Commencing Proceedings Just After the Limitation Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concerns an unfortunate situation that is reasonably common. A lawyer commences proceedings, typically by issuing a statement of claim, a few days or weeks after the expiry of the applicable statutory limitation period. Despite this error, for the past few years judges of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice have, on an increasingly routine basis, denied motions by defendants to dismiss claims in these circumstances. They have done so based on a power they claimed to have to extend the limitation period so as to preserve the plaintiff’s claim. But now the Court of Appeal for Ontario has exposed these decisions as incorrect. Contrary to what the judges below had been claiming, they do not have the power to so extend the limitation period. As a matter of law, the Court of Appeal’s decision on this point is correct. But it is surprisingly brief given the issues at stake, and it should leave us pondering a significant concern. The lower court judges may have been wrong in law, but they were responding to a real procedural problem with a solution that they, and many observers, doubtless considered to be just. The Court of Appeal’s decision, while right in law, may be lacking in essential justice. When Ontario’s statute of limitations is correctly applied to these cases, we reach a result that makes us question the policy behind the provision. In such a situation, the solution is not the one attempted by the lower courts. Rather, the statute itself needs to be amended to better provide for cases where the limitation period is narrowly missed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".