Breakfast With Appeal is Torys' quarterly series showcasing the appellate law that's shaping Canadian conversations. Visit our main Breakfast With Appeal page for more content and upcoming webinars.
While the right to peaceful assembly is protected under section 2(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, are there circumstances under which those rights might be justifiably violated? What happens when a company deliberately destroys evidence in a business transaction? Does the presence of a primitive clause in a statute contravene the rule of law? The BWA panel discusses three significant cases.
Transcript
Yael Bienenstock (00:08): Welcome to Breakfast With Appeal, Torys' quarterly series on the cases you want to know about. We offer our thoughts on the appellate law that's shaping Canadian conversations. Let's dive in.
Andrew Bernstein (00:23): Okay, let's move on, we're not terribly behind. So, let's—anyway, hope everybody found that that impromptu discussion of a, a fairly obscure but quite important doctrine in federalism was an adequate substitute for a case about election financing. [Laughter]. But...not to diss the case about election financing because you're still going to hear about it, but we're now going to move on to something that's maybe a little less theoretical, which is the Hillier case.
Andrew Bernstein (00:54): Yael, do you want to talk, tell us what this was about and what happened?
Yael Bienenstock (00:58): Sure, and just a little bit of warning. You might get a little bit of PTSD listening to this case, I know I did when I read it. So, the facts of this case take place in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic. Randy—I was pronouncing him Hilliay, but maybe it's Hillier—attended several protests in April and May 2021 and was arrested for contravening the province's COVID restrictions.
And just to situate what was happening in April-May 2021, we were about a year into the pandemic. Vaccinations were around, but apparently only 14% of people in Ontario had had one dose. And the health care system was really struggling to keep up with the COVID cases. So, in the spring of 2021, Ontario issued a number of regulations and orders that were trying to stop the spread of COVID-19, and this was one of several shutdowns that the government had put in place during the pandemic. In this particular one, there were two orders: there was a shutdown order that initially prohibited outdoor gatherings and public events of more than five people, but was then amended to prohibit them altogether; and a stay-at-home order that required people to stay home, subject to certain exceptions.
Now, both the shutdown order and the stay-at-home order had exemptions. You could go to things like weddings, funerals, religious services. Those were allowed and had their own, kind of, caps and restrictions in place. But there was no exception for protests and peaceful protests, meaning that if there were people who disagreed with the government's approach, protests were not a legal way to express their opposition under these laws. So, Mr. Hillier was an MP, and at the outset of the pandemic, he was onside with how the government was approaching the pandemic. But he later became disenchanted, and he was encouraging people not to get vaccinated, not to wear masks. And he began to attend protests. And he attended these outdoor protests in April and May 2021, and, perhaps ironically, was charged with violating the very legislation that he was protesting.
So, if he was found guilty, he would have faced hefty fines and potential imprisonment of up to a year. And he challenged the constitutionality of these orders, arguing that they violated his right to peaceful assembly under section 2(c) of the Charter. And I just want to quickly give a little bit of flavor as to what the evidence was about.
The evidence before the application judge really focused on the effectiveness of Ontario's response to COVID-19. There were lots of questions, expert evidence about questions like how effective are masks? What about social distancing? What's the risk of transmission outdoors? What was the burden on hospitals? But there was no evidence that was specific to this question of exemptions, and there was no evidence, first of all, that Ontario ever considered an exemption for peaceful assembly, for outdoor political protests like it had for, let's say, weddings and religious services.
And there was no evidence about what the incremental increase in risk would have been if there was some sort of exemption for outdoor peaceful protests and gatherings. So, the application judge agreed that the regulations violated the Charter, but he found that they were justified under section 1. And Mr. Hillier, Hillier appealed.
Andrew Bernstein (04:13): Okay. David, the Court did some interesting work on section 2(c), which is not an area of law that's got much attention. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the Court's analysis?
David Outerbridge (04:25): Andrew, I do. [Laughter].
Andrew Bernstein (04:27): [Laughter]. I'm relieved, because if you'd turned me down this, this session would have—
David Outerbridge (04:29): Well, we would have cut off our time. Yeah.
Jeremy Opolsky (04:34): Maybe slightly less appreciative. [Laughter].
Andrew Bernstein (04:36): Yeah, exactly.
