Source: https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/article/tipping-toward-the-plaintiffs-1444/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 06:52:22+00:00

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Justice Paul Perell cracked open a hornets’ nest last July when he delivered a decision from the Ontario Superior Court ordering a group of corporate defendants to file their defence in a proposed class action, even though the case hadn’t yet been certified.
Although Perell’s ruling actually reflects the wording of Ontario’s class action statute, it undercuts a 15-year, unwritten custom in which defendants typically wait until a case is certified before filing their defence. Perhaps the noisy reaction to it was less aimed at the decision itself, and more an expression of years of built-up frustration among the defence bar — a sense that the certification game is becoming increasingly stacked against them, and that courts are offering advice, re-interpreting conventions, and otherwise ushering plaintiffs through the certification gates.
Certification may be simply a procedural matter, but the stakes are high for both sides. Corporate defendants say a certified class action creates lousy optics: an impression in the public’s mind that the company has committed a wrong, even though the merits of the claim have yet to be judged. For plaintiffs, certification can be a tool to apply pressure against a defendant to settle before the case goes to trial.
Lang and her colleagues in the defence bar say in the early years, Canadian courts outside Quebec took a more cautious approach to certifying cases, following the introduction of class action legislation in Ontario and British Columbia in the 1990s. Individual preliminary motions were routinely accepted from defendants in advance of certification. And statements of defence were commonly withheld with the courts’ approval until after certification, a custom that emerged from Ontario (now Chief) Justice Warren Winkler’s 1996 decision in Mangan v. Inco Ltd. that judges had wide discretion to allow such delays by defendants.
Laila Brabander, assistant vice president and specialty claims manager for Chubb Insurance Co. of Canada, who manages litigation against corporate defendants insured by Chubb, says there’s been a “noticeable change” in the courts’ approach in recent years. “There’s no question that the pendulum has swung, and recent decisions likely suggest that certification is easier,” she says.
In 2005, for example, in the national residential schools class action Baxter v. Canada, Winkler again influenced the system by ruling that certification motions should be heard promptly, and should not be delayed by other motions. That led to an increasing reluctance by other judges to entertain a series of technical challenges by defendants.
Elsewhere there have been examples of judges helping plaintiff lawyers draft more sustainable pleadings, as Perell did before he certified the overtime labour class action McCracken v. Canadian National Railway Co. in 2010.
Meanwhile in competition class actions, “every province in this country, I would argue, has more recently become overwhelmingly plaintiff-friendly,” says Katherine Kay, a competition law specialist with Stikeman Elliott LLP. The B.C., Quebec, and Ontario courts have since 2009 certified a series of price-fixing cases — including Pro-Sys Consultants Ltd. v. Infineon Technologies AG in the B.C. Court of Appeal — despite difficulties in showing how harm was passed down through a distribution chain to indirect purchasers. Two similar cases in B.C. produced different rulings — Pro-Sys Consultants Ltd. v. Microsoft Corp. and Sun-Rype Products Ltd. v. Archer Daniels Midland Co. — that were granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada on Dec. 1, 2011.

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