part of the bank, but the Appeal Division was satisfied also that there was evidence indicating negligence on Potter’s part in that the whole summer of 1975 had been allowed to slip by without any affirmative steps being taken on the part of that company to trace the destination of the proceeds of its deposit cheque. The Potter company’s actions and attitudes in this regard are summarized by Mr. Justice Coffin who spoke, on behalf of the Appeal Division in the following terms:

On cross-examination, it was put to Mr. Raju that he had broken the terms of the arrangement with Potter in several different ways, including three which are particularly relevant:

1. He had cashed the cheques prematurely.

2. He did not give written notice of all the particulars of the deposit to Potter and Douglas.

3. He mixed the funds in those two cheques in one deposit certificate.

He acknowledged these things were wrong, but said he was not aware that he was doing all this, even although Mr. Gerald Amirault, Potter’s comptroller, began calling him about Potter’s money over the summer months.

From Mr. Amirault’s evidence, it appears that the Potter company may have picked up the fact that the cheque was cashed before the end of May when the April statement was reviewed. Mr. Amirault said that he was concerned that the cheques for bidders had been cashed prior to the award of the tender. Up to that time he did not even know that Mercantile was the banker, but when he saw the name on the back of the cheque, he was aware of that fact. He spoke to Mr. Raju several times through the summer and really did not get any definitive answers, but it was not until “somewheres between August, September,” that Mr. Amirault called Mr. Harper of the Mercantile Bank because he was not getting any details from Anil and after looking into the matter, Mr. Harper told him that “…there wasn’t anything there. There was no sign of any special account or any deposit or anything”.

Anil should have known what was done because on May 9, 1975 a credit advice was issued from Mercantile to Anil stating that they had credited the Anil account with $114,374 plus interest of $36.04.

Mr. Justice Coffin went on to conclude as follows:

In my opinion, the trial judge in determining the factual situation as he did was not in error in concluding

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that the appellant bank was negligent.

Having accepted the trial judge’s finding of negligence, we still have the question whether or not the respondent Carl B. Potter Limited was guilty of contributory negligence in not going to the bank much earlier than it did to ascertain the exact disposition of the deposit of $114,374.

We know that the contract was awarded to the respondent on June 5, 1975. The appellant’s argument is that the Potter Company knew in May that its cheque, had been cashed prematurely and thus there was a breach by Anil of the bidding instructions almost immediately after it received the certified cheque from the respondent.

The respondent also knew in May that Anil had failed to provide it with the details of the deposit as required by Division 1B. 3(4)(b) of those instructions.

The same finding is made with more precision later in the same judgment where it is said:

In my respectful opinion, while I accept the decision of the trial judge that the Bank was negligent in its handling of the respondent’s deposit, a prompt reaction by the respondent company would have brought the matter to light at a time when Anil’s credit with the Bank was good and a cheque in the required amount would have been certified and placed on deposit in an interest-bearing trust account in accordance with Division No. 1B. 3(4)(a) of the Instructions to Bidders. In my view there was negligence on the part of the respondent Carl B. Potter Limited, which contributed to the loss.

Based upon these findings the Appeal Division applied the provisions of the Contributory Negligence Act, R.S.N.S. 1967, c. 54, and concluded that it was not possible to establish different degrees of fault and the liability should therefore be apportioned equally between the parties. In considering the application of the Contributory Negligence Act to the circumstances here disclosed, it should first be recalled that there is no plea of negligence in the present case and that the cause of action is founded exclusively on a claim for “general damages and damages for breach of trust”. (The italics are my own.)

In fact what has been found here is indeed a breach of trust on the part of the bank.

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The Contributory Negligence Act of Nova Scotia contains the following provision:

1 (1) Where by the fault of two or more persons damage or loss is caused to one or more of them, the liability to make good the damage or loss is in proportion to the degree in which each person was at fault but if, having regard to all the circumstances of the case, it is not possible to establish different degrees of fault, the liability shall be apportioned equally.

It was argued on behalf of the bank that the word “fault” as employed in this statute connotes more than “negligence” in the accepted tortious sense of that word and is to be read as embracing a breach of trust such as that disclosed in the evidence in the present case. To this argument I am bound to say that in my opinion whatever extended meaning may be given to the word “fault” it must involve a breach of duty of some kind. In the present case the relationship of Potter to the bank was that of cestui que trust and trustee and I know of no authority for the proposition that a cestui que trust owes a duty to its trustee to ensure that the terms of the trust are observed. Accordingly, I cannot find here any duty on the part of the Potter Company to inquire into the internal accounting of the bank or its dealing with trust moneys.

For all these reasons I would allow this appeal with costs and restore the judgment rendered at trial. It follows from what I have already said that the cross-appeal, based as it is in large measure on concurrent findings of fact at trial and in the Appeal Division, is dismissed with costs. In this latter regard it will be recalled that the respondent to the cross-appeal was not called upon at the hearing of this appeal.

Appeal allowed with costs; cross-appeal dismissed with costs.

Solicitor for the appellant: Arthur R. Moreira, Halifax.

Solicitor for the respondent: John M. Barker, Halifax.