Absent Foreign Claimants in Canadian Class Actions: Where to After <i>Airia Brands</i> ?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: If a tort is committed on an international scale, when can a Canadian court assume jurisdiction in a class proceeding over class members who reside outside of Canada? The Ontario Court of Appeal’s recent decision in Airia Brands Inc v Air Canada provided a new framework for answering this question but, in doing so, expanded Ontario’s jurisdiction over absent foreign claimants to untenably broad levels. This new test allows on its face for the assumption of jurisdiction even when there are no direct connections between the absent foreign claimants and the forum. Rather, it is sufficient that a court have jurisdiction over both the representative plaintiff and the defendants, and that the representative plaintiffs share common issues of fact or law with the absent foreign claimants. This signifies an exceedingly broad approach to the assumption of jurisdiction over absent foreign claimants and a radical expansion of Canadian courts’ jurisdiction over class proceedings. If applied literally, this test will create significant problems for a wide range of class actions and would be inconsistent with norms of comity. Going forward, courts ought to consider the implications of this test and search for practical judicial solutions that can temper its negative impacts. These solutions may take the form of a modified test that requires greater linkage between absent foreign claimants and the forum or, alternatively, a more robust application of the forum non conveniens analysis subsequent to the finding of jurisdiction.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".