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Administrative - Common Law and Equity. Canada (Attorney General) v. Burke
In Canada (Attorney General) v. Burke, (Fed CA, 2021) the Federal Court of Appeal noted that principles of equity and common law may vary from each other between administrative and court-contexts (under Vavilov):[5] As the questions before the two adjudicators who ruled on the two different grievances submitted by the respondent were different, it was entirely reasonable for Adjudicator Olsen in the second case to have declined to follow the comments that the applicant sought to rely on. Moreover, as was recently noted by the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, 441 D.L.R. (4th) 1 at paragraph 113, citing its earlier decision in Nor-Man Regional Health Authority Inc. v. Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, 2011 SCC 59, [2011] 3 S.C.R. 616 (Nor-Man), "“… administrative decision makers will not necessarily be required to apply equitable and common law principles in the same manner as courts in order for their decisions to be reasonable”". Indeed, in Nor-Man, the Supreme Court upheld a labour arbitrator’s decision, who had applied the doctrine of promissory estoppel in a way the employer asserted was different from the way in which a court would apply the doctrine.
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