Stay informed on the latest business and legal insights and events.
Updates
2024 Economic Outlook: The Long-Term Is Now
December 2023
The global and Canadian economies are still adjusting to the shocks of COVID and war. Inflation remains elevated, and monetary conditions are restrictive. There are legacies, in particular high public and private debt.
Concurrently, the forces of demographic ageing, climate change, and digitalization are intensifying in a new fragmented world, transforming our economies, and requiring more public and private investment. These two factors—short-term adjustment and structural change—set the background for our 2024 Economic Outlook.
Land Use Compatibility Basics
June 29, 2023
Land use compatibility in the planning context is achieved where industrial and other major facilities can coexist with sensitive land uses to contribute to healthy, livable and sustainable communities. The statutory and policy background that informs land use compatibility issues includes the Planning Act, the Provincial Policy Statement, the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, the relevant Official Plan and, somewhat unique to land use compatibility, provincial land use compatibility guidelines.
Digitalization of Payments and Currency
June 15, 2023
Digitalization of Payments and Currency is a report of a virtual conference of international and Canadian experts, organized by Bennett Jones and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and held on March 7, 2023.
Economic Outlook: Playing the Long Game
June 2023
For the last three years, governments, businesses and workers have confronted a series of shocks and disruptions that have tested their agility and resilience. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, supply chain constraints, swings in commodity prices, and higher inflation and interest rates, have demanded swift responses and adjustment. There are aftershocks, uncertainty and risk, and still a need to adapt. Navigating turbulent times remains a key function of policy and business planning. Yet, given forces shaping the world of tomorrow, it matters even more how governments and businesses plan to invest, innovate and create the conditions for sustainable growth over the longer term. This Economic Outlook entitled Playing the Long Game reviews recent developments and short-term prospects, sets out a baseline scenario and risks to assist business planning and describes some of the context for the longer term and key tasks ahead for Canadian governments and firms.
Class Actions: Looking Forward 2023
June 01, 2023
In our 2023 edition of Looking Forward, we review notable class action developments from the past year and consider what recent trends in the law might tell us about what to expect in the years ahead.
IWD 2023: Workplaces Where Women Thrive
March 08, 2023
To mark this year's International Women's Day, we are proud to present a candid leadership conversation on the challenges women face in the legal field. Our five office managing partners—Melanie Aitken, Radha Curpen, Dominique Hussey, Pat Maguire and Barbara Stratton—are joined by moderator and Bennett Jones partner, Michelle Yung as they share perspectives from their lived experiences. This discussion highlights the importance of acting purposely to create an workplace where women can thrive.
Assessing the Potential Risks to the Sustainability of the Government of Canada's Current Fiscal Plan
January 23, 2023
The purpose of this paper is to explore the way two fiscal anchors, the debt/GDP ratio and the interest cost revenue ratio, are likely to evolve over the decade ahead (2032-33) under five plausible economic scenarios and thus to assess the implications of these two anchors as a guide to sustainable fiscal policy actions. Our conclusion is that the fiscal plan as laid out in Budget 22 and the fall FES is unlikely to be sustainable over the decade ahead.
Bennett Jones Fall 2022 Economic Outlook: Managing Risks and Taking Action
December 07, 2022
We present the Bennett Jones Fall 2022 Economic Outlook in a time of a slowing global economy, war and global trade tensions. Interest rates—and prices in general—have seen hikes and as the world attempts to navigate towards a post-COVID future, uncertainty remains a major theme in economic rhetoric.
Our actions now will shape the decade ahead and there is opportunity for businesses to make the most of the current global landscape—investing, investing, investing. In making the most of our situation, from the downsides of external factors to our privilege in resource accessibility, Canada can begin to close the gap between our current state and our tremendous upside potential.
Bennett Jones Spring 2022 Economic Outlook
June 16, 2022
A global economy still adjusting to COVID is now facing added stresses posed by the war in Ukraine, sanctions against Russia, supply disruptions, fragmentation of the trade environment, inflation, and financial market vulnerability. After years of shortage of demand, policy authorities and businesses in Canada and globally have to deal with a supply-constrained world. In this presentation of the Bennett Jones Economic Outlook, senior advisors David Dodge and Serge Dupont will review how the economic outlook will be shaped by the interaction of many global factors. They will discuss the challenge of central banks and governments to bring demand and supply into better balance, and the challenge of businesses to capitalize on opportunity and to invest in the future while preparing for potential adverse economic scenarios.
Bennett Jones Spring 2022 Economic Outlook: Planning in an Uncertain, Supply-Constrained World
June 16, 2022
We present this Bennett Jones Spring 2022 Economic Outlook in a period of great uncertainty. A war in Europe and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to exerting a devastating human toll, have reverberated through the global and Canadian economies. How these and other external forces will evolve, and how policy authorities worldwide will respond, are unknowns that make the development of economic projections and business plans unusually hazardous.
Geopolitics and Geoeconomics: Trade and Investment Disruptions and Implications
June 16, 2022
International trade and investment is a crucial channel through which economies and individual businesses specialize, innovate, become more productive, and grow incomes, output and employment while also containing input costs and inflationary pressures through competitive supply.
The Labour Market: Shortages, Uncertainty and Transitions
June 16, 2022
Two underlying themes for the Spring 2022 Bennett Jones Economic Outlook are supply shortages and economic uncertainty. These themes also resonate in analyzing developments and prospects in the Canadian labour market more than two years after the outbreak of COVID.
