You’ve Got to Have (Good) Faith: Good Faith’s Trajectory in Anglo-Canadian Contract Law Post-Wastech and the Potential for a Duty to Renegotiate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that the organizing principle of good faith should be judicially developed to include a duty to renegotiate in situations of hardship. It looks to the French Civil Code and the UNIDROIT Principles for guidance, in addition to Canadian law’s receptibility to an incrementally expanded principle of good faith. Although the Supreme Court of Canada rejected hardship in the 2018 case of Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp v Hydro-Québec, it did not forever close the door to this doctrine in Québec in situations of true financial peril. Given the “judicial dialogue” between Québec civil law obligations and Anglo-Canadian contract law, not to mention the Supreme Court of Canada’s increasingly expansionist approach, this illustrates a slight opening for the recognition of hardship in Anglo-Canadian contract law as well. Prior to proposing a test for the duty to renegotiate, the paper assesses the trajectory of good faith in Québec civil law and Anglo-Canadian contract law, in particular the duty to exercise a discretion in good faith and abuse of contractual rights. Given the law’s trend in an increasingly moral and interventionist direction, this paper argues that the time is ripe to allow for a duty to renegotiate in good faith where parties experience contractual hardship.\nDans le présent article, nous soutenons que le principe organisateur de la bonne foi devrait être développé judiciairement pour inclure une obligation de renégociation dans les situations de « hardship ». Il s’inspire du Code civil français et des principes d’UNIDROIT, ainsi que de la réceptivité du droit canadien à un principe de bonne foi progressivement élargi. Bien que la Cour suprême du Canada ait rejeté le « hardship » dans l’affaire Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp c. Hydro-Québec en 2018, elle n’a pas fermé à jamais la porte à cette doctrine au Québec dans les situations de véritable péril financier. Compte tenu du « dialogue judiciaire » entre les obligations de droit civil québécois et le droit des contrats anglo-canadien, sans compter l’approche de plus en plus expansionniste de la Cour suprême du Canada, cela illustre une légère ouverture pour la reconnaissance du « hardship » en droit des contrats anglo-canadien également. Avant de proposer un test pour l’obligation de renégocier, nous examinons la trajectoire de la bonne foi en droit civil québécois et en droit des contrats anglo-canadien, en particulier l’obligation d’exercer un pouvoir discrétionnaire de bonne foi et l’abus des droits contractuels. Compte tenu de la tendance du droit à s’orienter de plus en plus vers la morale et l’interventionnisme, le présent article soutient que le moment est venu de permettre une obligation de renégociation de bonne foi lorsque les parties éprouvent des difficultés contractuelles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".