David Outerbridge (04:38): So, Ontario conceded that section 2(c) of the Charter, which protects the right to assemble, Ontario conceded that that right had been violated, and they treated the case as solely about section 1 of the Charter and whether it was demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society, etc. The Court of Appeal said, not, not so fast: in order to analyze section 1 and what, you know, whether it's proportionate and all of that, you need to analyze the right and the importance of the right—or in this case, the freedom—and that that contact is essential for the section 1 analysis.
So, they did a full analysis of section 2(c). They noted that there's very little case law on the right to assemble, because almost all cases that get decided under the section 2 of the Charter, which deals with the fundamental freedoms, are either freedom of expression or freedom of religion, or freedom of association with assembly just being part of that, you know, you assemble for a religious service, you assemble in order to express yourself, etc.
So, the discrete right to assemble has rarely been analyzed, and this case was specifically about the right to assemble. It wasn't about the message. He didn't argue the case as being about freedom of expression, he argued it on the basis that it was an assembly case. And the, the Court also noted that, you know, there's nothing, there's nothing unusual about this case to, to make it more complicated, there was no violence, there was no threats, there was no intimidation. There was nothing but pure—as they called it—"plain vanilla assembly" for a political protest. And it was fundamental—
Andrew Bernstein (06:08): The most delicious flavor of—
David Outerbridge (06:09): Yeah, exactly. It was not, not, whatever, rocky road or whatever [laughter] but, the, the, the point that the Court was making was that, you know, assembly itself has value in a democracy that's different from just the right to express yourself, that assembling is part of how you deliver the message. It's what, you know—assembling creates, you know, inspires people by finding people of a common view and, and being together.
The size of the demonstration is part of the message. The fact that you're gathering people together is part of your method of trying to get your message across. So, the assembly, you know, the Court emphasized that assembly itself is a fundamental, bedrock element of a democratic society. And here the, the protest was over the prohibition on protesting, right, so if you think about what's fundamental to a democracy, bans on protesting what the government has done are about as core as you can get. You know, totalitarian regimes ban protest. Canada did not ban protest. We're the opposite end of the spectrum. If somebody wants to peacefully protest, they should be allowed to do it under almost all circumstances.
And the question here was, was this one of those rare cases where assembly should not be permitted? And, well, I won't, I won't spoil the surprise over, over—back to Jeremy, who again knows the answer.
Andrew Bernstein (07:30): The answer to what? [Laughter] Jeremy, so David obviously—there was an infringement of section 2(c) of course, this throws it to a section 1 analysis. The application judge had found the section 1—that the, the prohibitions were justified as both minimally impairing and sufficiently proportionate. And the Court of Appeal found neither. And I can't think of that many cases in which the Court discusses the third branch of the second part of the Oakes test, the proportionality branch, in such detail.
So, do you want to talk about the section 1 analysis and what it might mean for future cases?
Jeremy Opolsky (08:08): Sure. I mean, this, this is such an interesting case because the government conceded 2(c) but most of this case is talking about what 2(c) is to develop the doctrine. But the work should be done in section 1, which is, which is a little bit abbreviated in this case. But either way, just a brief refresher on section 1 and the Oakes test. The government... the first part is the government has a burden to prove there's a pressing and substantial purpose to the restrictions. Hillier, Hillier didn't contest this. And then we move into the second measure, which is actually all proportionality. And the first part of that test is rational connection.
And again, on appeal, he didn't contest this, there was a rational connection to protecting people from the pandemic, to limiting outdoor protest. So really, there were only two elements of the test, the second and third branch of proportionality. That's whether the restrictions were minimally impairing of the right, and whether there was proportionality between the deleterious effects of the ban on peaceful assembly on the one hand, and the salutary effects of the law on the other hand.
And the Court found that neither of those branches were met in this case. The government failed the burden on both. On minimal impairment—which is really where most laws founder and then the court just stops—the court said that basically an outright ban on peaceful assembly cannot be minimally empowering: that a total ban cannot readily meet the minimal impairment test, and basically the fact that the government completely banned protesting, instead of qualifying the right or restricting it like it did for gathering gatherings of weddings and funerals, etc., was not minimally impairing. The analysis is quite short, I think, for a case of this, of this nature, and a little surprisingly so. Where the court does go into more detail unusually, is on the third branch, which is the salutary versus deleterious effects branch.
And this is one of the few cases to actually get into the meat of this, this issue. The deleterious effect here is a complete ban on protest, indoor and outdoor. And as David talked about a little bit, outdoor protesting is, it seems, to be particularly effective at amplifying minority voices and expressing political dissent. And here they were denied the right to influence policy—and as David noted, a policy about protest: a policy about COVID restrictions, which was the very thing justifying the restrictions on protest.
