Articles

In the most recent development in the judicial saga surrounding the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., Google’s continuing efforts to oppose the extraterritorial scope of the injunction rendered against it by the Supreme Court of British Columbia have been thwarted (the “Canadian injunction”). This injunction was granted against Google in a counterfeit litigation involving Equustek. Google was not a party to the action, its involvement in the file being linked to its intermediary role as a search engine referring users to the defendant’s websites.

The Government of Canada recently announced that Bill C-45 on the legalization of recreational cannabis (“Federal Cannabis Act”) and its regulations will officially come into force on October 17, 2018. In this context, the insurance sector only has a few months to adapt to this new legislative framework.

This article provides an overview of the main risks and coverage issues related to the legalization of cannabis that will need to be assessed by damage insurers.

In our first article on governance, entitled “Duties and Obligations of Directors: a Brief Overview”, we summarized the main concepts underlying the duties and obligations typically associated with directors.

Must the conclusion then be that the personal responsibilities of directors are limited to these two categories? The answer is no. A director, like any natural or legal person, is also subject to the rules governing civil liability. Directors can commit a fault causing harm for which they will be liable, despite having acted in their capacity as a director when the fault was committed.

The start of the school year is approaching, and your institution may be planning to welcome foreign students, or perhaps you have a business project that entails hiring foreign temporary workers. In either case, you should know that the Government of Canada is expanding the requirement for foreign nationals to provide biometrics (fingerprints and a photograph) in order to enter Canada, effective July 31, 2018.

This article is a modified version of an article published in French by Éditions Yvon Blais in May 2018 (EYB2018REP2471).
The common interest privilege can be a useful ally in litigation proceedings or a complex commercial transaction. As its name indicates, it is intended to protect the confidentiality of information exchanged between parties who share a common interest. It can be raised when a person sends a document covered by another privilege to a person with whom the sender has a common interest. Thus, the document in question must initially be covered by either the litigation privilege or professional secrecy in order for the common interest privilege to apply.

This article – co-authored with articling student Guillaume Letendre – is a modified version of a case comment initially published by Éditions Yvon Blais in July 2018 (EYB2018REP2507).
In Quebec, the burden of proof that must be met in order to obtain authorization to institute a class action is recognized as being not very onerous, as this stage is intended to be a filtering mechanism to eliminate only frivolous claims or those obviously doomed to fail.