Tag Archive for: Canada

AAPrIL’s Feb 2026 Seminar: Pitel on ‘Reconsidering the “Proper Party” Basis for Jurisdiction’

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On Thursday 12 February 2026, the Australasian Association of Private International Law (AAPrIL) is hosting its first seminar of 2026, as Professor Stephen Pitel presents free online and in-person (Qld, Australia) on the topic, ‘Reconsidering the “Proper Party” Basis for Jurisdiction’.

Abstract:

In several jurisdictions the fact that a defendant is a ‘proper party’ to a legal proceeding constitutes a sufficient basis for taking jurisdiction over that defendant. Advocates of the proper party basis rely on considerations of fairness and efficiency to support it. Do these considerations support the proper party basis, especially if it is given a wide scope? Recently Canadian courts have been reconsidering their approach to the proper party basis, as seen (somewhat opaquely) in Sinclair v Venezia Turismo, 2025 SCC 27. This presentation will explore that reconsideration and offer thoughts for changes in other jurisdictions including Australia and New Zealand.

Chair:

Mary Keyes is Professor of Law at Griffith University, and President of AAPrIL. She is a leading scholar on questions of international jurisdiction and international family law. Mary is co-author of Private International Law in Australia, and is a member of the Working Group on Jurisdiction at the Hague Conference on Private International Law.

Presenter:

Stephen Pitel Stephen G.A. Pitel is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at Western University. His research and teaching are focused on private international law, tort law, civil procedure and legal ethics. Stephen is the author of Conflict of Laws (3rd ed. 2025) and co-author of Private International Law in Common Law Canada: Cases, Text and Materials (5th ed. 2023) and Statutory Jurisdiction: An Analysis of the Court Jurisdiction and Proceedings Transfer Act (2012). His tort law scholarship includes co-authoring Fridman’s The Law of Torts in Canada (4th ed. 2020) and Cases and Materials on the Law of Torts (11th ed. 2023). In the field of legal ethics, Stephen is a contributor to Lawyers’ Ethics and Professional Regulation (4th ed. 2021). He is a former President of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics.

Details:

Date and time: Thursday 12 February 2026, 5:00pm to 6:00pm (AEST)*

Date and time Thursday 12 February 2026, 5:00pm to 6:00pm (AEST)
in person: Griffith University, Southbank, Brisbane: Room 4.03 Building S07. The map is available here.

RSVP (essential): Please register via this link by COB Wednesday 11 February 2026, and advise whether you are attending in person or online. Please access the Teams link here. There is no cost.

* NZ. 8:00pm-9:pm; ACT, NSW, Tas and Vic. 6:00pm-7:00pm; SA, 5:30pm-6:30pm; Qld, PNG. 5:00pm-6:00pm; NT, 4:30pm-5:30pm; WA, 3:00pm-4:00pm

Supreme Court of Canada to Hear Jurisdiction Appeal

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Canada’s highest court does not grant leave to appeal in many cases involving private international law.  In November 2025 it granted leave to appeal from NHK Spring Co., Ltd. v Cheung, 2024 BCCA 236, in which the British Columbia Court of Appeal agreed with the court below in holding that it had jurisdiction to hear a price fixing class action.  The action is interesting because it involves what could be described as a “foreign” conspiracy that had effects within Canada.

The defendants are Japanese entities and the claim alleges that they conspired to fix the price of “suspension assemblies” which are a component of hard disk drives which are in turn a component of things like computers.  The claim alleges that Canadians purchased products that contained these assemblies and because of the price fixing they paid more than they otherwise would have done.

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Reciprocity and the Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Egypt – A Critical Assessment of a Recent Supreme Court Decision

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I. Introduction

Reciprocity is probably one of the most controversial requirements in the field of the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. While its legitimacy appears to be on the wane (see Béligh Elbalti, “Reciprocity and the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments: A Lot of Bark but Not Much Bite,” 13 JPIL 1 (2017) 184), reciprocity can still strike hard – particularly when it is applied loosely and without sufficient consideration.

The case presented here, decided by the Egyptian Supreme Court (Appeal No. 11434 of 21 June 2025), provides a good illustration. Despite the Court’s well-established case law imposing certain restrictions on the use of the reciprocity requirement, this recent judgment shows that, when not applied with the necessary rigor, reciprocity can still produce significant effects that undermine the legitimate expectations of the parties.

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Torts and Tourists in the Supreme Court of Canada

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In Sinclair v Venezia Turismo, 2025 SCC 27 (available here) the Supreme Court of Canada has, by 5-4 decision, held that the Ontario court does not have jurisdiction to hear claims by Ontario residents against three Italian defendants in respect of a tort in Italy.  The Sinclair family members were injured in a gondola collision in Venice that they alleged was caused by the Italian defendants.  But there were several connections to Ontario.  The trip to Italy had been booked by Mr Sinclair using a premium credit card’s concierge and travel agency service [4, 156] and the gondola ride had been arranged through that service [15, 160].  The card was with Amex Canada and one or more contracts connected to the gondola ride had been made in Ontario.  The Sinclairs were also suing Amex Canada and the travel service for carelessness in making the arrangements with the Italian defendants, and those defendants attorned in Ontario [167, 172].  A core overall issue, then, was whether the plaintiffs would be able to pursue all of their claims arising from the gondola collision, against various defendants, in one legal proceeding in Ontario.