Andrew Bernstein (10:47): A meta protest, if you will.
Jeremy Opolsky (10:51): Sure. I'm trying to think of a Soros reference, but it's failing me. Well, we'll go to Yael later.
Andrew Bernstein (10:55): [Laughter]
Jeremy Opolsky (10:56): And the thing you're comparing it to is the salutary effects. And here they found there was no evidence, as the increase in risk that would have imposed by an exemption for outdoor peaceful assembly or protest, particularly one that matched the exemptions for permitted gatherings like weddings and funerals and other things that were restricted to, to ten people. Religious services.
So basically, why permit it for a wedding but not a protest? Which I think is a, is a fair question. And the court is very harsh on the government for not even turning their mind to what, what is a fundamental freedom? It needs to be protected. Overall—Andrew did not ask this, but overall, I found the analysis a little lacking.
And the justification here was basically that a total restriction without a consideration of public protest is definitionally overbroad and disproportionate. I'm not sure that's going to hold water in the future. Recently, the Supreme Court of Canada heard another COVID case, in CCLA and Newfoundland about mobility restrictions, where Newfoundland blocked access to the island—to the Rock, if you will—it wasn't welcome to the Rock.
It was [laughter] not welcome to the Rock. And the Court heard a lot about the precautionary principle: what to do when you don't know about something like COVID and you don't know the restrictions and the effects that are, the—you don't know the restrictions that are necessary and the effects of the virus, because we didn't know a lot about COVID in 2020—and we didn't know as much as we know now—in 2021.
And there was some sympathy at the Court, for that argument. So, does this hold in future cases? Does this—are we going to be into a deep state of the salutary versus deleterious effects to the point where people will have to know how to pronounce those words? I don't think so.
Andrew Bernstein (12:42): [Laughter]. Yeah, well, you did an excellent job pronouncing them. All right, I feel like the SNL vibe is kind of faded a little, so I'm going to try and reinstate it with a Celebrity Jeopardy segment here. And the question is simply, is this Hillier case, is it going to the Supreme Court? Are they going to grant leave? What are they going to do if they get there?
And what judges—not what judges, but what score? So, your answers have to be in the form of, "What is: leave to appeal granted, Supreme Court reverses seven to two". Yael.
Yael Bienenstock (13:14): Oh, okay. What is: leave to appeal granted. Supreme Court upholds five to four.
Andrew Bernstein (13:19): Jeremy.
Jeremy Opolsky (13:20): What is: leave to appeal granted, Supreme Court reverses five-three-one, with Coté writing by herself in dissent.
Andrew Bernstein (13:27): [Laughter] Dave.
David Outerbridge (13:30): I go the other way. Leave to appeal—what is: leave to appeal granted, Supreme Court affirms nine-nothing.
Andrew Bernstein (13:36): Okay. Wow. That's a big, that's a big swing. All right, well, I'm just glad, actually, we got through Celebrity Jeopardy [laughter] and nobody insulted my mother. So, now we're going to get to—
Yael Bienenstock (13:47): We've confirmed that the Supreme Court of Canada can do anything. [Laughter].
Andrew Bernstein (13:50): Yeah. I think seven-two, because Coté and Rowe dissenting together. But there you go. So those are our two main cases. And now we're on to the Weekend Update segment of the show. And if you're an avid SNL fan, you know, that Weekend Update is when recurring characters show up and give a weird talk while everyone sits there awkwardly.
Fortunately, Jeremy has a case about spoliation and breach of contract, which will 100% live up to this billing. [Laughter]. When Yael laughs like that, it makes me wonder if she read the script. [Laughter]. Jeremy. Spoliation and breach of contents.
Yael Bienenstock (14:29): Sounds funnier than it reads.
Andrew Bernstein (14:33): Spoliation and breach of contract. Go! The best part is you've never even seen SNL. So. [Laughter]
Jeremy Opolsky (14:38): So, this is a case called SS&C. And Bank of New York Mellon. SS&C is a Canadian company that specializes in providing data required by financial services companies to value company securities. Which is a mouthful. It licenses data, basically, to financial institutions, and it prohibits those institutions from redistributing or reselling the data because, like with all IP, it's fungible that way.
