In a judgment released last July in Smith v. Inco. the Ontario Superior Court recently decided Ontario’s first-ever environmental tort class action judgment by awarding an estimated $36 million to approximately 7,000 homeowners in the Port Colborne area of Ontario.  The defendant, Inco, was sued for the loss of property values suffered by class members [...]

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Courts in two Canadian cases have recently made it easier to certify direct and indirect-purchaser class actions seeking damages for alleged price fixing. Formerly, the difficulty of proving damages suffered by indirect purchasers on a class-wide basis was a major impediment to certifying such actions. The two decisions, DRAM (Pro-Sys Consultants Ltd. v. Infineon Technologies [...]

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In two recent decisions, the Ontario Superior Court and the British Columbia Court of Appeal relied on the aggregate damages provisions of the Class Proceedings Act in their respective provinces to certify class actions seeking damages for alleged conspiracies to fix prices for hydrogen peroxide and DRAM memory chips. In doing this, both courts side-stepped the requirement in the aggregate damages provisions that liability must be proved before damages can be assessed in the aggregate. A close examination of the decisions suggests, however, that the courts have in effect done away with this statutory requirement.

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Many Canadian class actions alleging price fixing conspiracies are run parallel to similar US class actions. As a result, this handbook will be useful to Canadian lawyers seeking to understand how the US class action system deals with issues surrounding indirect purchasers.

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Can consumers who obtain a defective product for free recover profits earned by the manufacturer, even though those consumers suffer no damages whatsoever? Most non-lawyers would likely say: no. However, the Ontario Divisional Court recently affirmed a decision certifying a class action against Johnson & Johnson that raises this question.

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