Abstract: In 2019, at the behest of the Quebec Ministry of Justice, Professor Catherine Piché of the Université de Montreal’s Class Actions Lab, a distinguished legal scholar, published a detailed report on the Quebec class action. Among other things, this report addressed proportionality, authorization (certification), and class counsel fees. The following are the bilingual submissions filed by the authors. These submissions suggest reinforcing the court’s ability to stay or dismiss class actions at the pre-authorization stage, buttressing (rather than eliminating) the second criterion of article 575 of the Code of Civil Procedure, rethinking the assessment of risk when awarding counsel fees, and doing away with Quebec’s controversial “first-to-file” rule in favour of an expedited analysis of competing applications for authorization.
Ryan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.