Recent Developments in the Law of Damages and Injunctions

The last few years have been busy ones for developments in injunctions law and have generated important new decisions on the jurisdiction to grant injunctions, injunctions in relation to homeless encampments and occupation protests, interlocutory injunctions in Charter cases, and interlocutory injunctions in defamation cases. The leading Canadian authority on injunctions and equitable remedies, the Honourable Robert J. Sharpe, discusses these developments both in domestic Canadian law and internationally.

2023 and 2024 have also seen significant new decisions on the law of damages, including the confirmation by the Supreme Court of Canada that the state is liable for damages when legislation is clearly unconstitutional at the time of enactment or is enacted by the state in bad faith or as an abuse of power. In terms of private law damages, there have been some remarkably high awards recently, including a punitive damages award of $1,500,000 in Ontario which had an emphatically deterrent function, and a massive trial award of $10,125,000 in British Columbia for the tort of misfeasance in public office. These developments are discussed by Patrick Healy, a commercial litigator in Toronto, who is the new author of The Law of Damages in succession to the late Professor Stephen Waddams.

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Westlaw’s Topical Texts and Annotations

Robert Sharpe, B.A. (UWO), LL.B. (U of T) and D.Phil. (Oxford), is currently the Distinguished Jurist in Residence at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and a member of Arbitration Place. He retired from the judiciary in 2020 after serving for 25 years as a judge. He was a professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto from 1976 to 1988 and Dean from 1990 to 1995. Robert Sharpe is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Justice Sharpe is the author of Injunctions and Specific Performance, part of Westlaw’s Topical Texts and Annotations.

Weintraub Huang LLP

Patrick Healy holds a Ph.D. in Medieval History from Trinity College Dublin and taught history at Trinity and at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. He studied for his J.D. at the University of Toronto and is the new author of the Law of Damages in succession to the late Professor Stephen Waddams, a title part of Westlaw’s Topical Texts and Annotations. He will also be bringing out the ninth edition of Waddams’ Law of Contracts in 2027. Patrick is counsel and a litigation lawyer at the firm of Weintraub Huang LLP in Toronto.