And SS&C needs to ensure that it preserves its customer base. So, what happens in this case? Well, the first instance judge finds that—oh, sorry, let me back up. Bank of New York Mellon is the world's largest custodial bank in the world and a longtime customer of SS&C. Its predecessor, Mellon Trust, signed an agreement in 1999 with SS&C to get this data, and the issue emerged when Mellon merged with Bank of New York and SS&C alleged that Bank of New York Mellon breached the agreement by providing the data widely to its affiliates for free while the license agreement was restricted to the holding company itself and priced for the holding company.
The first instance judge found that the contract did indeed limit the data. But while SS&C asked for more than $1 billion Canadian dollars in damages, and Bank of New York Mellon said the damages were de minimis and should be nothing, the judge rejected both approaches and decided a damages award in the seven figures instead. The Supreme Court of Canada granted leave in this case—one of the few private law cases to go to the Supreme Court of Canada—and while it hasn't set it down for an appeal date, I would expect it in late 2025 or early 2026.
So why are we talking about it? Why do you care? What are the issues to watch out for? I'm going to highlight two. One is, this will be our next big contractual interpretation case to come out of the Supreme Court of Canada, and this will be the follow-on to Saatva and Earthco about what we do about surrounding circumstances and factual matrix, particularly in the context of commercial reasonableness, which is a doctrine of contractual interpretation, one that Andrew and I argued about, in a case called Resolute, and the dissent talked about it a lot.
We like the dissent. So, we will talk about how you judge commercial reasonableness in the context of surrounding circumstances and the prohibition or allowance of looking at one part—well, one party knew and not what the other party knew and subjective knowledge. There's an interesting issue, a side issue about limitation periods, and when knowledge by employees is attributed to the company for the purpose of limitation. Yes, Andrew, covert attribution is everywhere, or at least I look for it everywhere, but the main—
Andrew Bernstein (17:20): When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. [Laughter]
Jeremy Opolsky (17:22): Indeed, indeed. The main issue here is spoliation. Which, I promise I did not pick this case because it is a cool word to say. A little bit. [Laughter]. But, this is the issue that SS&C successfully sought leave on. So what's spoliation? It's a common law doctrine that dates back to the Roman times that bars the destruction of evidence. To get it, you need to—to prove spoliation, you need to show the destruction of evidence. You need to show a legal proceeding existed or was pending, and the destruction was an intentional act. And then after I take a deep breath, why does it matter here? Well, because SS&C sent a preservation letter at the beginning of the case saying, preserve all information about the sharing of this data.
And Bank of New York Mellon wrote back and said they disagreed with the allegations and therefore refused to do that. Judges did not like that approach. And the Court of Appeal found the spoliation had been made out and there was an intentional destruction of evidence. But the question here is, so what? What happens? What's the consequence?
What's the remedy? SS&C didn't like the remedy they got, they said that they couldn't prove the damages they wanted because they didn't have the documents, and they asked for a more robust version of spoliation. Will it stick? Will it hold? We will see in 2026/27.
Andrew Bernstein (18:44): Okay. Well, I was hungry before, but ever since you spent four minutes talking about spoliated melon, I'm, I've sort of lost my appetite. [Laughter]. David. As an avid democracy watcher, I'm hoping you will talk about the Democracy Watch decision that just got leave and what's at stake.
David Outerbridge (19:00): I will. So, Democracy Watch is an NGO that seeks to ensure that governments in Canada operate democratically and are held to account. And in this case, the issue—the issues that are going up to the Supreme Court have to do with the extent to which the legislative branch can insulate the executive branch from oversight by the judicial branch.
And we've discussed this case before on BWA. So, for some this may be just a refresher, but it's got a couple of pretty important issues that we thought our audience would be interested to know are going to the SCC. So, this is a case about the Federal Ethics Commissioner's review of the WE charity, and whether then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in a conflict of interest in connection with decisions that the federal government made about the WE charity.
The ethics commissioner concluded that Prime Minister Trudeau was not in a conflict of interest in connection with those decisions. Democracy Watch brought an application to the Federal Court for judicial review on the basis that the Ethics Commissioner had misinterpreted what a conflict is, essentially, under the federal Conflict of Interest Act, and also that he had made mistakes in characterizing the facts about Prime Minister Trudeau's connection to WE charity.
So, the Attorney General of Canada brought a motion to strike the application for digital judicial review on the basis that section 66 of the Conflict of Interest Act doesn't allow judicial review of the Ethics Commissioner's decisions, except in narrow circumstances involving jurisdiction or procedural unfairness or fraud. And the case—it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One is because the Federal Court of Appeal concluded that this was an inherently political area of, of oversight and that, because there was legislative oversight and other non-judicial types of oversight of the Ethics Commissioner's decision that it was okay to bar judicial review.
