A Statutory Solution to Ontario’s Environmental Class Action Problem: Section 99(2) of the <i>Environmental Protection Act</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Despite the immense promise of the Class Proceedings Act, 1992 as a tool to facilitate claims for environmental harms, the landscape for environmental class actions in Ontario is bleak. The seminal environmental decisions involving the Act (Hollick v Toronto and Smith v Inco) have saddled victims of environmental harms with difficult precedent to overcome at both the certification and merits stages of litigation. However, the decision in Midwest v Thordarson, in which the Court of Appeal affirmed the existence of the cause of action in section 99(2) of the Environmental Protection Act, provides plaintiffs with a new path to success in environmental class actions. The section 99(2) cause of action is versatile and powerful, and may be asserted for different types of environmental harms, by different types of plaintiffs, against different types of defendants. Section 99(2) claims can also overcome common obstacles that have prevented environmental class actions from receiving certification. Finally, section 99(2) offers a likelihood of greater success at a trial as compared to the typical common law causes of action for environmental harms. With section 99(2), plaintiffs can achieve the promise of class actions as a tool for seeking justice for widespread environmental harms.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".