Below are the summaries for this week's civil decisions of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. Topics covered included family law, limitation periods, vexatious litigants, easements, lawyers' professional negligence and class actions.
Perhaps the most interesting decision of the week was the class action decision, Castrillo v. Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which touches on worker's compensation law, intentional torts, administrative law and civil procedure. In that case, the court revived a claim against the WSIB for misfeasance in public office and negligence that had been struck by the motion judge as disclosing no reasonable cause of action. The plaintiff's allegation is that the WSIB has a "secret policy" of wrongfully reducing benefits for non-economic loss by finding "pre-existing impairments" as including asymptomatic pre-existing conditions that did not actually have any impact on a worker's pre-accident functioning.
The strong privative clause in section 118 of the WSIA that gives the WSIB exclusive jurisdiction and precludes the review of WSIB decisions by a court was found to be insufficient to oust the jurisdiction of the court with respect to a claim for misfeasance in public office and negligence. The court made the point that the legislature can never completely oust the court's jurisdiction. The court also confirmed once again that the duty of good faith is not a stand-alone claim and therefore struck it as such. However, to the extent the bad faith allegations were tied to the misfeasance in public office claim, they were allowed to remain.
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