And so that, that was actually the, the, the holding, the finding, and the, you know, the issue in the case that decided the case. And so that will be up to the Supreme Court. And the other issue is that, for a few years now, the Federal Court of Appeal has been divided on whether it, it contravenes the rule of law for there to be a primitive clause in a statute.
So, primitive clause is a clause in a statute that says there will be no judicial review or that limits judicial review of executive action. And in 2021, the Federal Court issued two inconsistent decisions on this point, one saying that primitive clauses—the one, which was consistent with a long line of cases before it, saying that primitive clauses violate the rule of law because there always has to be judicial oversight, you can't insulate the executive from, from oversight. And then another that said, actually, it's okay in some circumstances to insulate executive action from judicial oversight. In this case, the Democracy Watch case, as some will recall, that the chief justice in the Federal Court of Appeal has a long obiter discussion of, of how it is okay to have a primitive clause, that it's consistent with the rule of law to have a primitive clause, because the law is the statute and you're abiding by the statute by not having judicial oversight.
The other two judges in the case didn't sign on to that. And so, although it's obiter, there's a good chance, I think, that the Supreme Court will try and resolve this issue when it goes up to them. So, stay tuned. I imagine it'll be back on our program in a year or so.
Andrew Bernstein (22:30): Thanks. Dave and Jeremy and I are thinking about intervening in that decision, or seeking leave to intervene in that decision. If we could agree on [laughter] what position to take because we, I think, like the judges of the Federal Court of Appeal are on fairly—we have very strongly different views about exactly what section 96 of the Constitution Act 1867 does and doesn't require. So, that's definitely one to watch. And I would say if it ends up resolving that issue, we're going to talk about it maybe as often as we talked about Vavilov in the first few years after Vavilov. So, watch out. You may be hearing the words Democracy Watch quite often. Yael, we were going to do the Working Families decision until Opsis came out and demoted it.
Still, it's an interesting decision. So, you've been allocated four minutes. Go.
Yael Bienenstock (23:20): Okay. So, Working Families, as he said, is about advertising spending limits in political campaigns. So, in 2017, Ontario introduced third-party spending limits for political advertising. And they capped third-party spending at $600,000 in the six-month period before the writ for a general election. In 2021, they extended the pre-writ period to 12 months, but they did not increase the $600,000 spending cap.
So, these are limits for third parties. There are no limits on how much a political party can spend in the first six months of this period, the 6 to 12 months before an election, and they can spend substantially more, up to $1 million during the second six-month period. So, there are very different spending limits in place for political parties.
The respondents in this appeal were the Working Families Coalition, which is a nonprofit organization that draws voter attention to laws and policies of working people, and a number of school unions. And they had previously successfully challenged the spending limits under section 2(b) of the Charter, which is freedom of expression, in 2021. And in response, the Government of Ontario enacted an identical version of the provisions, but this time they invoked the notwithstanding clause under section 33 of the Charter. And what section 33 does is it permits a legislature to declare that legislation operates notwithstanding the protections included in certain provisions of the Charter, which are sections 2 and 7 to 15 of the Charter.
So, in this case, what it did is it essentially allowed the government to have this legislation and to infringe section 2 of the Charter. And so, in response, the same parties challenged the spending limit again. And first, they argued that the government had improperly invoked section 33. And second, they argued that, that the third-party spending limits violated the right to vote under section 3 of the Charter, because section 3 isn't subject to the notwithstanding clause in section 33. So, it feels a bit like a game of chess: I'm going to do this, they're gonna do that, I'm gonna do this. And so that, that's where we are now—or that's where we were. So, the application judge rejected both arguments. The application judge found that the notwithstanding clause was properly invoked and that the legislation did not infringe section 3.
The Ontario Court of Appeal allowed the appeal. They said the, the notwithstanding clause was properly invoked, but the spending limits did infringe the informational component of voters' section 3 rights. And I'm going to get into what that means. So, the government appeals. This goes up to the Supreme Court of Canada, and we have a five-four split, not surprisingly, with actually two dissenting opinions.
So, what did the Supreme Court of Canada do with all this? I'll try to do this very quickly because I see I'm running out of time. So, the majority took a pretty expansive view of section 3. They held that the participatory component of section 3, it's not just the right to vote, it's the right to vote in an informed way.
