Estoppel Without Regard to Equity? The Puzzling Omission of Promissory Estoppel’s Inequity Condition in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Promissory estoppel plays an important role in enabling the enforcement of promises not made for consideration in cases where the promise was intended to and did induce a party to change its position in regard to preexisting legal rights. However, Canadian law on estoppel has been plagued by confusion and misunderstanding. This article addresses the internationally notable absence of an inequity requirement from promissory estoppel in Canada. The requirement’s absence is peculiar, in that estoppel’s very foundation is in equity, and it must assure that its effect is indeed equitable. Drawing on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Company of Canada, I show how Canadian law is flawed in the absence of this vital element. I further demonstrate that, in fact, Canada was once a leader on this point before the widely-known opinion about it by Lord Denning in England in 1966. Later, the requirement fell through the cracks as the Supreme Court of Canada lost its grasp on its own precedents, and on the law on estoppel more generally. However, drawing on the older jurisprudence, and scholarship here and abroad, the situation can be rectified by having Canadian law again recognize promissory estoppel’s crucial inequity requirement.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".