Felix Frankfurter once described jurisdiction as “a verbal coat of too many colours”. Exhibit #4579009 is Fraser Health Authority v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal, 2014 BCCA 499, which features three sets of reasons on tribunals’ authority to reopen closed decisions (though the concurring reasons of Goepel J.A. contain mostly a brief treatment of the merits […] Read more

There are some interesting snippets in this morning’s Supreme Court of Canada decision in Marine Services International Ltd. v. Ryan Estate, 2013 SCC 44 on the nature of workers’ compensation statutes and their relationship to the law of tort.The issue for the Court was whether the statutory bar created by a provincial workers’ comp scheme […] Read more

I open with a warning: I find the Supreme Court of Canada’s causation jurisprudence hard to fathom, so it is with some trepidation that I venture out to comment on Alberta (Workers’ Compensation Board) v Alberta (Appeals Commission for Alberta Workers’ Compensation), 2012 ABQB 733. The case is about an individual who contracted asbestos-related disease […] Read more