And what that means is kind of two things. One is the right to hear different viewpoints from other parties, candidates and political parties, and also to express those viewpoints, and here the majority really focused on the disproportionality between political parties' sort of right to, to spend money to get information out there and third parties. And they said that the spending limits infringe section 33 because they could allow political parties to have a disproportionate voice in the political discourse, because they could have more influence than third parties.
This violates voters' rights to be reasonably informed of all possible choices. So, the problem wasn't the spending limits in and of themselves, it was the disproportionality between political parties and third parties. Under section 1, the majority held that the spending limit was not minimally impairing. The length of the limit far surpasses what is reasonably necessary to protect the integrity of the election process or the primary role of political parties in the electoral process.
Now, there were two separate dissenting opinions.
Andrew Bernstein (27:12): So, they struck down? The majority struck down. And the—
Yael Bienenstock (27:14): Yeah, that's what I—the majority. Yes. The majority upheld the Court of Appeal striking down. Yes.
Andrew Bernstein (27:19): And then the dissenters. What did the dissenters do?
Yael Bienenstock (27:22): The—I'm confused about my notes there. So anyways, the dissenters essentially said they would have allowed the appeal. They did not think that the law violated section 30—section 3, and they basically took two different approaches to that. Justice Wagner and Moreau said that section 3 does include more than just the right to vote, but what it does include is meaningful participation.
And as long as the spending limits allow for meaningful participation, which in this case, on the evidence it did, that was okay. And Justices Coté and Rowe, perhaps not surprisingly, took a more limited view to section 3, and they actually criticized the majority for conflating section 2(b) and section 3 and kind of taking an end run around section 33 of the Charter.
They basically said section 33 expressly allows an override to section 2(b), and now you're taking the section 2(b) freedoms and importing them into section 3 to basically allow the government to take an end run around—sorry to, to allow the...you're allowing an end run around section 33.
Andrew Bernstein (28:22): Okay. We're running out of time, so I'm going to cut it off there.
Yael Bienenstock (28:25): Complicated case.
Andrew Bernstein (28:27): It is a complicated case in four minutes for sure. Or six, whatever. We are pretty much out of time. And this was supposed to be this segment where Jeremy and I wrote jokes for one another to read because it is the end of the season. But we know that he actually doesn't read them, and I write them anyway, so that's totally fine. [Laughter].
We—I am just going to briefly shout out the McKinnon and Canada case, which was my quick hit, which was the challenge to the Prime Minister's decision to prorogue Parliament. Just to say two things about it. Number one, the Court took a very careful look at it in a very short period of time, decided that it could adjudicate this question, but decided that ultimately the decision to prorogue was kind of layered and complicated enough that the Court wasn't going to overturn it.
This came up at all, I would say, because of a decision from a few years ago in the UK called Miller II, in which the court actually did overrule a Prime Minister's request to the Queen to prorogue. It was Boris Johnson, and it was, he was trying to prorogue Parliament because Parliament wouldn't pass his Brexit plan. So that's an interesting one.
It is also going to the Court of Appeal, so perhaps we'll have a bit more of a chance to deal with it when it, when the Court of Appeal deals with it. Jeremy and I intervened for our client, the Constitutional Law Initiative of University of Ottawa, and we took a position on justiciability, which Jeremy had to learn how to say for the purposes of the appeal.
Jeremy Opolsky (30:00): Still working on it, Andrew. Still working on it. [Laughter]
Andrew Bernstein (30:00): Yeah. So, we're gonna, before we go, I want to actually just give a shout out. I see our former colleague Trish Jackson is here. Trisha was, of course, an incredibly important and valued member of our department for as long as I've been at Torys and a long, long—much longer than that, and was a really wonderful mentor and colleague to all of us, and she's getting an honorary doctorate from U of T tomorrow in, in recognition of her service both to the, to the legal profession and also to the university. So, I see that you're here, Trish. Congrats, we are incredibly proud of you. And I'll see you at the reception. I'll see you at the ceremony tomorrow.
Jeremy Opolsky (30:42): And we'll see the rest of you in September.
Andrew Bernstein (30:44): That's right. It is the end of the season, which is why Jeremy and I were supposed to have written jokes for one another to read. In terms of Breakfast With Appeal, we'll be back in the fall. Hope everyone has a great, relaxing, restful summer. Get some sunshine and we'll see you back here. Thanks, everyone.
That about wraps up our conversation. Before we go, I want to remind our listeners that they can find the webinar version of this edition of Breakfast With Appeal along with previous episodes on torys.com, and that our BWA program is eligible for one substantive hour of continuing professional development. Thanks again for joining us and take care.
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