In Teva Canada Ltd. v. TD Canada Trust, Teva Canada Ltd. (“Teva”), a pharmaceutical company, “was the victim of a fraudulent cheque scheme implemented by one of its employees”, (para 1). Teva claimed the collecting banks were liable for the tort of conversion. Teva Canada Ltd. v. TD Canada Trust provides insight into the Bills of Exchange Act‘s (“BEA”) section 20(5) defence to the tort of conversion, by clarifying the approach used to determining whether a payee is “fictitious or non-existing”. In the event that a payee is deemed fictitious or non-existing within the meaning of section 20(5) of the BEA, the bill may be treated as payable to the bearer, and thus can be negotiated by simple “delivery” to the bank meaning endorsement is not required, and the defence will succeed (para 5). Justice Abella, writing for the majority, outlined the two-step framework a bank must satisfy to demonstrate that a payee is fictitious or … Read More
Lost in Cyberspace : Legal causation in the age of AI and driverless cars
One day, in the immediate future, you might very well witness this scene from your office window. A lawyer jaywalks across a Toronto street to avoid being late for a firm risk management committee meeting. While she does so, she texts her colleague in Calgary with instructions on containing the legal liabilities arising from a northern Alberta oil plant shut-down that has already occurred in the future (a reality of simultaneity across locally-logged events across a multi-timezone world) after an eco-terrorist hacked into the plant heating system. It is at this moment that she is struck by an autonomous delivery van. The van was travelling the wrong way down a one-way street because the city transportation department had not uploaded a temporary change to traffic direction to accommodate a condo developer. An algorithm built into the telephone service to warn the lawyer of oncoming traffic fails to alert her because the … Read More