How to Avoid "Tortifying" Regulatory Law: A.I. Enterprises Ltd. v. Bram Enterprises Ltd., 2014 SCC 12

The Supreme Court of Canada this morning waded into the mire of the "economic torts", a grab bag of common law causes of action that impose liability for (primarily) nasty behaviour in the marketplace. Up for discussion in A.I. Enterprises Ltd. v. Bram Enterprises Ltd., 2014 SCC 12 was the "unlawful means" tort, though as Cromwell J. pointed out, the economic torts form such a morass that courts and commentators cannot even identify the appropriate label for this particular creature (at para. 2).

Privatization's Progeny: Canadian Offspring?

Term has happily come to an end up in now-icy Montréal, so I am catching up on all of the reading I missed in the last few hectic weeks. One paper I read some time ago but neglected to blog about is Privatization's Progeny by Jon Michaels.

A half-thought that occurred to me at the time was whether the process described by Michaels had an effect on the Supreme Court of Canada's 2008 decision in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9.

Keeping the Federal Government out of the Provincial Courts

In its 2010 decision in Telezone, the Supreme Court of Canada took a relatively relaxed approach to private law actions against the federal government in provincial court. The difficulty is that in some of these cases a court will have to adjudicate on the lawfulness -- as a public law matter -- of actions or decisions taken by federal authorities, but this is a matter reserved to the federal courts by the Federal Courts Act.

The Public-Private Divide Again

A decision from the Irish High Court in the long-running saga of Dontex Ltd. v. Dublin Docklands Development Authority, [2012] IEHC 318 is a useful example both of the division between private law and public law and of judicial reluctance to bar claims on the basis that the parties have chosen the wrong juridical route.