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Civil Litigation - Enforcement. Goguen v. Baptiste
In Goguen v. Baptiste (Ont CA, 2022) the Court of Appeal upheld orders that recognized a California judgement and allowed it to be enforced at an Alberta bank branch:[7] The second reason for not accepting the appellants’ submission is that, in our view, the motion judge was correct to conclude, in her enforcement reasons and draft order, that the Ontario court had in personam jurisdiction over both Baptiste and CIBC – Baptiste because of the factual background that the motion judge outlined in her recognition endorsement and CIBC because of its head office in Ontario. Against this backdrop, it was irrelevant that, apparently, Baptiste had transferred some or all of her funds to a CIBC branch in Alberta.
[8] In our view, the motion judge identified and correctly applied Chevron Corp. v. Yaiguaje, 2015 SCC 42, in reaching her decision. In Chevron, Gascon J. said at paras. 56, 57 and 69:Requiring assets to be present in the jurisdiction when recognition and enforcement proceedings are instituted is also not conducive to order or fairness. For one thing, assets such as … bank deposits may be in one jurisdiction one day, and in another the next.
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In today’s globalized world and electronic age, to require that a judgment creditor wait until the foreign debtor is present or has assets in the province before a court can find that it has jurisdiction in recognition and enforcement proceedings would be to turn a blind eye to current economic reality.
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Facilitating comity and reciprocity, two of the backbones of private international law, calls for assistance, not barriers. [9] In our view, the motion judge’s reasoning and decision are closely aligned with the Chevron framework. She concluded:The Defendant’s insistence on registration of the judgment in Alberta would impose a needless administrative burden on the Plaintiff given the jurisdiction this Court has over the Defendant and the Bank, the notice given and the consent of the institution (whose head office is in Ontario).
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