Bridging Borders: Reforming Canada’s Approach to Resolving Carriage Challenges in Light of Global Practices

Canada faces a carriage crisis. Mass breaches frequently affect persons across Canada in each province. Each mass breach results in duplicative class actions filed in multiple provinces. The result is a provincial fight for carriage and a national fight for membership of potential class plaintiffs. Carriage within provinces is decided at a carriage motion; carriage on a national scale is decided on an ad hoc basis in the isolation of the superior court of whichever province the national class action(s) is/ are filed. In this essay, I take a comparative approach to proposing reform to provide a procedure for the efficient resolution of intra- and inter-provincial carriage disputes. I take stock of Canada’s current approach to resolving carriage disputes and then draw from the experience of other common law jurisdictions: Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Drawing on their experience, I propose three changes: two legislative and one judicial. I propose first that each province enact legislation restricting provincial jurisdiction over class members; second, that each province enact legislation enabling the transferring of jurisdiction over cases between the provinces; and third, a judicial change from seeing comity as a principle of deference to seeing it as a principle of leadership and cooperation. The overall goal of the reform will be to centralise decisions within one province for the efficient resolution of carriage issues, both within and between provinces.