Cases Decided

The Supreme Court of Canada released one decision this week of interest to Canadian businesses and professions.

In Construction Labour Relations v. Driver Iron Inc., 2012 SCC 65, the Court held the Alberta Court of Appeal erred in quashing a decision of the Alberta Labour Relations Board on judicial review.  The Court’s brief judgment criticizes the Court of Appeal for taking an overly rigid approach to the Board’s reasons when finding that the Board failed to consider various issues of statutory interpretation under the Alberta Labour Relations Code.

Leave Applications Decided

The Court did not grant leave to appeal in any cases this week, but refused leave in three cases of interest.

The first, Abdula v. Canadian Solar Inc., 2012 ONCA 211, concerned the extraterritorial limits of the statutory cause of action for secondary market misrepresentations in Part XXIII.1 of the Ontario Securities Act, and in particular, whether the Ontario Court of Appeal was correct in finding it can be asserted against an issuer whose securities trade solely on a foreign stock exchange.  We discussed the Canadian Solar ruling extensively in a previous post.

The second, Carlson v. Carlson, 2012 ABCA 173, involved a plaintiff who sued to recover on a promissory note, in relation to a property he transferred to the defendant which he had not disclosed during his prior bankruptcy.  The Alberta Court of Appeal held that the plaintiff could continue with the action upon paying off his creditors, despite the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, which was brought on the ground that the plaintiff’s former trustee in bankruptcy was the only party who could enforce rights relating to the property.

The third case, Teva Canada Ltd. v. Wyeth LLC, 2012 FCA 141, dealt with a claim by a generic pharmaceutical company (Teva) under s. 8 of the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations against an innovator company (Wyeth), in circumstances where Teva was formed through the amalgamation of two previous generic companies, Ratiopharm and Novopharm.  Prior to the amalgamation, Novopharm had sold a generic version of the patented medicine under a licence with Wyeth, and it asked Wyeth to prohibit Ratiopharm from selling its own generic version of the medicine, which prohibition gave rise to the s. 8 action by Ratiopharm (and on amalgamation, by Teva) against Wyeth.  The issue proposed to the Supreme Court was whether the Federal Court of Appeal correctly found that Wyeth could not set off the pre-amalgamation profits that Novopharm as Wyeth’s licensee made, from the pre-amalgamation losses that Ratiopharm had suffered from Wyeth’s prohibition application, in defending the action by Teva.