March 8, 2023
Head of the firm’s national Class Actions practice and managing partner of the Montréal office, Sylvie Rodrigue, Ad.E., spoke with Law360 regarding the ongoing delays in Québec courts and the challenges in the class actions landscape.
“At present, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get hearing dates for preliminary motions, management conferences and court dates for trials on the merits, even though Québec Superior Court launched in 2018 a class action chamber aimed at reducing delays,” Sylvie said.
Through the years, the Québec class action legal environment has gone back and forth between cases hardly ever being certified to almost everything being authorized.
“From 2019 to 2021, the Québec Appeal Court struck a ‘good’ balance as class actions that deserved to go forward were certified while others were justifiably denied authorization,” she said.
Read: Q1 Torys Quarterly: Class actions in Canada: what to expect in 2023
Addressing concerns of a more liberal approach towards class action certification, Sylvie noted that the Québec Consumer Protection Act and the legislative provisions covering class actions both have socially focused access to justice objectives.
“The problem with a test that is too liberal is that you end up with an absolutely dreadful backlog in the courts,” she said.
“While the legislator’s primary objective in terms of class actions is access to justice, it is not doing justice to it by systematically authorizing them and depriving judges of first instance of a certain screening role.”
In her practice, Sylvie has been seeing more cases at the merits stage than at the authorization stage due to clients no longer wanting to settle.
“So, this objective of access to justice is not so much met if in fact, the files are authorized as it will take several years before the litigants win their case,” she said.
You can read more about our Class Actions work on our practice page.
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