The Court of King’s Bench of New Brunswick is that province’s superior trial court, and its medical malpractice decisions are of interest to Ontario practitioners as persuasive authority. New Brunswick is notable in causation law as the source of Snell v Farrell, [1990] 2 SCR 311, the case in which the Supreme Court of Canada adopted the robust and pragmatic approach to inferring causation.
For Ontario purposes the binding-versus-persuasive distinction matters. As a trial-level court of another province, the Court of King’s Bench of New Brunswick does not bind Ontario courts, and its decisions are persuasive only, although Supreme Court of Canada decisions on appeal from any province are binding. Ontario judges may consider New Brunswick reasoning on a shared question of negligence principle, because the common law of negligence is broadly consistent across the common law provinces.
Posts tagged Court of King’s Bench of New Brunswick analyze decisions of that court for what they signal about how Ontario courts may approach the same issue, noting their persuasive rather than binding status.
In the certified Moncton oxytocin class action, a New Brunswick court has ordered the defendant nurse’s personnel file produced, rejected most of the hospital’s quality-improvement privilege claims, and refused to disclose the private health records of other patients. The disclosure reasoning is persuasive only in Ontario, but it tracks the Ontario approach closely.
New Brunswick court holds anesthesiologist negligent in death of 36-year-old patient with severe obesity and sepsis after spinal anesthesia choice and management.
A proposed class action against the Moncton Hospital and a fired nurse over allegedly unprescribed oxytocin was denied certification because individual issues would predominate.
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