Case information

None.

Case summaries are prepared by the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada (Law Branch). Please note that summaries are not provided to the Judges of the Court. They are placed on the Court file and website for information purposes only.

The general scheme of the Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act, S.B.C. 2000, c. 30 is to create a direct action by the Government of British Columbia for the value of the expenditures by the Government to provide benefits resulting from "tobacco related disease" caused or contributed to by a "tobacco related wrong", as those terms are defined in the Act. Four actions were launched immediately after the Act was passed. The first is an action by the Attorney General of British Columbia against fourteen defendants. Three of the defendants are Canadian manufacturers of cigarettes while one is a former Canadian manufacturer of cigarettes and one is a trade organization. Three defendants manufactured cigarettes which were sold in British Columbia. The remaining six defendants, none of whom manufactured cigarettes sold in British Columbia, were said to be in some form of relationship which attracts liability with one or more defendants who manufactured cigarettes sold in British Columbia. Of the fourteen defendants, five are Canadian and nine are non-Canadian. Eleven of the fourteen defendants were served out of British Columbia, without leave, under the rules of the British Columbia court. Those eleven defendants applied to set aside service on a number of grounds, including that the Act is unconstitutional. The cause of action in the first action was pleaded as an aggregate action under s. 2 of the Act. The Attorney General's Statement of Claim alleged that the defendants manufactured and promoted cigarettes which reached consumers and were smoked as intended and that in doing so the defendants breached their duty: by providing a defective product; by failing to warn of the risks of smoking their products; by targeting children and adolescents; by providing a product that was unjustifiably hazardous or which they should have known was unjustifiably hazardous; through deceit and misrepresentation about their product. The remainder of the defendants were joined in the action because it was pleaded that they engaged in some form of concerted action with one or more of the defendants who breached their duties to consumers in the ways alleged. The three other actions were brought, respectively, by the three Canadian manufacturers for a declaration that the Act is unconstitutional.

Holmes J. of the Supreme Court of British Columbia heard argument on the constitutionality of the Act and decided that the Act was unconstitutional because the extraterritorial reach of the Act exceeded provincial constitutional competence. He would have found the Act to be constitutional on the alleged grounds of judicial independence and the rule of law. In three sets of reasons for judgment concurring in the result, the Court of Appeal allowed the appeals and set aside the judgment of Holmes J., declaring that the Act was constitutionally valid legislation. In consequence, the Court of Appeal dismissed the three actions by the three Canadian tobacco manufacturers, and remitted the applications in respect of the service ex juris to the Supreme Court of British Columbia.