A ‘Real and Substantial’ Improvement? Van Breda Reformulates the Law of Jurisdiction in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In February 2010, the Ontario Court of Appeal released the much-anticipated Van Breda v. Village Resorts Ltd. decision, which radically reformulated the real and substantial connection test for the assumption of personal jurisdiction over a defendant. Prior to Van Breda, the approach adopted in Ontario – and indeed, much of Canada – was that based on the Court of Appeal’s 2002 decision in Muscutt v. Courcelles. This article explores whether the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Van Breda represents a “real and substantial” improvement over the jurisdictional approach which prevailed under Muscutt. It examines the presumptive categories framework for the assertion of jurisdiction, the content of the re-conceptualized real and substantial connection test, the role of “analytic factors,” and the newly formulated forum of necessity doctrine. The article concludes that although Van Breda’s formulation of the jurisdictional test appears to be an improvement over Muscutt, it will take some time to see whether Van Breda’s guidance is implemented effectively by lower courts – if indeed the Van Breda formulation of jurisdiction survives scrutiny by the Supreme Court of Canada.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".