Deciding on a Digital Dollar: The Necessary Steps for Canada
June 16, 2022
On April 26, 2022, the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Bennett Jones LLP hosted a virtual workshop with international and Canadian experts, from the public and private sectors as well as academia, on the steps required for Canada to keep pace with global developments in the digitalization of money.
An Update on COVID-19 Class Actions in Canada
April 22, 2022
Nearly 2 years after the launch of more than 30 proposed class actions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic upended the Canadian class action landscape, pandemic-related class actions risk, and ongoing litigation appear to have entered a new phase.
Diverging Approaches to the Certification of Class Actions
April 22, 2022
Last year, we reported on the amendments to Ontario’s Class Proceedings Act, 1992 (CPA) that took effect on October 1, 2020. One of the most significant amendments to the CPA was the introduction of a higher standard for class certification in Ontario, requiring that a proposed class action be a superior way to determine the rights or entitlement to relief of class members, and that questions of fact or law common to the class members predominate over the individual issues. We predicted this would make Ontario a less attractive forum for class action plaintiffs.
Navigating Multijurisdictional Class Actions
April 22, 2022
Parallel class actions, filed in different Canadian jurisdictions under different provincial class action statutes, erode the efficiency that class actions are meant to facilitate, and risk duplicative proceedings and conflicting judicial decisions.
Ontario and British Columbia Lead a Sequencing Culture Shift
April 22, 2022
For the past two decades, how best to achieve the fair and efficient management of class actions in Canada was routinely resolved by a one-size-fits-all approach: a presumption that certification should be the first motion heard in the case. Defendants seeking an exception to this general rule faced a heavy burden. As a result, defendants with strong positions on the merits were often locked into procedurally complex, financially burdensome litigation that, in many cases, took years to get through the certification stage.
The Expansion and Contraction of Product Liability Causes of Action
April 22, 2022
Product liability case law in 2021 brought clarity to certain causes of action that often form the basis of product liability claims. In particular, Ontario courts considered new duty of care categories arising within the commonly pleaded negligence cause of action, and within claims for breach of express warranty and breach of the implied warranties that underlie consumer protection legislation. These decisions provide updated guidance in the context of both motions to strike and motions for certification. Manufacturers carrying on business in Canada should be aware of these developments.
The Need to Prove Compensable Losses in Privacy Class Actions
April 22, 2022
Recent developments in the privacy class actions space favour businesses facing ongoing risks in maintaining the privacy of individuals’ information collected for business use. While businesses must continue to adhere to statutory and common law privacy laws and policies, privacy breach class action decisions in 2021 show that institutional defendants have the upper hand if class members cannot prove compensable losses. Barring new developments in the appellate courts that permit the extended application of the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, which does not require proof of loss, privacy breaches must yield a quantifiable loss or harm beyond everyday inconveniences for plaintiffs to succeed.
Class Actions: Looking Forward 2022
April 19, 2022
If 2020 was a year of seismic shifts affecting Canada’s class actions landscape, 2021 was a year of reverberations and aftershocks. The instability and uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic did not disappear. Canadian businesses adjusted to the new normal, pandemic-related class actions entered into a new phase, and judges reacted to landmark decisions and legislative changes from the year before in key substantive and procedural areas. The result was some new, and some familiar, fault lines.
Bennett Jones Fall 2021 Economic Outlook
December 08, 2021
The Canadian economy is entering 2022 with solid progress in recovering from the pandemic. In September, employment returned to its pre-COVID level. GDP should recover its losses before the end of 2021. In the Bennett Jones Fall 2021 Economic Outlook, we look at how growing our economy sustainably over the long term will require exceptional collaboration between the public and private sectors, within the frame of a growth strategy. Growth will also require an accelerated response to the structural challenges of population ageing, the digitalization of the economy and climate change.
Bennett Jones Fall 2021 Economic Outlook: Closing the Investment Gap
December 08, 2021
Economic activity and employment in Canada and in advanced economies continue to show a rapid, vigorous recovery. In a normal business cycle, businesses would now be stepping up plans to hire, to invest and to take advantage of the rebound of demand globally and domestically.
To some extent, this is happening. In fact, employment in Canada has already regained its-pre-pandemic level. However, there are near-term uncertainties and pressures.
The greatest uncertainty is the future evolution of the pandemic and its potential impact on the economy. There is public fatigue in continually adapting public health measures, the activity of daily life and the workplace to counter COVID and its variants. Yet, businesses have no choice but to be prepared for different scenarios in conducting and planning their activities.
The Labour Market: Recovery, Gaps and Strategies
December 08, 2021
This companion paper to the Fall 2021 Economic Outlook focuses on the Canadian labour market. Specifically, the key attributes of the current labour market; the main gaps in the labour market and their root causes; and strategies that could be adopted by both business and governments to address these gaps. There is an opportunity for Canada, after a strong recovery, to redress longstanding labour market fault lines and to take steps toward delivering good jobs, good wages and economic prosperity.
Climate and Energy: Accelerating a Necessary Transformation
December 08, 2021
This companion paper to the Fall 2021 Economic Outlook focuses on Canadian and global climate targets and policies, commitments to emissions reduction and ambitions to transform energy systems.
Bennett Jones