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New Canadian Conflicts Text

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The Irwin Law “Essentials Series” is a collection of texts about Canadian law aimed at a broad audience: it includes law students and also lawyers, judges and academics.  It has been quite successful over the past twenty years.  In 2024 Irwin Law was acquired by University of Toronto Press.  It has continued the Essentials Series and the use of the Irwin Law imprint.

It has now published the third edition of Conflict of Laws written by Professor Stephen G.A. Pitel of Western University, Canada.  The second edition was published in 2016 and so this edition updates almost a decade of activity, mainly from courts across Canada.  The major change is that the chapter on declining jurisdiction has been reorganized and updated in light of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in Douez v Facebook, Inc (2017) and Haaretz.com v Goldhar (2018).  All chapters have been updated to reflect new decisions, legislative changes and recent scholarship.

More information is available here.  For those outside Canada, the book is a clear and accessible source of comparative conflict of laws analysis.

Supreme Court of Canada to Hear Jurisdiction Appeal

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The Supreme Court of Canada has granted leave to appeal in Sinclair v Venezia Turismo. In light of the test for obtaining leave and the relatively low number of cases in which leave is granted, this offers at least some suggestion that the top court is interested in considering the legal issues raised in the case.

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A milestone for the Apostille Convention: today it enters into force for Canada

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On 11 January 2024, the Apostille Convention entered into force for Canada. The accession of Canada to the Apostille Convention on 12 May 2023 was a milestone for the Apostille Convention and it is perhaps a development that has gone under the radar.

Considering that the Apostille Convention was adopted in 1961 (EIF: 24-I-1965), one may wonder why Canada took so long to join the Apostille Convention. This is primarily because there is no statutory requirement for the legalisation of incoming public documents in Canada. In its response to the 2021 Questionnaire, Canada indicated:

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Is this a Conflicts Case?

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In Sharp v Autorité des marchés financiers, 2023 SCC 29 (available here) the Supreme Court of Canada has held that a Quebec administrative tribunal, the Financial Markets Administrative Tribunal, can hear a proceeding brought by the administrative agency that regulates Quebec’s financial sector, the Autorité des marchés financiers, against four defendants who reside in British Columbia.  The AMF alleged in the proceedings that the defendants had contravened the Quebec Securities Act.

The courts below, including a majority of the Quebec Court of Appeal, focused the analysis on s. 93 of the Act respecting the Autorité des marchés financiers, CQLR, c. A-33.2, which grants the FMAT jurisdiction to make determinations under the Securities Act.  They interpreted and applied this provision in light of Unifund Assurance Co. v Insurance Corp. of British Columbia, 2003 SCC 40, a leading decision on the scope of application of provincial law, which held that a provincial regulatory scheme constitutionally applies to an out-of-province defendant when there is a “real and substantial connection”, also described as a “sufficient connection”, between the province and the defendant.  This test was met on the facts [see para 22] and so the FMAT had jurisdiction.  This analysis is not generally understood as being within the field of conflict of laws.  Indeed, the majority of the Court of Appeal “saw no conflict of jurisdiction or any conflict of laws that would require the application of private international law rules to this case” [see para 29].

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New Edition of Leading Canadian Conflict of Laws Treatise

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A loose-leaf publication tends to stay as current as the most recent set of insert pages, and so identifying it either by its initial year of publication or its edition number can be misleading. For many years the leading Canadian work on private international law has been the 6th edition of Castel & Walker Canadian Conflict of Laws, with that edition first appearing in 2005. For nearly two decades, then, it has had the same year of publication and edition number, but as a loose-leaf (and as available through an electronic subscription) it has been kept quite up-to-date on a frequent basis. Now comes a new edition, the 7th, published in 2023 and with a revised title. The text is now called simply Canadian Conflict of Laws and its sole author, as was the case for the 6th edition, is Professor Janet Walker of Osgoode Hall Law School. The change in the title reflects the completion of a long process of transition from the original edition (1975) as written by Professor Jean-Gabriel Castel through some editions that were co-written by Professors Castel and Walker.  Detailed information about the new edition is available here. It remains an indispensable resource in the Canadian context and beyond.

Revised Canadian Statute on Judgment Enforcement

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Two years ago, the Uniform Law Conference of Canada (ULCC) released a revised version of the Court Jurisdiction and Proceedings Transfer Act (CJPTA), model legislation putting the taking of jurisdiction and staying of proceedings on a statutory footing. The statute is available here.

The ULCC has now released a revised version of another model statute, the Enforcement of Canadian Judgments Act (ECJA). The original version of this statute was prepared in 1998 and had been amended four times. It has now been consolidated and substantially revised. It is available here and background information is available here and here.

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